Home- cooked title for Chan?
Canadian skater shrugs off mocking media reports saying he deserved the gold
Sun columnist Cam Cole says critics were quick to pounce on the judges for giving Patrick Chan gold in London, but the skater says he earned the title.
From the short end of the judging stick at Salt Lake City in 2002 — after the conspiracy, but before the ISU owned up to it — Canada’s David Pelletier shrugged and said of the mysterious ways of figure skating: “You know, we can’t control what we can’t control. If I didn’t want this to happen, I’d have gone down the hill on skis.”
An American writer reminded me of this Saturday, as some papers in the United States were scathingly ripping the judges and mocking the “homecooked” world championship Patrick Chan win Friday night.
The word “Chanflation” — an old Internet chestnut first applied a few years ago to the consistently high marks the 22- year- old Canadian gets for his program components — actually appeared in headlines in some editions of the Los Angeles Times, and in a number of stories.
St. Patrick, they hinted, wasn’t meant to be taken literally, even if this was his weekend.
Then again, my writer friend said, it was not unlike the routine inflation Michelle Kwan could always count on, the 5.9 and 6.0 artistic marks, back in the days when she was winning five world titles.
So maybe not so much has changed, after all. Except that back then, nobody was drawing a parallel between the bias of judges and the popularity of the sport. American women were strong, and so was figure skating. All was ducky.
It wasn’t killing the sport when an American was the beneficiary.
It’s fair to say that even in the new scoring system, the judges can still fudge the second set of marks. If it’s not along nationality lines so much any more, they can still be carried away by their hearts, by the connection they feel with a skater, by the “soul” — as Chan put it Saturday — of the program.
It was evident in their propping up four- time world pairs champions Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy of Germany, who had two poor performances here and still finished second.
And it was a factor, if not the deciding one, in Chan’s win.
Did he wake up, on the morning after the night before, feeling guilty about having hung on by his fingernails to a slender 1.3- point victory over Kazakhstan’s Denis Ten, avoiding what surely would have ranked among the greatest upsets in figure skating’s history?
“I went to bed a bit bummed,” he said Saturday, in a gathering with a handful of media people. “I can’t imagine if I didn’t win a gold medal, how much worse I’d feel. But I truly believe I deserved to win.”
Chan, who skated amazingly in setting a world- record short program score Wednesday, took a seven- point cushion into the free skate and needed almost all of it to withstand the challenge from the 19- year- old Ten.
After opening with two perfect quads, the first in combination with a triple- toe loop, Chan had a series of mistakes, including falls on a triple Axel and triple Lutz, and barely survived to win his third consecutive world title.
Combined with the fifth- place finish of Coquitlam’s Kevin Reynolds, it gave Canada the full complement of three men for next year’s Olympics in Sochi, which they also achieved in pairs and ice dancing.
By the end of competition, Canada had secured more entries in the Olympics — 11 of a possible 12, 17 skaters in all, only one woman’s entry short of the maximum — than any other country. Chan’s was the only gold. “I deserve it,” he said. “I’d be more than happy to explain why. I think people ask because they don’t understand figure skating. That it’s not all about jumps.
“It’s totally understandable that people have their doubts. You look at hockey, it’s simple: Score one goal more than the other team, you win, while figure skating is a little more subjective.”
Asked if he was the kind of guy who chafed at negative reviews, he said: “I think people forget that it’s a two- part event. It’s easy to judge what we do as athletes when you’re sitting in front of a computer writing an article as opposed to being there. It’s really humbling, standing out there by yourself in front of thousands of people, it’s very vulnerable, and I don’t think any journalist can experience that.
“I would for sure admit that I didn’t skate my best but ... Chanflation? I don’t believe in it. I think if they have a problem with it, they should talk to the judges and not blame me. I’m just going out there trying to do my job.
“If I gave my own marks, I definitely would criticize myself a lot more, but that’s just the perfectionist in me. But I deserved every point that I got, and worked hard for it.’’
Those who defend Chan’s victory say he won it on the strength of the seven- point cushion, and the opening quads in the long.
“If I go back and study it, I think that the amount of time I’ve fallen ( in a combined seven minutes of skating) in both the short and long programs, and count the number of mistakes I made, I don’t think I made more than Denis did or Javier ( Fernandez, bronze medallist) did or anyone,” he said.
“I think they’re just looking at the long program by itself and just the mistakes I made on that day.”
He acknowledged that he left the door open, and said the onus was on his opponents to take advantage.
“Obviously, I gave them the opportunity. I skated third ( in the last flight). Denis could have won it, and I think he made one or two mistakes in his program and ( the winning margin) was one point — he could have done it. And I’m sure he’s kicking himself today.
“If there had been inflation, maybe I’d have had a 10- point lead after the ( short). I had a great skate in the short program, and yet Denis had ( the chance). He just didn’t capitalize.”