By Alexandra Stevenson
You knew the rivalry in the women’s event was heating up when, on Thursday (March 19), the Japanese Skating Federation felt obliged to post a notice on their website, denying Japanese skaters, "have intentionally committed acts of obstruction involving the South Korean skater Yu-na Kim." Kim, who has won the bronze in the past two world championships despite back problems, has a sponsorship deal with the Korean TV network SBS, which also sponsored the Grand Prix Final in which Mao Asada, current world champion, came from behind to beat Kim, who was competing in her own country. Kim had won that event (the Grand Prix Final) the previous two years. The network aired an interview with Kim and film of a skater, whose identity was deliberately blurred, who had crossed her path forcing Kim to abort a move. However, no protest was filed with the International Skating Union by the Korean Association. Kim said the problem was particularly noticeable at the Four Continents Championships and said she was "trying to find a way to deal with it." An agent for Kim confirmed that her client, "felt obstructed during her warm-ups and, if this situation continues, we may have to lodge a protest."
Near and actual collisions are a part of the six-minute warm-ups skaters get prior to competing. Everyone who was in Salt Lake City at the 2002 Olympic Games watching the warm-up of the top pairs will remember Jamie Salé, skating full out forwards in her own world, accidentally charging into Anton Sikharulidze & Elena Berezhnaya, who were skating backwards. There was a similar fuss regarding Sasha Cohen’s allegedly "dangerous" warm-up maneuvers in the Staples Center back in 2002 when US nationals were held here before the Olympic Games.
Joannie Rochette, the 5-time Canadian champion, who is North America’s best prospect in the Ladies championship, which takes place on Friday and Saturday, was asked last Friday in a teleconference about such happenings. She said, "No one does it on purpose. Everyone is very focused on themselves. It gets very intense. There are six of you on the ice and we only have six minutes to warm up all of our jumps, spins and footwork. You have to share the ice. You each can’t warm-up for one minute. It’s not very long to get everything you want done. Sometimes we are so focused on what we are doing, that sometimes such incidents happen. But it’s never deliberate. Of course, that is frustrating. But it’s part of the competition."
Kim was placed in Group 6 of the 8 groups of Ladies for Monday morning’s practice at the Convention Center. Her rotation called for her to skate first of the six, which included her team mate, who also has the last name, Kim, and four lesser known skaters who were just thrilled to be on the ice with someone of her stature. None came close to obstructing her way as she "walked through" her Dance Macabre short program, completing only the spiral and footwork sequences. The four were Isabelle Pieman (Belgium), Tamami Ono (Hong Kong), Gracielle Jeanne Tan (Phillipines) and Victoria Muniz (Puerto Rico). Tan and Muniz live in the LA area.
Kim’s coach, Brian Orser, directed her practice from the barrier. The twice Olympic silver medalist had said on Saturday while picking up his credentials, "The incident has been blown completely out of context. In the warm-ups skaters do get in each other’s way, which also happens sometimes in practice. Believe me, it’s not deliberate. Why would you risk injury to yourself? But skaters should be continually on the lookout to try and ensure it doesn’t happen. Sometimes, with all the excitement of competition clicking in, it’s stressful and skaters can get careless, and that is upsetting." Orser has taught Kim since 2006. "She had been to Colorado Springs before but she first came to Toronto for a visit in the spring of 2006. As a 15 year old, she wasn’t very happy. She did a lot of off-ice training and the sport was her whole life. That, and her braces, made her very uncommunicative. It took David (Wilson, her choreographer) and me at least a week to get her to relax and smile. Now she smiles all the time." Kim told the LA Times, "When I was a junior skater, the most important thing was how many triple jumps I could do. But now I know jump is just one of the elements. Since I worked with Mr. Brian Orser, I could upgrade my performance. He often tells me about his experience including the 1988 Olympic Games and tries to share what he felt and learned."
Asada and Kim have been rivals since Kim dethroned Asada in the 2006 World Junior Championships. Neither was old enough to go to the Olympics. Both were born in 1990 only 20 days apart. Asada, whose birth date is September 25, is the younger of the two. A big fuss was made over Asada not being able to go to the Torino Olympics, especially when she won the Grand Prix Final held in Tokyo in December 2005, beating the then world champion Irina Slutskaya. Unlike the Japanese, no fuss was made in Korea about Kim, who didn’t become a big star in that country until two weeks after the Olympics when she eclipsed Asada at the World Junior championship. Asada seems invincible on paper because of her skill with triple Axels but lately she has been unreliable. In the Four Continents Championship, Asada was only sixth in the SP and, although she won the FS, she finished third overall behind Kim and Rochette, who received silver. At that event, Asada said, "I have problems with my Lutz, getting the wrong edge call, so I have been working very, very hard to correct that. I saw the countdown clock of the Olympics (in Vancouver) showing about 370 days. Of course I sometimes think about Olympics, but I want to concentrate on each competition as I do it. I will try not to think about Olympics too much." Ever since her defeat by Kim at the World Junior championships, Asada has always credited having Kim with helping her "to work harder". She has said in several press conferences, "I think it is good to have a rival. It motivates and inspires me." Kim, meanwhile, does not mention Asada. And, it seems, she’s getting tired of everyone asking her if she’s going to start trying to match Asada’s triple Axel. Orser contends he is not going to fix what isn’t broken. "For her to start the triple Axel is just too risky. It is so easy to get injury and blow everything. We are concentrating on keeping her healthy. She has very clean jumps and she doesn’t get wrong edge calls."
Asada, and her older sister, Mai, trained in California in 2007, in Lake Arrowhead where she was evacuated during the October fires. "I saw the fire from where I was staying," she told reporters at the Skate Canada Grand Prix event that year. Her then coach, Rafael Arutunian, added. "I had to evacuate them (the sisters). The police came and told us we must leave. It was a bit scary. They told us we had time to gather only essential items, which we threw into the car." When they had returned from Canada, they discovered the fire had not come even close to where they were staying. Being the defending champion does not make her fell pressured, Asada claims. "I try not to think about last year," she told Japanese journalists. "I want to forget that. I just want to think about the present, about doing my best."
The critical point may revolve around jet lag. With only two hours difference, Kim and Rochette should have no problems with this sometimes debilitating, disruptive pattern of sleep cycles. But it’s a significant factor for others. Asada did not pick up her credential until Monday after the first of two Ladies’ practice sessions scheduled that day. Her teammates Miki Ando, the 2007 world champion who was forced to withdraw from last year’s event when the warm-up for the Free Skate clearly showed she was unable to continue, and Fumio Suguri, had already practiced on Sunday and on Monday morning. Ando is credited with being the first and, as yet, only female to execute a quad Salchow in ISU competition. That happened in December 2002, a short time before her 15th birthday. But she subsequently grew and has been unable to repeat that feat outside of Japan. With her coach Tatiana Tarasova at the barrier, Monday night Asada practiced on the Staples Center’s ice presenting parts of her lovely Short Program set to Debussy’s Clair de Lune immediately following Ando’s runthrough. Both wore black and had ponytails, but Ando’s was longer. Suguri left the ice half way through the practice session, not waiting for her music to be played. Suguri, who was born on New Year’s Eve 1980, is delighted she has been pipped by six months for the dubious honor of being the oldest competitor in the Ladies championship, by Anastasia Gimazetdinova of Uzbekistan. The oldest woman in this entire event is British ice dancer, Sinead Kerr, who turned 30 on August 30. Suguri won bronze medals in the 2002 & 2003 world championships, and the silver in 2006 but she did not make the Japanese world team in 2007 & 2008. Asada has been training in Russia with Tarasova and in Japan with Tarasova’s assistant, Shanetta Folie.
This will be Rochette’s 7th world championship. The 23 year old from Ile Dupas, an island with only 700 inhabitants in Quebec, has a best place world finish of 5th last year. She also finished 5th in the last Olympic Games. Should she medal, she would give Canada its first women’s medal since Liz Manley in 1988. "I know I have to do a triple-triple in the short," Rochette said in a telephone conference last Friday. "I’ll be trying a triple Lutz to triple toe. I worked with my choreographer Lori Nichol last week making small changes in the long – nothing big, just to freshen it up, to make it more interesting for me. When you do the same routine for six months, you need to take a new look so you aren’t too robotic, doing it just mechanically. You want to show on the ice that you are enjoying yourself and giving it your all. So, a few little changes help with that goal. The ending pose is different. And after the Four Continents, I had to break in new boots, not really the best time to do that but it was really necessary."
Her boyfriend is even more famous in Canada than she is. She met Francois-Louis Tremblay, 28, at the 2006 Olympics. He holds a gold and two silver medals earned in the 2002 & 2006 Olympic Games in short track speed skating. "He loves to cook," Rochette confides. "He prepares some very nutritional meals for me. When we come home we don’t talk about our sports but he has taken me speed skating a few times and he showed me how to push with the heel to go faster. That looks terrible on figure skates!! He has been on figure skates and even tried a Lutz which wasn’t that bad. But we have a life together outside of skating. He won’t be in Los Angeles because he has to train but my mother, who has only been to one other Worlds, will. That was 2006 when it was in Calgary. However, I have got tickets for a party to come from Ile Dupas to thank them for supporting me through the years. So this event will be very exciting for me. I’m healthy and I’m just raring to go. There is a saying we have in French, ‘It was so good, but I’m hungry for more.’"
Carolina Kostner will definitely be in the mix. Like Rochette, the Italian will be taking part in her 7th world championship. She was the silver medalist last year. In January, the 22 year old lost the European title she had won twice previously. She had fallen in the short program but could have recovered from that error, had she not been a victim of a technicality in the Free Skate. By accident, she had too many exit rotations on a spin which changed the classification and resulted in no marks at all for that element, which was termed an illegal repeated move. That enabled local skater Laura Lepistö to become the first Finn to ever win the European Ladies title. However, although Lepistö is an extremely graceful competitor, she does not present either a triple Lutz or triple flip.
No one can predict with certainty where the Americans will fit in. The new US champion, Alissa Czisny, is undoubtedly one of the world’s most beautiful skaters. If she had lived in an earlier age, when women did not do triple jumps, she would have been unbeatable in the free skating, possibly becoming a legend. However, her jumps are inconsistent. Today’s champion must be an all-rounder and that definitely includes jumps. Czisny, a 21 year old with a dazzling smile worthy of any toothpaste commercial, made the world team once before. She finished 15th after gaining bronze in the US championships in 2007. After winning her national title this year, she finished only 9th in the Four Continents Championship.
The placings of last year’s US world team mean the country was allowed to enter only two entries instead of the maximum three this year. (Kimmie Meissner finished 7th; Bebe Liang 10th & Ashley Wagner 16th.) The last time only two US women competed in Worlds was after the 1998 Games. The Olympic champion, Tara Lipinski, and Nicole Bobek did not continue to Worlds in Minneapolis, and only one reserve was sent. That was Tonia Kwiatkowski, who finished sixth. The other reserve, Angela Nikodinov, could not be contacted in time, having gone on holiday to Bulgaria. The last time the US failed to QUALIFY three women for Worlds (as opposed to only two taking part although three were permitted) was 1995. After the 1994 Games, Olympic silver medalist Nancy Kerrigan did not continue to Worlds and Tony Harding was thrown out of the USFSA and banned from competition for life. Michelle Kwan, as first reserve, took part in her first Worlds in 1994 placing a very promising 8th while the second reserve, Nicole Bobek failed to get out of the qualifying round. In an amazing turn around, Bobek won the US title and bronze at Worlds in 1995 while Kwan finished 4th in worlds. That restored the US back up to the maximum allowance for 1996, when the event was in Edmonton and Kwan dethroned Lu Chen of China, to win her first world title.
Rachael Flatt, who gained silver in this year’s US nationals for the second consecutive year, but will be competing in Worlds for the first time because she was too young by 21 days to be entered last year, said, "It is very important we do try to get three spots for the Olympics. I definitely think it’s a very realistic goal, but I’m not focusing on that. I’m just focusing on trying to skate my best, especially since it’s my first worlds. I want to make a really strong debut and get credit for doing triple-triple jumps in both my Short Program and the long. It’s another challenge, and I’m very excited for it." Flatt, who trains in Colorado Springs, is from Del Mar in California which she left when she was eight, not for skating reasons, but because her dad had a change of job location. She is a straight-A student, taking advanced placement classes in English, biology and chemistry. After placing a disappointing 7th at the Four Continents Championships, she, and her coach, Tom Zakrajsek, made the decision to dump her free skate and arranged for Canadian Lori Nichol to come to Colorado Springs to manage an emergency salvage procedure. "After Four Continents, we’d had some mixed feedback about my routine with criticism of the music and the overall impression," said Flatt, who always appears very bubbly and energetic. "That’s really not what we wanted to hear going into Worlds, so we decided to go back to my old long because it was a really good program for me. I’m able to express it a little bit better. I have a lot of fun with it. Sometimes you have to make changes. Not everything works all the time." She said she is very excited at the prospect of competing in her home country and having people who know her in the audience, including her first coach, Tiffany Mayes.
Missing is Julia Sebestyen from Hungary who has a renewed flare-up of her Archilles Tendon problem. She said, "In the past 10 years, I skated in every Europeans, Worlds and Olympics. It’s naturally hard to accept that I have to miss worlds due to something I have no influence on." Italy’s Valentina Marchei of Italy has also withdrawn.
Copyright 2009 by ISIO