With brilliant skating by the top three, Nathan Chen still leaves no room at the top

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With brilliant skating by the top three, Nathan Chen still leaves no room at the top

When a skater has been as dominant as Nathan Chen has for three seasons, it is not surprising many others look at him as untouchable.

That feeling is even shared by a skater like Vincent Zhou, the reigning world bronze medalist and, like Chen, a 2018 Olympian.

“I have come to the realization that pretty much everyone – and also myself, inadvertently – puts whoever is at the top on a pedestal, and anyone not on that pedestal has no chance of winning,” Zhou said.

“Obviously, Nathan is an amazing skater. But I want to be the best I can and if that means I can win, that’s great.”

In Saturday’s short program at the U.S. Championships, when the top three finishers all skated brilliantly, Zhou came as close as he ever has to making room for himself at the top next to a Chen at the top of his game.

“I was aware of what he did,” said Chen, who skated more than an hour later. “Vincent is extremely talented, and I know he is going to throw it down every time he skates. I’m thrilled I was able to skate the way that I did.”

It was hard to remember another competition in which three men skated short programs as well as Chen, Zhou and Jason Brown. One can only imagine what the crowd reaction would have been had they not been compelled to compete in an empty Las Vegas arena out of COVID-19 safety concerns.

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Bradie Tennell moving forward in fresh start, aiming for triple Axel

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Bradie Tennell moving forward in fresh start, aiming for triple Axel

Bradie Tennell was frustrated.

Three years after she had gone from “who?” to “wow!,” jumping from ninth to first at the U.S. Championships in just one season and then becoming the highest U.S. finisher at both the 2018 Olympics and world championships, Tennell felt as if she were spinning her wheels.

It wasn’t as if the figure skater from north suburban Chicago no longer was getting solid results. Last season, despite a foot injury in late summer, she became the first U.S. woman to qualify for the Grand Prix Final since 2015 and the first to win a Four Continents Championship medal (bronze) since 2017. She also completed a full set of medals at nationals, adding 2020 bronze to her 2018 gold and 2019 silver.

“But I was getting older, and I didn’t feel I was reaching my goals fast enough, and I wasn’t progressing fast enough,” Tennell said.

Tennell was increasingly annoyed by her failure to get traction on her goal of adding another spin to one jump, the Axel. She wanted to master the triple Axel, a jump that is turning into something of a litmus test for elite women the way it did for elite men in the 1980s.

It reached the point where, at age 22, she would explain the frustration during a recent phone interview with a paraphrase of a quote about insanity attributed to Albert Einstein.

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Another Medvedeva stunner: pandemic sends her back to old coach after bitter split led her to Orser, who says her departure was amicable

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Another Medvedeva stunner: pandemic sends her back to old coach after bitter split led her to Orser, who says her departure was amicable

During the Russian Figure Skating test event last weekend, when Brian Orser and Yevgenia Medvedeva were bridging the 5,000-mile span between him in Toronto and her in Moscow via video chat, they laughed about how different the atmosphere seemed than it had been at the same event two years earlier.

Orser would tell me Wednesday morning he had no idea during those weekend conversations that the bridge linking them was on the verge of collapse under the weight of separation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A few hours before Orser called me, what Medvedeva had told him Tuesday became public: she was making the stunning move of returning to her previous and longtime coach, Moscow-based Eteri Tutberidze, whom she had left in an acrimonious split three months after the 2018 Olympics.

“She (Medvedeva) and I agree if there was no pandemic, we would not be having this discussion right now,” Orser said.

So, there was a bittersweet irony in Orser’s recollection of his earlier conversations with Medvedeva, 2016 and 2017 world champion and 2018 Olympic silver medalist.

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Virus put Grand Prix plans on hold for Orser's international skating stars

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Virus put Grand Prix plans on hold for Orser's international skating stars

Over the past decade, the Toronto club where Brian Orser coached South Korea’s Yuna Kim to the 2010 Olympic title has become such an attraction for top figure skaters from around the globe that it could add a word to a name that already is a mouthful.

You could call it the Toronto International Cricket Skating and Curling Club.

But its reach now is limited by the deadly virus pandemic that has effectively frozen out the elite athletes from Japan, Russia, South Korea and Poland who train at the Cricket Club.

That situation won’t change quickly, even with the International Skating Union having announced Monday its plans to proceed with a live format for the international Grand Prix Series. This fall, it will become a series of six essentially domestic competitions scheduled to begin with Skate America Oct. 23-25 in Las Vegas.

If they take place.

“As soon as the skaters can come back, it will be full steam ahead… to where, we don’t know,” Orser said via telephone Wednesday.

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Solomonic figure skating schedule discussed for 2022 Olympics, with events starting in morning and evening

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Solomonic figure skating schedule discussed for 2022 Olympics, with events starting in morning and evening

After agreeing to a morning start for all figure skating events at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, a move that benefitted NBC by providing prime-time viewing in the United States, the International Skating Union is considering a compromise for the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.

Sources with knowledge of the situation have told Globetrotting that although discussions are continuing, they think the figure skating schedule for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing could include starting times in both the morning and evening.

That means European viewers would not need to be awake in the middle of the night to watch all the skating.

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