I set a tweet storm personal best today.
Pushed to do it after what Papadakis & Cizeron, Zagitova, Medvedeva and Tursynbaeva accomplished on the ice in Japan.
So much fantastic skating, in so many ways.
Read MoreTORONTO – Jason Brown was feeling out possibilities to continue his competitive skating career with a new coach, and he figured it made sense to see what it might be like to work with Brian Orser and his team.
So, Brown came in mid-April to the Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club, with no promise other than the opportunity to do a couple training sessions with the coaches who had produced singles champions at the last three Olympics. Orser & Co. already had a rink full of elite talents, with more expected, and he was not sure if there was room for another.
No sooner had Brown taken the ice with several other skaters, the room was his.
Read MoreTORONTO – She was not supposed to be sitting here, in a coach’s office at a skating club in Canada. Yevgenia Medvedeva is Russian, just 18 years old, figure skating world champion in 2016 and 2017, and only eight months ago winner of the singles silver medal at the Winter Olympics in South Korea.
Barely two months after the Olympics, she left her Russian coach of 10 years, Eteri Tutberidze, who had guided her to the top of the figure skating world, for reasons Medvedeva has not discussed except in general terms. The move she made was startling and utterly unexpected.
Star Russian skaters stay in Russia. Never before had one of the sport’s pre-eminent Russians left the country to train with a non-Russian coach. Not since Michelle Kwan in 2001 had a skater with a career record as brilliant on the world and Olympic level as Medvedeva’s made such a dramatic coaching change, and Kwan did it without leaving her native California.
But Medvedeva felt she had no other choice after a tumultuous 2018 season that did not end with the Olympic gold medal she had seemed a lock to win.
Read MoreAs many of you know, the figure skating website icenetwork closed at the end of June, with most of what it covered migrating to a number of sites on NBC platforms.
And, after two years of writing for Ice Network, some of my coverage is migrating to NBC as well.
Read MoreIt was the middle of 1964, and 26-year-old Frank Carroll was in San Francisco at a career crossroads.
He had done college, getting a degree in 1960 from the College of the Holy Cross in his native Worcester, Mass., with a major in sociology and Dean’s List grades. He had done competitive skating, with national junior singles bronze medals in 1959 and 1960. He had done show skating, spending four and one-half years with Ice Follies before leaving the show with plans to attend the University of San Francisco Law School, which had accepted him, then deciding he did not want to start academic studies again.
Over the years with Ice Follies, which was styled like an elaborate Broadway review, Carroll had made friends with many actors in musicals like “Kismet,” “Carousel” and “Hello, Dolly.” One suggested he go to Los Angeles, where friends could help get him work in films. He went.
“I would go to auditions, and when they would ask what I did, I said, `I ice skate,’’’ Carroll said. “I was like a joke to them.”
But he was handsome, with a physique buffed in the gym, and that got Carroll parts as a “body person” in three of the eminently forgettable beach movies of the mid-1960s (think “Beach Blanket Bingo,” although Carroll declines to identify which movies he was in or what his stage name was.) He would stand among a group of other “body people” in the background and sometimes sing with the group.
There would be months between film shoots, leaving Carroll to spend his days hanging at the gym or going to the beach until, as he puts it, “I got bored with this ridiculousness.”
A friend who had photographed Carroll at skating competitions suggested he might fill the down time as a skating teacher. After all, he had done some coaching as a Holy Cross undergrad to help pay his school and skating bills and done some more coaching after graduation. The photographer connected Carroll with a rink in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, where he began working in the 1965/66 skating season.
By 1968, Carroll was coach of a medalist at the national championships. A year later, he had his first national champion: Jimmy Demogines in the novice men’s division. In 1972, he coached Olympic team alternate Robert Bradshaw. In 1976, he coached his first Olympian, Linda Fratianne.
Over the next 40 years, Carroll would become the most successful coach in the United States
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Philip Hersh, formerly Olympic specialist for the Chicago Tribune, has covered 20 Olympic Games. He often uses sport as a way to write about the culture of a country or athlete. READ FULL BIO
