Living in two worlds at once, Camden Pulkinen seeks first U.S. Championships medal

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Living in two worlds at once, Camden Pulkinen seeks first U.S. Championships medal

ore difficult since last August.

“About tenfold more difficult,” he said.

For the previous six years, when he lived and trained in Colorado Springs, Pulkinen had a five-minute drive to a rink where the elite figure skaters had almost unlimited ice time. He had finished high school online and then had taken in-person and online college courses at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs essentially on his own schedule. .

When I spoke to him early last week, that life seemed a distant memory. Now he is up at the crack of dawn to get from Columbia University’s Manhattan campus to the Chelsea Piers Sky Rink, where he begins his daily training between 8 and 8:30, and the ice time available to him ends at 11:20. That trip involves 14 stops on the 7th Avenue subway and then a mile-long walk to the rink, and it takes between 50 and 55 minutes.

When his training ends, Pulkinen does the trip in reverse to begin his day as a sophomore at the Ivy League university.

“The mental oscillation between getting through a long program and then rushing yourself to a class and having to learn about calculus is something,” Pulkinen said.

It is what the 22-year-old from Scottsdale, Ariz., signed up for when he decided to continue his figure skating career through the 2026 Olympic season and become a full-time, on-campus student after having deferred his matriculation at Columbia for a year.

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With war at home in Ukraine, Anastasiia Smirnova and Danil Siianytsia persevere and embrace skating for the U.S.

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With war at home in Ukraine, Anastasiia Smirnova and Danil Siianytsia persevere and embrace skating for the U.S.

There are thousands of threads in the tapestry of a life, with the sturdy and neutral monochrome warp threads covered by multiple colors of fine weft threads to create a scene that can pull together a moment in time or an enduring image.

Events can conspire to make the whole thing start to unravel, too, turning a settled and pleasant view into an unnervingly jarring one, and seemingly stable lives into ones full of uncertainty. That’s what has happened to the lives of U.S. pair skaters Anastasiia Smirnova and Danil Siianytsia.

In the weft of their tapestry, the azure blue and golden yellow threads of Ukraine’s flag combine with the coral red, bright white and navy blue threads of the United States. The colors illustrate the past, present and future of a team who left their native Dnipro, Ukraine two years apart to build sporting lives 5,200 miles away in suburban Minneapolis, where they train with coach Trudy Oltmanns.

Their move involved expected cultural and linguistic dislocation and separation from families, difficult but surmountable obstacles in an ever-more-connected world. None threatened the integrity and strength of either the warp or weft of their story.

“We had no problem adapting,” Siianytsia said in a recent Zoom interview, his English now fluent.

Then came last Feb. 24, when Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine began a war that has lasted nearly a year, tearing apart the fabrics of millions of lives.

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Jason Brown returns to figure skating, and a Toronto basement, with an ‘Impossible Dream’

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Jason Brown returns to figure skating, and a Toronto basement, with an ‘Impossible Dream’

In June, figure skater Jason Brown moved all his belongings out of the Toronto basement apartment where he had lived most of the last four years while training to make the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. He brought everything back to his family home north of Chicago, where nearly all those possessions – and his car – remain.

“No part of me thought I was coming back to Toronto,” Brown told me in a recent phone conversation.

Why would he have? Brown, 28 next month, had been in Toronto to work with coaches Tracy Wilson and Brian Orser on preparing for competitions. That lengthy phase of his skating career, with 12 years as a senior competitor and suitcases full of medals and achievements, seemed to be over with his solid sixth-place finish in the men’s singles event in China.

Brown had wearied of the blinkered perspective and single-minded focus necessary to be an elite competitive skater. He wanted to immerse himself more deeply in the other sides of skating, using his nonpareil artistry and body awareness to be a choreographer, to be a frequent and innovative show skater, to lay groundwork for the hope of one day producing his own show and having a skating camp.

None of those endeavors needed him to be based in Toronto.

And yet there he was in Toronto when we talked, back in the basement apartment with one suitcase of belongings, back training at the Cricket Club for his next competition, the U.S. Championships in late January, back with a frame of mind in which skating at the 2026 Winter Games is a far-off but not far-fetched thought.

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At worlds, a men’s short program filled with powerful emotion and exceptional skating

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At worlds, a men’s short program filled with powerful emotion and exceptional skating

If they did a highlight reel from the men’s short program at the 2022 World Figure Skating Championships, it might turn into a feature-length film.

It would include scenes of heartrending and powerful emotion. Scenes with one terrific performance after another. A scene showing almost improbable brilliance from a man making an unexpected second appearance at worlds and another scene showing confirmatory brilliance from a teen making a highly anticipated debut at worlds.

Numbers really can’t do justice to what took place over four hours Thursday in Montpellier, France, but they can provide some parameters to assess it.

Twelve of the 29 competitors had personal best scores, a group that included the first (Shoma Uno), third (Kazuki Tomono), fourth (Ilia Malinin) and fifth (Daniel Grassl) finishers.

Each of the top four, led by three Japanese, scored over 100 points, the first time that has happened in a men’s short program at the world championships. Uno had 109.63, Yuma Kagiyama 105.69 and Tomono 101.12, with Malinin of the United States at 100.16.

And the man who finished 22nd, Ivan Shmuratko of war-ravaged Ukraine, brought the crowd to its feet in a touching ovation just by being there, for wearing a simple blue practice shirt with a heart-shaped patch showing the colors of his country’s flag. How sad it was that officials saw fit to give him a deduction for a “costume / prop” violation.

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At age 11, Nathan Chen set his course for Olympic gold

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At age 11, Nathan Chen set his course for Olympic gold

Nathan Chen vowed publicly to have fun at his second Olympics, to free his head of the anxiety that overwhelmed him four years ago.

Chen remained so true to that pledge that he even broke out a wry smile after his one mistake in a free skate of surpassing difficulty Thursday afternoon.

He handled the free and an equally demanding short program so well on his sport’s biggest stage that Chen won the Olympic gold medal easily at the 2022 Winter Olympics.

But there was nothing easy about the journey that got him here.

“I never thought I would actually be able to make this happen,” Chen said. “It was a pretty daunting mountain.”

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