At age 14 and just 4-foot-9, figure skater Isabeau Levito within reach of senior podium at nationals

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At age 14 and just 4-foot-9, figure skater Isabeau Levito within reach of senior podium at nationals

About 12 years ago, Chiara Garberi decided to check out the ice rink in her New Jersey neighborhood to see if it might be a place where she could skate for fun on weekends.

With her daughter, Isabeau Levito, in tow, Garberi arrived at a moment when competitive figure skaters were training. Levito, then age 2 ½, took one look at the situation and asked if she could go on the ice.

“I told her, `You need special shoes for that,’” Garberi recalled. “She saw a pair of rental skates next to the ice sheet and said, `Are those mine?’”

They would be, soon enough. Because what followed was a progression familiar to parents of kids who wind up in figure skating’s highest levels.

First came weekly learn-to-skate classes, which Garberi originally made a reward for her daughter if she finished her meals. Next, a year later, was asking a coach who was working with the beginners if Levito, at almost 4, was ready for a private lesson. (The answer was yes.) And then, a few years later, daily lessons. Now, all day at the rink, six days a week, with schoolwork fit in between and after skating sessions.

“Isabeau always tried to be better than everyone else, even in learn to skate,” said Yulia Kuznetsova, who has been Levito’s coach for 10 years.

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A taller Alysa Liu also hoping to show growth as a skater

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A taller Alysa Liu also hoping to show growth as a skater

Word on the street is Alysa Liu has grown.

The two-time reigning U.S. figure skating champion said that’s true… to a degree. The two inches of height she added between last season and her 15th birthday in August don’t change Liu’s perspective.

“I just went from really short to very short,” Liu said, wryly, via telephone after a training session last week in San Francisco. “I’m up to 5-0. I like the five-foot number, but it’s still short.”

Anyway, the more important measure will be how much Liu has grown as a skater since her successful 2019-20 debut in international junior competition.

As is the case for all skaters, especially those in North America, such skating growth risks being temporarily stunted by restrictions on training and lack of competition caused by the coronavirus pandemic. And physical growth, even if it is only two inches, can also be problematic.

In Liu’s case, issues related to the pandemic have complicated her sudden shift to a new coaching team in late June, when she announced a split from Laura Lipetsky, who had coached her since age 5. Cancellation of the Junior Grand Prix series is giving Liu more travel-free time to adapt to the new situation, although, ironically, travel restrictions are keeping her from having the two-country, three-coach arrangement work the way it was planned.

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Figure skating fans in Nepal, Iran, Peru, Brazil and Singapore? Free streaming of Junior Grand Prix has drawn viewers in such seemingly unlikely places

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Figure skating fans in Nepal, Iran, Peru, Brazil and Singapore? Free streaming of Junior Grand Prix has drawn viewers in such seemingly unlikely places

Hi, Ted,

I’m Laura from Peru. I like figure skating so much; perhaps it’s not very popular in my country. I wanted to thank you for your comments on the events. They are very useful for people like me who just started to follow this sport.

–Email sent to Ted Barton during one of this season’s Junior Grand Prix events

 Laura Quinto Castro spent her childhood in Tarma, a city at 10,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes, where there was no ice rink. When Quinto Castro moved 150 miles west to coastal Lima, at age 11, she found what had been the lone permanent rink in her country, but that facility now has become itinerant in Peru’s capital for lack of funding.

Quinto Castro, 27, still managed to develop a strong attraction to figure skating by watching ESPN Latin America’s telecast of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Like many people worldwide, she was mesmerized by the exploits of 15-year-old Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya. A couple years later, Quinto Castro wondered what had happened to Lipnitskaya, the darling of the Sochi Winter Games.

So Quinto Castro began searching YouTube, which recommends videos based on the subject of the searches. One day, a video from the International Skating Union’s Junior Grand Prix Skating Channel on YouTube popped up. She subscribed to the channel and found that it does streams of the JGP competitions that are available free and live throughout the world everywhere but Japan and South Korea, where TV networks have bought rights to the junior events.

Quinto Castro, a one-time roller skater, now is among the 66,754 subscribers to the channel, which will do its final live broadcasts of this season from the Junior Grand Prix Final Thursday through Saturday in Vancouver. Twelve-month streaming data (August-to-August) of Junior Grand Prix events on the YouTube channel, both live and archived, show viewer hits grew from 3.1 million for 2014-15 to 14.1 million for 2017-18 and could reach 15 million in 2018-19. The totals increase as people watch archived video.

Viewers to date this season have come from 83 countries. And Peru, which is not an ISU member country, is just one of the unlikely places where people are watching.

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