Ilia Malinin heralds new era at figure skating nationals, but Jason Brown still has a place

/
Ilia Malinin heralds new era at figure skating nationals, but Jason Brown still has a place

SAN JOSE, California — Ilia Malinin figures people thought of him as a just another guy a year ago when he made his senior debut at the U.S. Championships with two dazzling performances to finish second.

“I felt like nobody knew me until after nationals,” Malinin said. “It was almost like this random guy showed up and surprised everyone.”

That anonymity was long gone when Malinin took the ice Friday for his short program at the 2023 Nationals. By then, everyone in the skating world was focused on the 18-year-old who uses “quadg0d” as his social media handle in a disarming way, the young man who had made skating history earlier this season by becoming the first to land a quadruple Axel, a jump he plans to attempt again in Sunday’s free skate,

“It’s a big leap from last year,” Malinin said. “There was a huge spotlight on me. Everyone has expectations of me.”

And he exceeded them, leaving the son of two Uzbek Olympic figure skaters to face the question, “Has the Ilia Malinin era now arrived?”

“I think it is here, and it will be here for a long time,” Malinin said.

Read More

Once again, World Team Trophy has six countries, but only three medal contenders...and that doesn't add up to much of a competition

/
Once again, World Team Trophy has six countries, but only three medal contenders...and that doesn't add up to much of a competition

The big problem with the competitive aspect of the World Team Trophy is having just three countries with a chance to win medals now that Canadian skating has hit a fallow period since its athletes won the team gold medal (and three individual medals) at the 2018 Olympics.

Only Canada, Russia, the United States and Japan ever have won medals at the World Team Trophy, which has a six-country field, two entries per country in each segment of singles and one couple in pairs / dance. Canada’s last WTT medal came five editions ago (2013.)

Only Canada, Russia and the USA have won team medals at the Olympics since the 2014 addition of the event, where the field has 10 countries with only one singles skater and one couple in the short programs, after which the field is cut to five countries for the free skates.

Read More

By the (likely) final performance, Nathan Chen became a mirror for Glass music

/
By the (likely) final performance, Nathan Chen became a mirror for Glass music

My observations from Day 2 of 3 at the World Team Trophy, where Nathan Chen was Same As He Ever Was in winning the free skate after winning the short program on Day 1.

(Wait…maybe Talking Heads for him in the Olympic season?)

1. It’s too bad that Friday was most likely the last time Nathan Chen will skate the free program Shae-Bourne artfully choreographed to selections from the music of the minimalist composer, Philip Glass.

Chen clearly had a physical as well as intellectual understanding of Glass, having studied his music at Yale and having learned how to play part of it on the piano. The skater’s interpretation got more nuanced each time he performed it, with the final half of the four minutes at the World Championships and the opening 30 seconds at World Team Trophy clear evidence of how he “got” the music.

Read More

In making history with fifth straight U.S. title, Nathan Chen competes against his own singular past

/
In making history with fifth straight U.S. title, Nathan Chen competes against his own singular past

The trouble with being Nathan Chen is, nearly all the time, you are being judged against your past brilliance.

Unless the redoubtable two-time reigning Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan is in the competition, that is.

But the two have met just twice since the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, with Chen winning both, and pandemic-born uncertainty over the fate of the 2021 World Championships, currently scheduled for late March in Stockholm, and perhaps even next season’s events makes it is impossible to know when the next Chen-Hanyu showdown will take place.

Chen has simply been so extraordinary for so long and has dominated U.S. men’s skating so thoroughly since 2017 that it is getting too easy (and unfair) to take him for granted and forget he commandingly won a historic fifth straight U.S. title Sunday in Las Vegas because he did it with a less-than-jaw-dropping free skate.

A modest (by only his own standards) winning score of 322.28 still left Chen more than 30 points ahead of runner-up Vincent Zhou (291.38), a national medalist for the fourth time, this one after a one-year absence from the podium. Jason Brown, the 2015 U.S. champion was third (276.92), his sixth medal at nationals.

Read More

Vincent Zhou on turning his life inside out, nomadic existence and surprisingly strong figure skating at nationals

/
Vincent Zhou on turning his life inside out, nomadic existence and surprisingly strong figure skating at nationals


Vincent Zhou’s plans for this season went completely out the window.

After leaving his previous training base in Colorado Springs last August to begin studies at Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he hoped to finish freshman year before taking a leave, the reigning world bronze medalist found himself without a place nearby to train.

The Brown rink had little available time, its ice conditions were fine for hockey but not figure skating, and the hockey coaches made it clear they didn’t like the way he dug it up with the toe pick.

After briefly enduring a brutal commute to a rink north of Boston, he put skating on hold in early October.

By December, Zhou decided it would be better to put school on hold after finishing one semester, and he moved to Toronto to train with coach Lee Barkell and choreographer Lori Nichol.

With barely two weeks of steady training before nationals, Zhou managed to place fourth, wisely choosing to limit his quadruple jumps to one in each program. It was good enough to earn one of the three 2020 U.S. world team spots based on his two-year body of work after finishing sixth at the 2018 Olympics.

With the World Championships coming up in Montreal, NBCSports.com/figure-skating spoke recently by phone with Zhou about his nomadic existence since the move, his performance at nationals, his expectations for worlds and his plans after that.

Read More