With upcoming season in doubt, Jason Brown maintains focus on '22 Olympics

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With upcoming season in doubt, Jason Brown maintains focus on '22 Olympics

For Jason Brown, the last figure skating season began and ended with some unexpected challenges.

On Aug. 22, 2019, the day he arrived for U.S. Figure Skating’s pre-season Champs Camp in Irvine, Calif., Brown was a backseat passenger in a vehicle involved in an accident. He sustained a concussion that compromised his training for several weeks and forced him to withdraw from what was to have been his season debut competition.

On March 16, 2020, the day Brown was to fly from his training base in Toronto to the World Championships in Montreal, he went the other direction, driving home to his family’s home in the Chicago suburbs because the world meet had been cancelled five days earlier over Covid-19 health concerns. His most successful competitive season, with silver medals at nationals, the Four Continents Championships and Skate America, left him feeling both fulfilled and unfinished.

Now Brown, 25, is back in Toronto (finally getting there June 23 brought another unexpected challenge). He is undergoing a Canadian government-mandated 14-day self-quarantine before a planned July 8 return to the ice at the Cricket Club to prepare for a season that may not take place.

We caught up with Brown, the 2014 Olympic team event bronze medalist, by phone at the end of last week for a wide-ranging conversation:

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Nathan Chen weighs unknown variables of next figure skating season

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Nathan Chen weighs unknown variables of next figure skating season

Nathan Chen is a statistics and data science major at Yale.

But even his fluency in those subjects can’t help Chen much now in finding answers to questions about his future.

“Too many variables,” Chen said this week via telephone from California.

Not to mention all the complete unknowns in any equation Chen might use to help define his plans.

For the two-time defending figure skating world champion, that starts with the unknown about when he can back on the ice for the first time since the 2020 World Championships were cancelled in mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic.

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For many Olympic-related sports bodies in the USA, surviving fiscal impact of pandemic would be like winning a gold

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For many Olympic-related sports bodies in the USA, surviving fiscal impact of pandemic would be like winning a gold

U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee chief executive Sarah Hirshland sounded the storm warning last week, in a virtual staff meeting as well as a letter and Q-and-A fact sheet to the USOPC’s constituents.

Hirshland did it again Tuesday in an athlete town meeting call that a person who listened to it described as “pretty much the same doom and gloom.”

She told of USOPC budget cuts of 10-to-20 percent that could include staff cuts and already include voluntary salary cuts of 20 percent (Hirshland) and 10 percent (the other eight top executives). And then there was the ominous passage, about the impact on the USOPC if the postponed-until-2021 Tokyo Olympics have to be cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The impact of a cancellation would be devastating to our athletes, first and foremost, but also to our financial health and stability,” said the FAQ sheet, a copy of which was obtained by Globetrotting. “We would survive such a scenario, but the impact would be severe.”

The USOPC can survive because it has an endowment in excess of $200 million it could use in a “`worst-case’ scenario.” That has not yet become the situation, the FAQ said, but it reach that level if Tokyo 2020 does not take place – a possibility evoked by two prominent members of Japan’s medical community in the last 10 days.

Cancellation would create a much more dire situation for the National Governing Bodies that help train and support the athletes who become part of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams. Many would go from weathering the storm to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

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With 2020 worlds definitively gone, skaters like Jason Brown try to stay on peak while off ice in uncertain times

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With 2020 worlds definitively gone, skaters like Jason Brown try to stay on peak while off ice in uncertain times

Thursday’s unsurprising news that the 2020 World Figure Skating Championships were definitively cancelled had minimal impact on Rafael Arutunian.

The impact of having little else definitive about figure skating’s future schedule is what Arutunian struggles to deal with.

“We knew this is what would be done with worlds,” said Arutunian, coach of two-time reigning world champion Nathan Chen. “What happens now with next season?”

The International Skating Union’s governing council hopes to provide some clarity about that after it meets again by conference call April 28. Even then, though, most of its answers will have to be prefaced by a literal or understood “if,” since there remains little certainty about the further development of the coronavirus pandemic and its consequent effect on the world of sport.

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Update: ISU Congress postponed to 2021, decision upcoming on rescheduling 2020 figure skating worlds (very likely, "no”), plus my exclusive info on bigger future worlds

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Update: ISU Congress postponed to 2021, decision upcoming on rescheduling 2020 figure skating worlds (very likely, "no”), plus my exclusive info on bigger future worlds

This week, there will definitely be a decision on one major International Skating Union event cancelled by the coronavirus pandemic.

That will be followed soon after by a decision on another – even if the fate of the latter, the 2020 World Figure Skating Championships, seems pretty much a foregone conclusion already.

The ISU asked its members to vote on the future of the organization’s biennial policy-making Congress, which had been scheduled for this June 8-12 in Phuket, Thailand. The ballot offered three choices: 1) postponement until June 2021; 2) definite cancellation; 3) abstention.

Votes are due today. Once they are in, the ISU Council will meet by teleconference to discuss the result and matters related to the 2020 worlds, the 2020-21 season and seasons after that.

No 2020 worlds and more skaters at future worlds are involved.

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