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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New math: Figure skating’s latest recalculations change skaters’ formula for success

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New math: Figure skating’s latest recalculations change skaters’ formula for success

In the ever-changing calculus of figure skating’s mathlympics, the latest recalculations change some of Nathan Chen’s formula for success.

His two highest-valued jumps, the quadruple Lutz and quad flip, no longer add up to much – or as much – of an advantage.

When Chen hit his first quad Lutz in 2016, the element had a base value of 13.6 points, the highest score for a jump anyone has landed in competition. At that time, a quad Lutz was worth 1.3 points more than a quad flip and 1.6 more than a quad loop.

By last season, when Chen won his second straight world title with brilliant quad Lutzes in the short program and free skate, the jump’s value had been reduced to 11.5, compared to 11.0 for the flip and 10.5 for the loop.

Next season, according to the scale-of-value list the International Skating Union published last week, the Lutz, flip and loop all will have a base value of 11.0. And the Lutz now will be worth just 1.5 more than the mundane quad toe loop after having been worth 3.3 more back in 2016.

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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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Full of vainglory, IOC grandees sweat details about Tokyo 2020 while hiding big picture

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Full of vainglory, IOC grandees sweat details about Tokyo 2020 while hiding big picture

The International Olympic Committee said some things Tuesday about the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the coronavirus in the form of what it called a “communique,” because the simple word “statement” apparently is not good enough for these self-appointed pooh-bahs.

The dispatch from Olympus publicly addressed only the issue of how athletes who have yet to qualify for the Summer Games might do so, which shows the IOC is 1) rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and/or 2) is so distanced from reality it won’t acknowledge the elephant in the room until the beast finishes shitting on them.

The statement tries to justify avoiding mention of the possibility these Summer Games might not take place as scheduled by saying, “any speculation at this moment would be counter-productive.”

That comes at the end of a paragraph reading, “The IOC remains fully committed to the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, and with more than four months to go before the Games there is no need for any drastic decisions at this stage. . .”

There is no need for “drastic” decisions now.

What is needed is for the IOC to tell the truth about whether it is considering alternatives to 2020. It is foolhardy for the IOC to say speculation would be counter-productive when every person with a functioning brain is wondering what decisions the IOC might take if “drastic” action is needed and when such decisions might be made.

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