Comings, goings and questions as coach Rafael Arutunian looks to next season

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Comings, goings and questions as coach Rafael Arutunian looks to next season

LAKEWOOD, Calif. -- In an upstairs locker room at Lakewood ICE, a skating facility with three rinks 21 miles south of Los Angeles, each dressing stall has a plate above it with the name of a figure skater or coach who regularly trains or teaches there.

On a recent afternoon early in what passes for the (brief) off-season in figure skating, odds and ends of clothing lay in the dressing stalls assigned to Team USA members Nathan Chen, Ashley Wagner, Adam Rippon and Mariah Bell. Michal Březina of the Czech Republic and Romain Ponsart of France have their fair share of personal belongings in the locker room as well, as do their coaches, Rafael Arutunian and Nadia Kanaeva.

Which of those skaters will be using the stalls next season remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: there definitely will be some new ones working with the only person who has coached U.S. singles skaters to World Championships medals since 2009 - Chen's gold last month and Wagner's silver in 2016.

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Play it again. And again. Reruns, early brilliance and more in this Olympic figure skate season

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Play it again. And again. Reruns, early brilliance and more in this Olympic figure skate season

It isn’t even October, and this Olympic figure skating season already has featured some stunning performances – all in Class C level competitions of the International Skating Union's Challenger Series.

(Class A is Olympics and worlds; Class B is Grand Prix - with the Grand Prix Final a B+.)

Does that still mean the best is yet to come or that a few top skaters – especially in singles - will have peaked too early, with the Olympics not until February in South Korea?

Only time will tell, of course, but the changed framework of international competition, with Challenger Series events now drawing media attention and audiences for live streams, means some skaters are trying to be great in many events from September through early April.

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Takeaways: Chen, Honda set themselves apart from skating peers

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Takeaways: Chen, Honda set themselves apart from skating peers

SALT LAKE CITY - Here are six takeaways from the 2017 U.S. International Figure Skating Classic, which marked the real start of the Olympic season.

1. Nathan Chen stood out last season, not only for succeeding on history-making quadruple jumps but also for accepting the risk to attempt them.

He stood out in his first competition of this Olympic season, the U.S. International Figure Skating Classic, by taking some musical risk while most singles skaters are playing it safe with old warhorses like Turandot, Carmen, Phantom of the Opera, et al., ad nauseam.

Chen let his choreographers -- Shae-Lynn Bourne (who did his short program to the Benjamin Clementine version of "Nemesis") and Lori Nichol (who used the score from the film Mao's Last Dancer, with its powerful passage from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, to craft his free skate) -- pick the music.

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Japan's Marin Honda, skating star since 11, revels in growing spotlight

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Japan's Marin Honda, skating star since 11, revels in growing spotlight

SALT LAKE CITY -- When she was only 11 years old, Marin Honda was anointed by Japanese media as the worthy successor to Mao Asada, the most decorated figure skater in her country's history.

Since then, the hype around Honda has grown exponentially in her homeland, a country that has developed a boundless passion for figure skating over the past decade.

So, there were six Japanese TV networks and 10 Japanese newspapers in town to cover a second-tier event -- the 2017 U.S. International Figure Skating Classic in Salt Lake City -- because it was Honda's debut on the senior international circuit.

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