Living in two worlds at once, Camden Pulkinen seeks first U.S. Championships medal

/
Living in two worlds at once, Camden Pulkinen seeks first U.S. Championships medal

ore difficult since last August.

“About tenfold more difficult,” he said.

For the previous six years, when he lived and trained in Colorado Springs, Pulkinen had a five-minute drive to a rink where the elite figure skaters had almost unlimited ice time. He had finished high school online and then had taken in-person and online college courses at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs essentially on his own schedule. .

When I spoke to him early last week, that life seemed a distant memory. Now he is up at the crack of dawn to get from Columbia University’s Manhattan campus to the Chelsea Piers Sky Rink, where he begins his daily training between 8 and 8:30, and the ice time available to him ends at 11:20. That trip involves 14 stops on the 7th Avenue subway and then a mile-long walk to the rink, and it takes between 50 and 55 minutes.

When his training ends, Pulkinen does the trip in reverse to begin his day as a sophomore at the Ivy League university.

“The mental oscillation between getting through a long program and then rushing yourself to a class and having to learn about calculus is something,” Pulkinen said.

It is what the 22-year-old from Scottsdale, Ariz., signed up for when he decided to continue his figure skating career through the 2026 Olympic season and become a full-time, on-campus student after having deferred his matriculation at Columbia for a year.

Read More

Jason Brown returns to figure skating, and a Toronto basement, with an ‘Impossible Dream’

/
Jason Brown returns to figure skating, and a Toronto basement, with an ‘Impossible Dream’

In June, figure skater Jason Brown moved all his belongings out of the Toronto basement apartment where he had lived most of the last four years while training to make the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. He brought everything back to his family home north of Chicago, where nearly all those possessions – and his car – remain.

“No part of me thought I was coming back to Toronto,” Brown told me in a recent phone conversation.

Why would he have? Brown, 28 next month, had been in Toronto to work with coaches Tracy Wilson and Brian Orser on preparing for competitions. That lengthy phase of his skating career, with 12 years as a senior competitor and suitcases full of medals and achievements, seemed to be over with his solid sixth-place finish in the men’s singles event in China.

Brown had wearied of the blinkered perspective and single-minded focus necessary to be an elite competitive skater. He wanted to immerse himself more deeply in the other sides of skating, using his nonpareil artistry and body awareness to be a choreographer, to be a frequent and innovative show skater, to lay groundwork for the hope of one day producing his own show and having a skating camp.

None of those endeavors needed him to be based in Toronto.

And yet there he was in Toronto when we talked, back in the basement apartment with one suitcase of belongings, back training at the Cricket Club for his next competition, the U.S. Championships in late January, back with a frame of mind in which skating at the 2026 Winter Games is a far-off but not far-fetched thought.

Read More

Ilia Malinin, the “quadg0d,” seems heaven-sent for U.S. figure skating

/
Ilia Malinin, the “quadg0d,” seems heaven-sent for U.S. figure skating

When Ilia Malinin started skating, at age 6, the rink was basically a day care center for him.

His parents, Tatyana Malinina and Roman Skorniyakov, each a two-time figure skating Olympian for Uzbekistan, both were coaching, and it was both easier and less expensive to have their son with them after school at the SkateQuest facility in Reston, Virginia.

“At the beginning, we didn’t take it seriously,” Malinina said. “We just took him to where we were working, and he was skating there.”

That changed three years later.

With minimal preparation, skating just three times a week, Malinin qualified for the 2015 U.S. Championships in the juvenile division when he was just 9 years old. He finished ninth.

Suitably impressed, Malinin and Skorniyakov started having him skate under their tutelage five times a week. In 2016, just after his 11th birthday, he became national juvenile champion.

Many others soon would be as captivated as his parents by their son’s nascent talent.

Read More

At age 11, Nathan Chen set his course for Olympic gold

/
At age 11, Nathan Chen set his course for Olympic gold

Nathan Chen vowed publicly to have fun at his second Olympics, to free his head of the anxiety that overwhelmed him four years ago.

Chen remained so true to that pledge that he even broke out a wry smile after his one mistake in a free skate of surpassing difficulty Thursday afternoon.

He handled the free and an equally demanding short program so well on his sport’s biggest stage that Chen won the Olympic gold medal easily at the 2022 Winter Olympics.

But there was nothing easy about the journey that got him here.

“I never thought I would actually be able to make this happen,” Chen said. “It was a pretty daunting mountain.”

Read More

In potential swan song, U.S. figure skater Jason Brown vows to do things his way

/
In potential swan song, U.S. figure skater Jason Brown vows to do things his way

Jason Brown is a skater for an earlier time, the one before multiple quadruple jumps became necessary to win medals at major international competitions.

And yet Brown still is a skater for all time, one who has created indelible impressions from the entirety of his programs rather than from instants of outstanding athleticism provided by the revolutionary jumps.

"I have utmost respect for what those guys are doing to push the sport technically," he said this week in China. "I’m just in absolute awe, and I wish I could be one of them as well. But I am going to push the sport in my way."

That is through performances like the one Brown gave Tuesday in the short program at the 2022 Winter Olympics. His four jumps simply were part of a seamless, compelling expression of a traditional Black spiritual, "Sinnerman," as sung by Nina Simone and choreographed by Rohene Ward with references to what Alvin Ailey created for his landmark ballet, "Revelations."

Read More