Serendipitous addition of Jeremy Abbott to Alysa Liu’s coaching team helping her work through growth spurt

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Serendipitous addition of Jeremy Abbott to Alysa Liu’s coaching team helping her work through growth spurt

Serendipity is part of this story. And both happenstance and coincidence also played a part in how Jeremy Abbott became a full-time member of Alysa Liu’s coaching team this fall.

Abbott describes the way it all developed as “organic,” a word he also uses to explain the process Team Liu is using to further her growth as a skater. It is a word that seems especially appropriate for Liu this season, when organic physical changes have challenged the two-time reigning U.S. women’s figure skating champion.

Four months past her 15th birthday, Liu is some three inches taller, with longer limbs and a different center of mass, than she was at this point a year ago. All that has made it harder for her to spin in the air as quickly as she could.

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Reality check: Audrey Shin is what’s happening in U.S. women’s skating

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Reality check: Audrey Shin is what’s happening in U.S. women’s skating

The first thing Audrey Shin asked her parents in Colorado when they spoke by phone after she skated the short program at Skate America in Las Vegas was, “Did this actually happen?”

The “this” in question was the near flawless, self-assured performance that had put Shin in third place, beginning two days in late October that ended with her as the surprising star of her first senior Grand Prix event. But even her parents’ reassurance that they saw how well their 16-year-old daughter had skated could not assuage all of Shin’s desire to pinch herself.

“It was already on YouTube, so I watched it a few times in a row right after we talked because I was really proud of what I did,” she said in an interview last week. “After a while, it kind of finally sunk in.”

The disconnect between what had happened – and how well Shin would do again in the free skate to win the bronze medal – and what she had envisioned was understandable.

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A taller Alysa Liu also hoping to show growth as a skater

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A taller Alysa Liu also hoping to show growth as a skater

Word on the street is Alysa Liu has grown.

The two-time reigning U.S. figure skating champion said that’s true… to a degree. The two inches of height she added between last season and her 15th birthday in August don’t change Liu’s perspective.

“I just went from really short to very short,” Liu said, wryly, via telephone after a training session last week in San Francisco. “I’m up to 5-0. I like the five-foot number, but it’s still short.”

Anyway, the more important measure will be how much Liu has grown as a skater since her successful 2019-20 debut in international junior competition.

As is the case for all skaters, especially those in North America, such skating growth risks being temporarily stunted by restrictions on training and lack of competition caused by the coronavirus pandemic. And physical growth, even if it is only two inches, can also be problematic.

In Liu’s case, issues related to the pandemic have complicated her sudden shift to a new coaching team in late June, when she announced a split from Laura Lipetsky, who had coached her since age 5. Cancellation of the Junior Grand Prix series is giving Liu more travel-free time to adapt to the new situation, although, ironically, travel restrictions are keeping her from having the two-country, three-coach arrangement work the way it was planned.

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Virus put Grand Prix plans on hold for Orser's international skating stars

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Virus put Grand Prix plans on hold for Orser's international skating stars

Over the past decade, the Toronto club where Brian Orser coached South Korea’s Yuna Kim to the 2010 Olympic title has become such an attraction for top figure skaters from around the globe that it could add a word to a name that already is a mouthful.

You could call it the Toronto International Cricket Skating and Curling Club.

But its reach now is limited by the deadly virus pandemic that has effectively frozen out the elite athletes from Japan, Russia, South Korea and Poland who train at the Cricket Club.

That situation won’t change quickly, even with the International Skating Union having announced Monday its plans to proceed with a live format for the international Grand Prix Series. This fall, it will become a series of six essentially domestic competitions scheduled to begin with Skate America Oct. 23-25 in Las Vegas.

If they take place.

“As soon as the skaters can come back, it will be full steam ahead… to where, we don’t know,” Orser said via telephone Wednesday.

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Death of Mike Moran means Olympic world has lost his inventive mind, institutional memory, moral compass and ability to create trust

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Death of Mike Moran means Olympic world has lost his inventive mind, institutional memory, moral compass and ability to create trust

It was coming up on 1 a.m. on a Sunday in Lillehammer, Norway. The Opening Ceremony of the 1994 Winter Olympics had been over for about six hours, just about long enough for those of us who had covered the ceremony to thaw out.

It was a long day for most of the U.S. media, whose 24/7 focus for a month had been on two figure skaters, one of whom (Tonya Harding) already was implicated in a plot to injure the other (Nancy Kerrigan.) Four hours before the opening ceremony, Kerrigan gave her first press conference of the Games.

It was the last place on earth the media-shy Kerrigan wanted to be: facing more than 1,000 journalists and seemingly as many TV cameras from around the world. Many of us who knew Kerrigan by having covered her for several years were as curious about how she would handle this overwhelming situation as we were about what she might say.

Mike Moran made sure she got through it fine.

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