Wait for It: Stars on Ice shines brighter as show goes on, leaving you wanting more

/
Wait for It: Stars on Ice shines brighter as show goes on, leaving you wanting more

The first half of Sunday’s Stars on Ice show at Allstate Arena in suburban Chicago felt like an interminable rock concert with skating as an incidental accompaniment to music blared at twice the necessary volume.

The decibels didn’t drop much in the second half.  But, despite a difficult two days of travel, the skaters amped themselves up after intermission with programs richer in choreography and polish.  Those performances thankfully dampened the music, putting the skaters at the center of the icy stage and allowing the visual to take the expected precedence over the aural.

By the penultimate star turn, with new world champion Nathan Chen doing “Nemesis,” his competitive short program this season, this was a show that clearly understood the maxim to always leave the audience wanting more.   As Stars finished with the entire cast - 13 U.S. Olympians - combining on “You Will Be Found” from “Dear Evan Hansen,” the two hours of entertainment had become more and more compelling.

Read More

Breathtaking Olympic performances highlighted figure skating season

/
Breathtaking Olympic performances highlighted figure skating season

Some random observations on the competitive figure skating season that ended last week at the World Championships in Milan:

1.  The enduring memory will be of the overall excellence at the 2018 Olympics – the best skating in all four disciplines at the 11 Winter Games I have covered.

The full flowering of the quad revolution led to boggling feats in the men’s event, where Japan’s peerless Yuzuru Hanyu won a second straight Olympic title with a balance between athleticism and art unmatched by any man during the 14-seasons the IJS has been used at global championships.

Russians Alina Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva were flawlessly stunning in taking gold and silver, respectively, in the women’s event, and Canada’s Kaetlyn Osmond won bronze with her huge jumps, expressiveness and sense of choreographic purpose erasing one relatively minor mistake.

Read More

Bouquets, brickbats (and some of both): a 2018 Olympic figure skating scorecard

/
Bouquets, brickbats (and some of both): a 2018 Olympic figure skating scorecard

Lynn Rutherford and I checked in with our winners and losers from the figure skating competition at the recently completed 2018 Olympic Winter Games.

Some of my winners:

Eteri Tutberidze

Although early records are incomplete, the coach of Alina Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva is almost certainly the first person to be by the boards for both the gold and silver medalists in an Olympic singles event.

Skate Canada

The best possible realistic scenario for the Canadians was two gold and two bronze medals, and that is exactly what their skaters won -- and they were on the podium in four of the five events. No other country medaled in more than two.

Read More

Redemptive performance keeps demons at bay for Nathan Chen

/
Redemptive performance keeps demons at bay for Nathan Chen

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - It was the most significant performance to this point in Nathan Chen's competitive skating career.

And Chen's redemptive Olympic free skate Saturday may turn out to be the most significant in his entire career.

"I'm glad I was able to show myself, and everyone else, I can bounce back from a bad performance," Chen said.

To have finished his debut Olympics with nothing to temperhaving done so poorly in the team event and individual short programs would have been a burden Chen couldn't have shaken until 2022 -- if ever.

"These kind of things haunt you," 1992 Olympic silver medalist Paul Wylie said.

Chen, 18, not only exorcised the demons-in-waiting -- he also wound up making Olympic history, winning the free skate by a whopping 8.91-point margin over repeat gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan. His performance moved him from 17th after the short to fifth overall but, more important, allowed him to step into a future that again seems as bright as the one everyone has envisioned for him.

Read More

Quad revolution Chan helped start swept away his medal hopes, but not his legacy

/
Quad revolution Chan helped start swept away his medal hopes, but not his legacy

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - In his 12 years at the senior level of figure skating, Canada's Patrick Chan has been a transformative athlete.

"I am never going to look at Patrick as anything but a three-time world champion who was the first man to do beautiful skating and multiple quads," said four-time world champion and fellow Canadian Kurt Browning. "He was alpha dog for a long time."

What Browning could not include in that encomium is the one thing missing from Chan's much-decorated career: an individual Olympic gold medal. He let it slip from his grasp in 2014, and it seems out of his reach in the men's competition that begins with the short program Friday morning.

When Chan got his first Olympic gold medal Monday, it was for the team event, in which he had two mistake-riddled performances. That could have made it seem a bittersweet prize, but he refused to see it that way.

"At the end of the day, a medal is a medal," Chan insisted. "I'm going to hold this medal tight to me. That's how I am going to see it. That's how I am going to enjoy it."

Read More