With upcoming season in doubt, Jason Brown maintains focus on '22 Olympics

/
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:

Read More

At 14, after consecutive U.S. figure skating titles, Alysa Liu leaves longtime coach

/
At 14, after consecutive U.S. figure skating titles, Alysa Liu leaves longtime coach

Two-time reigning U.S. figure skating champion Alysa Liu has left her longtime coach, Laura Lipetsky, to work with a team including coaches in California and Canada.

Liu, 14, of Richmond, Calif. had been coached by Lipetsky since she began skating at age 5.

Liu is now to train with three-time Italian Olympic ice dancer Massimo Scali, who is based in Oakland, and with Lori Nichol and Lee Barkell, who are based at the Granite Club in Toronto.

“I have really enjoyed working with Alysa for her entire skating career,” Lipetsky said in a text message. “Massimo Scali and her father informed me that I would no longer be working with her. To not add to her distraction and allow her the opportunity to focus on being the best she can be, I prefer not to comment any further.”

Read More

Nathan Chen weighs unknown variables of next figure skating season

/
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.

Read More

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

/
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.

Read More

For many Olympic-related sports bodies in the USA, surviving fiscal impact of pandemic would be like winning a gold

/
For many Olympic-related sports bodies in the USA, surviving fiscal impact of pandemic would be like winning a gold

U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee chief executive Sarah Hirshland sounded the storm warning last week, in a virtual staff meeting as well as a letter and Q-and-A fact sheet to the USOPC’s constituents.

Hirshland did it again Tuesday in an athlete town meeting call that a person who listened to it described as “pretty much the same doom and gloom.”

She told of USOPC budget cuts of 10-to-20 percent that could include staff cuts and already include voluntary salary cuts of 20 percent (Hirshland) and 10 percent (the other eight top executives). And then there was the ominous passage, about the impact on the USOPC if the postponed-until-2021 Tokyo Olympics have to be cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The impact of a cancellation would be devastating to our athletes, first and foremost, but also to our financial health and stability,” said the FAQ sheet, a copy of which was obtained by Globetrotting. “We would survive such a scenario, but the impact would be severe.”

The USOPC can survive because it has an endowment in excess of $200 million it could use in a “`worst-case’ scenario.” That has not yet become the situation, the FAQ said, but it reach that level if Tokyo 2020 does not take place – a possibility evoked by two prominent members of Japan’s medical community in the last 10 days.

Cancellation would create a much more dire situation for the National Governing Bodies that help train and support the athletes who become part of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams. Many would go from weathering the storm to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Read More