Another Medvedeva stunner: pandemic sends her back to old coach after bitter split led her to Orser, who says her departure was amicable

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Another Medvedeva stunner: pandemic sends her back to old coach after bitter split led her to Orser, who says her departure was amicable

During the Russian Figure Skating test event last weekend, when Brian Orser and Yevgenia Medvedeva were bridging the 5,000-mile span between him in Toronto and her in Moscow via video chat, they laughed about how different the atmosphere seemed than it had been at the same event two years earlier.

Orser would tell me Wednesday morning he had no idea during those weekend conversations that the bridge linking them was on the verge of collapse under the weight of separation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A few hours before Orser called me, what Medvedeva had told him Tuesday became public: she was making the stunning move of returning to her previous and longtime coach, Moscow-based Eteri Tutberidze, whom she had left in an acrimonious split three months after the 2018 Olympics.

“She (Medvedeva) and I agree if there was no pandemic, we would not be having this discussion right now,” Orser said.

So, there was a bittersweet irony in Orser’s recollection of his earlier conversations with Medvedeva, 2016 and 2017 world champion and 2018 Olympic silver medalist.

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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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Virtual figure skating competition offers glimpse of sport’s possible future

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Virtual figure skating competition offers glimpse of sport’s possible future

It was early April. The 2020 World Figure Skating Championships had been canceled by Covid-19, abruptly ending last season. Rinks were closing down for health reasons. Some entire countries were on lockdown.

Anyone who has been around figure skating as long as Gale Tanger could see even then how difficult it would be to have any competitions the rest of 2020 if they required travel by athletes or officials, whether the events were international, national, regional or local.

Tanger, an international judge for 32 years, began looking for an alternative to give elite U.S. skaters left unmoored by the pandemic’s impact at least something that could feel like a competition, something to anchor a goal in the early part of the 2020-21 season.

So the Peggy Fleming Trophy became the first virtual event in the sport’s history.

“It worked!!!!!!!” an excited Tanger said in an email late Tuesday, after the judging of the competition was completed. “What an incredible leap for our sport. Obstacles have been removed, and a new highway has been paved.”

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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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Latest news on figure skating scoring changes? I stumbled upon that needle in the haystack

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Latest news on figure skating scoring changes? I stumbled upon that needle in the haystack

The International Skating Union sure doesn’t make it easy.

In mid-May, it published two communications about significant changes to the scale of values and grades of execution used to score and judge singles and pairs skating. There was no email alerting media to the changes. I learned of them from a figure skating official who had received the communications.

In mid-June, with the Covid-19 pandemic having put the viability of the 2020-21 season in serious doubt, the ISU said it was suspending the changes published in May. Once again, there was no media notification of the decision.

Only because ISU vice-president Alexander Lakernik of Russia had told me last month that there would be further news about the suspended changes this week, I went to the ISU web site Friday morning to look.

There was nothing under the “Latest News” rubric at the top of the web site (see photo above.) And nothing on the entire front page of the web site. But, just for the heck of it, I clicked on the “Communications” link near the very bottom of the front page.

And discovered that a communication about the changes to the changes had been published two days earlier.

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