Bradie Tennell moving forward in fresh start, aiming for triple Axel

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Bradie Tennell moving forward in fresh start, aiming for triple Axel

Bradie Tennell was frustrated.

Three years after she had gone from “who?” to “wow!,” jumping from ninth to first at the U.S. Championships in just one season and then becoming the highest U.S. finisher at both the 2018 Olympics and world championships, Tennell felt as if she were spinning her wheels.

It wasn’t as if the figure skater from north suburban Chicago no longer was getting solid results. Last season, despite a foot injury in late summer, she became the first U.S. woman to qualify for the Grand Prix Final since 2015 and the first to win a Four Continents Championship medal (bronze) since 2017. She also completed a full set of medals at nationals, adding 2020 bronze to her 2018 gold and 2019 silver.

“But I was getting older, and I didn’t feel I was reaching my goals fast enough, and I wasn’t progressing fast enough,” Tennell said.

Tennell was increasingly annoyed by her failure to get traction on her goal of adding another spin to one jump, the Axel. She wanted to master the triple Axel, a jump that is turning into something of a litmus test for elite women the way it did for elite men in the 1980s.

It reached the point where, at age 22, she would explain the frustration during a recent phone interview with a paraphrase of a quote about insanity attributed to Albert Einstein.

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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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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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