Patrick Chan of Toronto has added the quad to his figure-skating repertoire.
JONATHAN HAYWARD/THE CANADIAN PRESS
MOSCOW—One of the happiest guys to see Patrick Chan convert to the quad squad this season may be nemesis Brian Joubert.
Chan blasted Joubert at the world championships two years ago for whinging that figure skating was being ruined because skaters weren’t pushing the envelope by doing quads. Joubert was particularly irked when he was beat out for the 2008 world title by Canadian Jeff Buttle, who didn’t have a quad but had superior artistry.
Well, Chan has added the quad to his repertoire in a big way after previously saying you didn’t need it to win — one is planned in the short program Wednesday and two in the long program Thursday — and his jumps are explosive and high.
“To see Patrick Chan try two quads and to land it, it’s good,” said Joubert. “It’s good for the rest of the skaters. It’s good for the judges. If nobody does it, the rest of the skaters will try just triple jumps. In sport, you have to take risks. Of course, some skaters won the Olympics or world title without quad. They skated very well. But I was disappointed because they didn’t take risk.”
Joubert said he checked out how the other half lives by leaving the quad out of his program at the French championships this year.
“Mentally, it’s very easy,” he said. “Physically also. You just have to be focused on triple Axel. When you do a quad in the free program, it’s very difficult, it changes everything, you lose a lot of energy on the jump. If you try a quad in the short program, it’s more difficult.”
Joubert thinks the 20-year-old Chan has the potential to be a great world champion.
“Yes, but he’s not the only one,” he said. “There’s the Japanese. They are very, very good also. But he can be two or three (times world champion) and maybe Olympic champion.”
Kaitlyn Weaver
and Andrew Poje won the preliminary round in ice dance Tuesday — the top ranked couples are exempt — but the Canadian ice dancers might have made their biggest impression with a sign Weaver made for the championships.
It said ‘Prayers for Japan’ in English on one side and ‘Thank you, Russia’ on the other in Cyrillic.
It turns out Weaver, who’s from Toronto, learned to speak and write Russian over her years of working with many Russian coaches.
“It was such an amazing feat for them to take the championships and with the time constraint pull off a great event,” Weaver said of Russian organizers. “I thought it would be a great gesture.”
Her language skills helped out when they were at Red Square with Patrick Chan and had to negotiate the complex subway system to get back to the hotel.
“I was thankful that I’ve been studying it. It came in handy.”
Amélie Lacoste of Montreal came fifth in the women’s preliminary to advance to the short program Friday.
Clara Peters’
first pair of skates were four sizes too big, the skating rink she started out on often turned into a pool, but her love of skating keeps Ireland great ice hope going.
“The ice was atrocious,” she said of the rink in Dublin where she first trained. “It would melt in the summer and there’d been an inch of water. But it was an ice rink and to us it was the best thing in the world.”
Peters was 21st in qualifying and failed to advance.