Elvis Stojko remembers watching Brian Orser spin by the air with a triple axel on his TV display, inspiring him to at some point observe the trail carved out by the Canadian determine skating legend.
“It was a really amazing time for us,” Stojko mentioned. “We had so many great idols and great heroes to look up to.”
Orser stacked {hardware} with two Olympic silver medals, a world championship and eight straight nationwide titles within the Eighties. Next got here Kurt Browning, who strutted his solution to 4 world championships.
Stojko carried on the mantle of Canadian success, successful 10 nationwide championships, three world titles and two Olympic silver medals within the Nineteen Nineties.
“I was very, very lucky in the ’90s to have that chance to skate during the — I guess they were considering it a golden era of skating,” Stojko mentioned.
But Canada’s males now not rule the ice, or prime the rostrum.
No Canadian has received a males’s world or Olympic medal since Patrick Chan claimed silver on the 2014 Games, and that drought isn’t anticipated to finish any time quickly.
Rather than a roster of contenders, Canada is sending just one males’s participant to subsequent yr’s worlds after nationwide champion Wesley Chiu and Roman Sadovsky completed seventeenth and nineteenth final March in Montreal.
At Skate Canada International final weekend in Halifax, prime Canadian Aleksa Rakic confirmed promise however nonetheless completed seventh within the 12-skater Grand Prix occasion that featured solely a pattern of the world contenders.
The Figure Skating Show | Skate Canada International recap:
The greatest skaters on the earth descended on Halifax for Skate Canada International, and Canadian skaters captured 3 medals within the 2nd Grand Prix cease of the season. Asher Hill & Brenda Irving are right here to offer evaluation, scorching takes and naturally some piping scorching tea on this episode of ‘That Figure Skating Show’.
“I just hope they can figure out a way to bring it back, but it will be a tough climb,” Stojko mentioned.
Stojko believes one main downside is that younger athletes can’t discover determine skating on TV and be impressed like he was to take up the game.
“It’s not as accessible. You have to kind of search for it,” he mentioned. “I watched the Battle of the Brians in 1988 [when Orser and American Brian Boitano duked it out for Olympic gold] — that was a massive thing.”
Chan is one more Canadian skater who reached the highest of the skate world, successful three world championships from 2011 to 2013 along with his mixture of artistry and athleticism. He was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame final week.
The bar has been raised
The 33-year-old says the game has modified drastically since he retired in 2018 due to a brand new era pushing the boundaries “at a rate that I’ve never seen before.”
“The bar has been raised by the likes of Ilia Malinin so high that it’s almost like anything below him is noise,” Chan mentioned. “Elvis Stojko, Kurt and Alexei Yagudin — these are like my idols — even they might be like center of the pack on this present period.
“If I was starting as a junior skater right now and I was watching the field ahead of me, I’d be like, `maybe I should start looking at a different sport,’ because it’s just so crazy.”
Malinin is the one man to have landed a quad axel in competitors. The 19-year-old American landed six quads in a record-breaking free skate at worlds, and dominated the sector this previous weekend at Skate Canada.
As for the way younger Canadian skaters can get into the race, Chan doesn’t have the solutions and expects it may take one other 5 or 10 years earlier than that modifications.
He says constructing from the grassroots, bringing again alumni for steering and having a constant nationwide champion who builds momentum are all issues that assist.
But he additionally wonders if Canada ought to stop making an attempt to chase Malinin’s unreachable heights, and as a substitute attempt to win at a special recreation.
“It’s like X-Games-style, fireworks, but it’s starting to all look the same,” he mentioned. “We’ve misplaced contact a bit with the artwork of skating.
“My tip to Wesley [Chiu] is spend more time working with a modern dance teacher, a ballet teacher. I took improv class at one point. I worked with a mime — going above and beyond doing weights in the gym or quad after quad on the ice.”
Sadovsky, a veteran of the Canadian crew at solely 25, isn’t certain what must occur for Canada to get again on prime both.
“If I had an easy answer that one, I think we would be winning all the competitions,” he mentioned.
“It’s kind of an aspect with the high risk, high reward factor of quads in men’s figure skating, and I think we’re trying to play that game,” he added. “I still think we have very strong skaters.”
Canadian coach Lee Barkell remembers that Canada went 10 years with out successful a males’s world title between Stojko in 1997 and Jeffrey Buttle in 2008 (though each received silver in that stretch).
“When the champion steps down, everybody panics and it does take a few years to rebuild,” he mentioned. “Those talented skaters coming up, they’ve got to continue to push each other. Eventually somebody is going to rise to the top.”
Skate Canada high-performance director Mike Slipchuk seconds that opinion and stays optimistic about the way forward for males’s skating.
“It’s a young team, and we just feel they just need that time,” he mentioned. “With a year and a half out of Olympics, we’re just going to utilize that to get them as many opportunities, to get out internationally to be competitive with the top guys.”
