International Figure Skating March/April 2017

The World Championships are now just a few weeks away. With berths at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games on the line in Helsinki, I expect this competition to be a fierce battle in all disciplines. No one wants to stay home next February and watch the Games on television so earning the highest placement possible will be a top priority for all skaters who compete at Worlds. The World Junior Championships, one of my favorite competitions of the season, will take place in Chinese Taipei in mid- March. Many of these young skaters will be moving up the senior ranks fulltime later this year, and some potentially will be challenging for a berth on their nation’s Olympic teams. We thought it was the perfect time to profile some of the…

When Ekaterina Alexandrovskaya and Harley Windsor first met at a try-out in Moscow, Russia on Dec. 4, 2015, they could not have imagined that a little more than 12 months later they would be competing against the top pairs teams in the world at the Junior Grand Prix Final in Marseille, France. Separated by culture, language and a distance of over 14,000 km., Alexandrovskaya, who is Russian, and Windsor, an Australian, were teamed up by his coach, Andrei Pachin, through his connection with Nina Mozer. She initially suggested three potential partners for Windsor, but Alexandrovskaya was the only one to try out with him. Windsor competed as a singles skater at domestic events in Australia, and had no previous pairs experience before he teamed up with Alexandrovskaya. He said his…

It has been a season of top finishes in the junior ranks for Rachel Parsons and Michael Parsons. The siblings have danced to the top of the podium at every event they have contested this season, including the Junior Grand Prix Final in December. In January, the brother-sister duo followed that up by winning their first U.S. title in Kansas City, Mo., overtaking their training mates Lorraine McNamara and Quinn Carpenter, the 2016 World Junior champions, for the first time in their career. The past few seasons we’ve been nipping at their heels and kind of skating in their shadow,” said Rachel, 19. “At Junior Worlds last year, we beat them in the short dance, but fell back after the free. At the Final this season, we ended up ahead…

Every year Russia produces a new figure skating wunderkind who ends up dominating the junior ladies circuit. This year it is Alina Zagitova, a 14-year-old who trains in Moscow alongside 2016 World champion Evgenia Medvedeva. Zagitova debuted on the Junior Grand Prix circuit in 2016, opening her season with a win at her first event in France. “After that there were a lot of expectations for me but I was a bit too nervous at my second event and I finished third. Nevertheless, I made the Junior Grand Prix Final, which is very honorable,” said Zagitova, who won the event in December. “I knew if I skated both programs clean I could win, because as Eteri (Tutberidze, her coach) said, only girls with a triple Axel can overtake me. I…

An unfamiliar face with a very familiar name made her debut at the 2017 U.S Junior Championships in January. Elizaveta Kulik, daughter of two-time Olympic pairs champion Ekaterina Gordeeva and Ilia Kulik, the 1998 Olympic men’s champion, finished in eighth place in Kansas City, Missouri. Though she was hoping for a top six finish, the 15-year-old said, “it’s OK because it was my first time. My short program was a bit disappointing. In practice I was basically perfect, but I guess I just got nervous. The long program was alright — I was pretty proud of what I accomplished in the long run.” Blessed with her father’s smile and Gordeeva’s grace, Kulik, began skating at age 3. At the time, she tagged along with her parents who worked as coaches,…

Four of the six reigning champions who arrived in Ostrava, Czech Republic, to contest the 2017 European Championships retained their titles, with a new team crowned in the pairs discipline — universally applauded as the standout event of this competition. In total, 166 skaters from 33 International Skating Union member nations competed in Ostrava. Only one man in the modern era had ever claimed five consecutive European crowns — Ondrej Nepela, who achieved that feat some 44 years ago, winning his final title in 1973. Javier Fernández entered the 2017 campaign knowing that equaling that record was within his grasp, and seemed determined from the outset to write his own piece of Europeans history. The 25-year-old Madrid native captured the lead with a short program that included two quads —…