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Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are among the veterans to lead Canada's figure skating squad of 17 to Sochi.
Dancing on ice, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir look like they were born to be in each other’s arms.
Whether it’s the romantic grace of their Olympic gold medal-winning program in Vancouver or the sultry drama of last season’s Carmen they make moving as one look effortless.
“That synchronicity is an X-factor for us on the ice,” said Virtue.
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Being so emotionally and physically connected isn’t as easy as they make it look.
“It’s something that we work
really hard at. Anybody who’s been in a partnership for 17 years will tell you it is hard work,” Virtue said.
really hard at. Anybody who’s been in a partnership for 17 years will tell you it is hard work,” Virtue said.
She was a 7-year-old girl from London, Ont., and Moir a 9-year-old boy from nearby Ilderton when they first hooked up as ice dance partners.
Now, heading to Sochi, Russia for their second Olympics, they are 24 and 26, and have had a lifetime worth of experiences together.
“We spend more time with each other than anybody,” Moir said. “We’re business partners, we travel together and from a young age we were each other’s family,” he said.
“It’s a unique relationship. We always understand each other and we have a common goal.”
That goal is an obvious one: another Olympic gold medal.
But, standing in the way are their training partners and rivals, the American duo of Meryl Davis and Charlie White.
Davis and White were runners-up in the 2010 Vancouver Games, but since then, it is the Canadians who have come second in the key competitions.
who have come second in the key competitions.
Virtue and Moir and three-time world champion Patrick Chan are the Olympic veterans who will lead Canada’s squad of 17 skaters into Sochi.
Those spots were earned by the team’s strong performance at the 2013 world championships in London, Ont. No other nation has qualified as many skaters.
The team’s depth, including Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford who captured the pairs bronze in the world championships, sets Canada up to do well in the new Olympic event of team figure skating.
It is contested by the top 10 skating nations and the single medal is awarded on the combined scores of skaters in men’s singles, ladies’ singles, pairs and ice dance.
, ladies’ singles, pairs and ice dance.
Canada’s Kevin Reynolds made history at the 2013 world championships by being the first to land five quads in a single competition. He had two in his short program and three in his free skate.
But this season he has struggled with ill-fitting skate boots and is hoping to be back on form by Sochi.
Liam Firus, who moved to Colorado Springs to train with Chan’s former coach Christy Krall, rounds out the men’s skaters.
Kaetlyn Osmond, 18, is the teenager who came to sudden fame at the 2013 world championships when a spectacular short program had her sitting as high as fourth among Olympic medallists and world champions.
Her 8th place final result, when she was ranked 35th going in, qualified a second Olympic spot for a Canadian woman.
woman.
Gabrielle Daleman earned the right to fill that spot at the national skating championships in January.
The Newmarket, Ont. teen is the youngest Canadian to compete in Sochi.
to compete in Sochi.
In pairs, Canada’s other two teams are Kirsten Moore-Towers and Dylan Moscovitch, and Paige Lawrence and Rudi Swiegers.
In ice dance, Canadian’s Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje, and Alexandra Paula and Mitchell Islam, will also compete in Sochi’s Iceberg Skating Palace
Sochi 2014: Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir skate around retirement talk
Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje close second after ice dance short program at Canadian championships.
KANATA, ONT.—We’re undoubtedly approaching the end pages of The Scott & Tessa Diaries.
The book that goes along with the reality show now running on TV.
Barring an unlikely change of mind — change of heart — the defending Olympic ice dance champions will twizzle off into the sunset after Sochi.
And these are probably their last Canadian figure skating championships .
“Good question,” says Scott Moir, when that question was posed following the ice dance short program competition Friday afternoon. Then he, um, skated around it.
Tessa Virtue was a shade less coy. “We haven’t really made any official decision yet, but we’re trying to treat it as if it is. Trying to take some moments in practice and soak it in.”
The long-time on-ice couple — never off-ice couple — were not exactly soaking in the moment at the conclusion of their Ella Fitzgerald-Louis Armstrong routine here, however, despite earning a plump score of 76.16.
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Not fat enough, apparently, and less than four points clear of friendly rivals — and hotly pursuing Canadian compatriots — Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje, at 72.68.
On their way out the door, the duo want the best of everything, for themselves and for their fans.
“We want to go out and bring the house down,” says Moir. “Anything short of that, we get disappointed.”
They were short of that on this day, annoyed by a couple of brief technical wobbles that would never be noticed by the unpracticed eye and even deducted one point for an overhead lift that went beyond the six-second time limit.
The overall irritation showed on their faces in the Kiss ’n’ Cry.
“We’ve been training and practising kind of lights-out,” said Moir. “Tessa and I, we’re really perfectionists and it kind of felt today like we just weren’t skating the way we’ve been training. That’s probably the emotion you saw in our faces.”
With most of the attention focused on Sochi five weeks hence , these 100th anniversary nationals feel a bit like an afterthought — or a pre-thought, rather, because Canada’s team will be selected off this weekend’s results.
But the event clearly means a great deal to Virtue and Moir, who are undeniably Canada’s skating sweethearts, if not — drat — sweethearts to each other.
“This event has been downplayed,” agrees Moir. “But we have great competition in Kaitlyn and Andrew, who’ve been pushing us all year. There’s a lot of pressure. We want to compete well for our Canadians fans.
“It’s great practice for Sochi but we didn’t perform under that pressure as much as we’d like to.”
Moir added: “On a short program, you’ve got to be tight and you’ve got to make sure that you get all your points. We left some on the board today.”
They won’t be able to get away with that at the Olympics, not neck-and-neck as they’ve been this season with forever-rivals and training stablemates Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who took gold over the Canadians’ silver at the Grand Prix final last month.
Those who’ve been watching their reality TV series — Tessa & Scott — on the W Network, which began a week ago and will run until the Olympics, will have gained some insight into the true nature of that acutely competitive relationship between Americans and Canadians, who also share a coach/choreographer in Marina Zoueva. It’s not as air-kiss-air-kiss cozy as all four claim.
Intriguingly, Moir and Virtue aren’t watching the show.
“No, not until after,” says Moir.
After meaning after the Olympics, after they hang ’em up as competitive athletes and probably hit the ice show circuit. At that point, they can sit down for a Tessa & Scott marathon.
“It’s just too much us ,” Moir announces, and he’s not kidding.
This program is a kind of time capsule, to hang on to the moments of this season as they occur. Because, as both skaters note, they have trouble resurrecting those precious moments from four years ago in Vancouver, which went by in a blur. Now, they want to can the experience for later replay.
But what viewers are seeing now in the program was filmed months ago — either too long ago or not long enough to have much significance for the duo.
“We’ve sort of lived it already,” says Virtue. “We don’t want to go back and feel the things that we were feeling in August and in September, especially just a few weeks short of the Olympics. We’re in such a good place now. I think we needed to go through that fall to get her, but it’s better for us to just block everything out.”
Similarly, Canada’s second ice dance team has had to “block out” the blinding shimmer of the Olympic champions in whose shadows they’ve skated for years.
Yet Weaver and Poje are starting to emerge from that shadow, drawing ever closer to the ice dancers they idolize.
Their short dance number, 42nd Street, is a lively, frothy, up-tempo routine — a sharp contrast to the actual season this hard-luck couple experienced a year ago, almost completely lost to injury because of Weaver’s broken fibula. They rebounded marvelously to finish fifth at worlds with barely a month to prepare, after watching nationals from the wings. This was the same team, of course, that just barely missed out on qualifying for the 2010 Olympics. (Canada will send three dance teams to Sochi.)
“It was a season-best performance, and also (SB) score,” enthused Weaver of their short program effort, which left they just behind the Olympic champions and five points up on Alexandra Paul and Mitchell Islam. “It felt like a season’s best. And that’s exactly where we need to be right now.”
The song, “42nd Street,” from an old-time musical and older movie — about a Broadway understudy getting her big break when the show’s star can’t go on — got into Weaver’s head last winter, as strove recover from the broken underpinning.
“Just about this time last season, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to come back for the end of the year,” she recalls. “The surgeon said, absolutely not. Not many people had faith that I would. So I started looking for music and I found “42nd Street.” I remembered it from when I was a little girl because I loved watching the movie.
“I watched the movie again and again and again, listened to the music over and over and over, to the point where Andrew and my parents were, like, again , aren’t you sick of it? But it just makes you feel good. It’s a story that talks about the underdog and how, if you believe, then anything can happen.
“That outlook has helped us throughout this whole year and we are always reminded of that when we skate this program.”
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