International Figure Skating June 2022

Back in the fall of 2021, it was uncertain whether the Olympic season would go ahead as planned — and if it did, how would it play out? Ultimately, it was better than probably any of us could have imagined, with all the competitions taking place as scheduled and so many of them contested at the highest level. The World Championships in Montpellier, France, was one of those competitions. That was, in part, due to the non-attendance of skaters from a particular country. Without their presence and the endless quads and triple Axels in the women’s event, skating returned to its pure form, something many of us reveled in as we watched many amazing performances. I also found it refreshing to finally have a competition that had no predictable winners…

ALYSA LIU Her catchphrase could be “I did it all.” Though Alysa Liu never won any major titles, she crammed a lot into the two seasons she competed on the international stages. Liu first came to the world’s attention as a 13-year-old when she won the 2019 U.S. national title, making history in that nation as the first female to land three triple Axels at one competition and the youngest American ladies’ champion. Liu made her international debut in the junior ranks in the 2019-2020 season. At her first competition in the summer of 2019 — a Junior Grand Prix event in Lake Placid, New York — she again made history as the first female skater to land a quad jump (Lutz) and a triple Axel in the same program.…

The 2021-2022 season was like a farewell tour for American ice dancers Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue. While most skaters choose to announce their retirement at the end of a season, Hubbell and Donohue made it known in the fall of 2021 that they were calling an end to their 11-year partnership, and that the 2022 World Championships would be their final hurrah. At every competition — from the first to the last — they focused on being in the moment, savoring every experience one last time. The World Championships in Montpellier, France, completed the circle for the three-time U.S. champions, who made their global debut a decade earlier in the southern French city of Nice. In a series of interviews and media scrums in Montpellier, Hubbell and Donohue, both…

IT WAS A MOMENT about a year in the making, the very thing that Vanessa James and Eric Radford had been striving to achieve ever since forming their unlikely partnership. Everything they had done in this fastpaced journey — since that audacious thought of returning to competition became reality in March 2021 — led the team to an emotional free skate at the 2022 World Championships in Montpellier, France. It was the performance they had been searching for all along, and it finally happened at the last event of the season. It was also a performance that elevated James and Radford to a bronze medal finish in the pairs event, Canada’s only medalists at the Championships. They could not have asked for a better way to finish the campaign. “We…

There were so many feelings. It was my first time putting everything together at an event. It was a call he hardly expected to receive, but it may end up being the conversation that changes the trajectory of Camden Pulkinen’s figure skating career in a major way. In the wake of a fifthplace finish at his country’s national championships in January, the 22-year-old was listed as the second men’s alternate for the American team headed to the 2022 World Championships in Montpellier, France. As such, Pulkinen dutifully kept up training his programs at his home base in Colorado Springs, just in case his services were needed — even if, in Pulkinen’s mind, it seemed like the longest of shots. The United States had sent a formidable trio of men to…

With the people responsible for all the turmoil and drama at the 2022 Olympic Winter Games not in attendance at the World Championships in Montpellier, the women’s competition had a refreshing aura surrounding it. For the first time in years, quads and triple Axels did not dictate the conversation, but rather it was the quality of performances laid down by many of the competitors that made for an exciting event from start to finish. A field of 33 took to the ice for the women’s short program. Skating third in the final flight, Kaori Sakamoto of Japan whipped through her routine, set to “Now We Are Free” from the “Gladiator” soundtrack, with impressive speed, reeling off a double Axel, triple Lutz, and a triple flip-triple toe combination. She racked up…