Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 i International Figure Skating

The 2022-2023 campaign is now in full swing and if the early competitions are anything to go by, this season is shaping up as one that will be full of surprises. At every stop on the Junior Grand Prix Series, talented young stars emerged, and every competition was a hard-fought battle. If you missed that Series, we have short recaps of each of the six events, along with photos of the skaters you will see at the Junior Grand Prix Final. The senior Grand Prix Series is now underway. Unfortunately, due to the late publication by U.S. and Canadian networks of the respective television and online schedules, our Media Guide listings for the Series begin with the third event in France. As I noted last issue, there will be a…

Canadian ice dancers are enjoying a successful start to the season at both the senior and junior levels. Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha got the ball rolling at the senior level with a win at Nepela Memorial in Bratislava, Slovakia in late September. The duo won the rhythm dance by a 3.48-point margin but sailed away in the free dance, closing out the competition with a personal best combined score of 193.35, which gave them a 14.66-point cushion over Eva Pate and Logan Bye of the U.S. who finished second. It was the first senior international victory for the 2019 World Junior ice dance champions, but neither was celebrating. “It was O.K. for a first skate despite a little mistake,” said Lagha, 23. “We don’t want to make mistakes anymore.”…

The host countries for the 2022 Junior Grand Prix Series saw big numbers in singles and ice dance this season, with more than 370 athletes from 50 International Skating Union (ISU) member nations contesting the six events. The Series was reduced from seven competitions to six following the cancelation of the competition in Yerevan, Armenia, due to a border conflict. Entry numbers for each nation for the six events were determined by the results of the 2022 World Junior Championships. With all the top competitors from last season having moved into the senior ranks or retired — new champions were crowned in every discipline at every competition. Japan and South Korea were dominant throughout the Series, but there were also some surprise medalists from other nations, with several writing their…

Reigning U.S. champion Mariah Bell announced her retirement in an Instagram post on Oct. 12. The 26-year-old, who finished 10th at the 2022 Winter Games — her first Olympic appearance — capped off the 2021-2022 season with a fourth-place finish at the World Championships in France. In late spring, after living and training in California for almost six years, she packed up her apartment and moved to North Richland Hills, Texas, where her sister Morgan Bell coaches at the NYTEX Sports Centre. Bell is also now a resident coach at the venue. Last January, in her ninth appearance at nationals, Bell made history as the oldest women’s champion in 95 years. “This journey was hard, and I didn’t always like it, but I did always love it,” Bell wrote in…

For much of her life, her journey had a defined direction. With dreams of becoming a figure skating champion ever dancing in her head, Kaetlyn Osmond knew precisely what she needed to do to achieve the goals she had set for herself. In the final two seasons of her career, that singleminded laser focus paid off with a silver medal at the 2017 World Championships, and Olympic bronze and a World title in 2018 — the first global crown for a Canadian woman in more than four decades. And then suddenly, everything changed when Osmond closed the door on it all in 2019, calling it a career at age 23. The purpose that had been the guiding force in her life was gone and with it, much of the identity…

When Jeremy Abbott left the competitive world in 2017, the four-time U.S. champion had no idea what his future held, but from the outset it has been an exciting adventure with many different opportunities and many unexpected twists and turns along the way. Inspired to take up skating as a 4-year-old after watching Robin Cousins compete, Jeremy Abbott moved from his hometown of Aspen, Colorado in 1999 at age 14 to train at the World Arena in Colorado Springs. Six years later, when Abbott won the 2005 U.S. junior title, no one was more surprised than him. Following his victory, the then 19-year-old commented that “stranger things could happen; pigs could fly,” and from that point on he adopted a pig with wings as his mascot. The next three years…

GRAND PRIX FINAL JUNIOR/SENIOR Torino, Italy December 8-11, 2022 INNER Loop Team Japan, led by reigning World champions Shoma Uno and Kaori Sakamoto, scored a runaway victory at the 2022 Japan Open, which took place Oct. 8 in Tokyo with a combined total of 623.84 points. Team North America finished in second place with a score of 577.27 and Team Europe placed third with 512.49 points. Following the competition, all the skaters, along with special guest artists, performed in the “Carnival on Ice.” shows.…

The first six stages of the 2022 Challenger Series produced some interesting results in the ice dance discipline. One of the standout teams so far this season has been Great Britain’s Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson who train at the I.AM Academy in Montréal. The duo has been rising steadily through the ice dance ranks the past two years, finishing 10th at the 2022 Olympic Winter Games and sixth at the subsequent World Championships. But this season, it is a whole new ballgame for this team whose goal is to be the best in the world. Fear and Gibson opened their campaign on home soil at the inaugural Brittania Cup in late August, claiming the title in a runaway victory. At their first Challenger Series event, the U.S. International Figure…

Loena Hendrickx wrote a new chapter in skating history for her country last March with her silvermedal finish at the 2022 World Championships in Montpellier, France. She is the first singles skater from Belgium to ever win a global medal and the only person from her nation to land on a World podium since Micheline Lannoy and Pierre Baugniet captured the World pairs title in Davos, Switzerland in 1948. The 2021-2022 campaign was one Loena Hendrickx will likely always remember as her breakout season. Aside from capturing a silver medal at the World Championships, she finished fourth at Europeans and eighth at the Olympic Winter Games — her best results at all three competitions. Many wondered if Hendrickx would return for another season, but the Belgium native had no intention…