The Gift of Amnesia

It takes many skills to succeed as a figure skater. Physical ability is certainly key, as is musicality, charisma, and the ironclad confidence to trust 4.8mm blades with your life. But a skill we don’t often talk about might be the most important of all: selective amnesia. A figure skater who can blank out a botched element or bad performance, then move on to skate well, has a genuine superpower. In the wake of the Pairs short program today, we’re about to find out who has that power.

The Pairs event was mostly cause for celebration up until the last six skaters. The competition opened with Karina Akopova and Nikita Rakhmanin skating a squeaky clean homage to Alexander Abt, scoring positive GOE on every element in their Olympic debut. Newly-appointed Polish Plush Pierogi Ambassadors Ioulia Chtchetinina and Michal Wozniak were surprised and delighted to qualify for the free skate with a sturdy skate of their own. Team after team stood up to the Olympic pressure, and even those who faltered, like Wenjing Sui and Cong Han, could still be proud of their fight. By the time Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud dropped in with a gorgeous program set to a Jessie Ware track, I was prepared to haul myself back to church. Surely God was real if this many teams were landing their tricks.

I have a sticker on my coffee mug that says “I Am God’s Fool” and I took a long gulp of black water from that mug after Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps left the ice. This team is carrying the weight of a nation desperate for a gold and a training injury that took them out of the team event. Despite that weight, they were almost clear with decent jumps and a solid throw. But when Deanna fell off the landing of an otherwise beautiful lift, the team’s standing dropped with her. By the end of the event they found themselves in 14th place. They qualified to the free skate, but a full three flights earlier than former World Champions normally appear. Meanwhile, Akopova and Rakhmanin, our first team of the night, qualified in 12th place. They’ve never even been to Worlds.

Deanna and Maxime’s error was a painful demonstration of just how costly a fall can be. Not only did they suffer the mandatory 1 point deduction for the fall they also lost GOE points. Since it’s hard to sell a program when you’re scraping yourself off the ice, their PCS dropped, too. While the official scoring guidance limits PCS to a maximum of 9.5 in any category, it’s often judged quite generously depending on the skater’s reputation. Deanna and Maxime got no such gifts. A sub-8 presentation score is a severe downgrade for a pair of their calibre, but the 7.93 on their protocol is a black eye. This was a warning shot to the rest of the field: keep your skates on the ice.

Unfortunately, the Spirit of Menning entered the rink at this point and gave most of the remaining teams the shakes. An rare error on a throw triple flip tripped up Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava, who you can usually count on for technical competence if not emotional connection. They were satisfied to see their performance hold up for second place, not that anyone else was. How a team with lift footwork so poor it would give the ghost of Sergei Grinkov fits finished ahead of a sublime Lia and Trennt annoyed me, Sandra Bezic, and most of the figure skating community.

Adding to all this psychic damage was the no good very rotten day out for Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara. They are defending World Champions, heavily favoured for gold, and currently sitting in 5th place. If you felt a shiver around 1:45pm PST today that was everyone watching the livestream gasp as Riku and Ryuichi completely misfired a lift, leaving Riku spinning limply overhead before wanly descending like a leaky balloon. Coach Bruno Marcotte comforted a deeply upset Ryuichi by insisting, “It’s not over!”

Bruno Marcotte is a wise coach: it’s not over! But a lot of pair teams who entered this competition with medal ambitions have a great deal of work ahead of them for the free skate.

Unlike the Ice Dance and Men’s competitions, there is only an overnight turnaround between the Pairs short program and the free skate, which isn’t much time to exorcise the demons from your mind. The team sitting most comfortably heading into that free skate is Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin, who skated brilliantly today but not perfectly. They now carry twice the pressure: event leadership and the hopes of winning the first German gold medal in pairs since Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot in 2018. Incidentally, Bruno Massot also had a disastrous moment in the short program in 2018. He doubled his side by side jump, leaving the team in 4th place after the short program and earning him a horrified reaction from Aljona (who would march into hell herself if it meant getting a gold medal). He managed to reset in the 24 hours between short and long programs and skated one of the all-time great pair free skates.

Bruno is in Milan for the Olympics, now happily coaching the French pair of Kovalev and Kovalev. If I were one of today’s wonky pair teams, I think now would be a good time to buy Mr. Massot his beverage of choice and ask him the secret to his success.