Amidst his eighth Canadian title, Patrick Chan will lead an influx of home grown talent

HALIFAX - The power-jumping, deft-footed Patrick Chan will lead a team of two men, two women, three ice-dancing and three pair teams to the world championships in March in Boston.

Even so, winning a medal isn’t part of his plan, although pairs and dance teams have potential to take gold. “I don’t even want to talk about medals and winning again,” said the three-time world champion, who is still just trying to find his feet after taking off last season from competition.

He won’t make quads his priority, especially if they disrupt the quality of the skating for which he is known. He definitely will never do four quads in a program. “It’s impossible,” he said. And even if he set aside all the transitions he likes to do between elements, and just focuses on a slam-dunk quad show, “it just doesn’t feel good,” he said yesterday after winning his eighth Canadian title. “I’ll feel like I’m cheaping out.”

He’s talked with coach Kathy Johnson about adding a second quad to his short program and a third to his long – but not quite yet. And he’d do it only if they did not sacrifice the quality of his skating. He’s a skating purist.

Until this week, Chan hadn’t been able to find his rhythm so far this season, but at the Canadian skating championship, he silenced some doubters, landed two quads in the free skate for the first time this year, and pulled big marks: 103.58 for the short program, 192.09 for the free and a final mark of 295.67. Because these are domestic scores, they cannot be compared to points gained in front of international judges.

Scores are important to Chan this year only as a gauge to tell him where his comeback development is going. His next goal is to successfully land a second triple Axel in the fee skate. He figures, if he does everything he intends to do in his routine, it could bring him 320 points, which is edging closer to Yuzuru Hanyu’s world record of  330.43 points set in December.

Firstly, Chan will return home to Detroit to give his achy ankle and glute muscles time to recuperate. He wrenched an ankle industriously trying quad Salchows after the Grand Prix Final. Now he’s setting that jump aside for next year.

For the past two weeks, his gluteus maximus muscles – the powerful butt muscles that move the hips in any direction – have felt uncomfortable, from all the work he’s done to hone his triple Axel technique.

Skate Canada high-performance director Michael Slipchuk said Chan will now lead – and take all the heat from - a burgeoning group of young male Canadian skaters, including defending champion Nam Nguyen, who finished fourth this week, thereby missing the world team. Nguyen fell on both of his quads in the free program on Saturday.

Ironically, three of the youngest promising male skaters are taller than Chan, Slipshuk said, which seems to a world-wide trend. Nicolas Nadeau, 17, who finished fifth, is a six-footer who does quads; Nguyen, 17, is 5-foot-10, and Roman Sadovsky, 16, is close to it.

Stephen Gogolev, 11, the novice champion this week, stands 4-foot-9 and does quads, too, although not yet in competition. “You have to say he did one of the best triple Axels in the whole week,” Slipchuk said. “He’s met our benchmark [scores] for junior [internationally], but he’s not old enough to go yet.”

In general, Canada will field a powerful team to the next two international championships in all disciplines now: Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford are reigning world pair champions, Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje are Grand Prix Final champions, and this week new Canadian champion Alaine Chartrand and past champ Gabby Daleman have posted scores that could make them competitive among the top 10 at the world level, Slipshuk said.

The strength and depth in all disciplines bodes well for the new team event at the 2018 Olympics. Slipchuk says he’s been monitoring world teams and he likes where Canada is sitting.

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