California dreamin' with Hetty Shi

The rising Canadian talent believes a move south of the border will be just the ticket to her first national senior women's title. And a whole lot more in the seasons to come.

Fresh off a bronze-medal finish in her senior debut at the Canadian Championships, Hetty Shi now has her sights set on a national title (All photos by Tina Weltz).

Sometimes, when you know, you just know. And rising Canadian skater Hetty Shi is pretty sure she knows why she had to take her biggest dreams and aspirations in the sport south of the border to unlock her fullest potential.

Understand this is a 15-year-old who has already had a mighty impressive run at the top of the Canadian skating world. Shi won novice (2022) and junior (2023) national titles in back-to-back seasons. She followed that up with a podium finish (bronze) in her senior debut at the Canadian Championships earlier this year in Calgary, Alberta.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll start to understand why she chose to end her successful run at the Canadian Ice Academy under the direction of coaches Paul Parkinson and Andrew Evans. Just weeks after earning that medal in Calgary, Shi pulled up stakes and joined the camp of renowned coach Rafael Arutyunyan at Great Park Ice & Fivepoint Arena in Irvine, California.

(she still has a Canadian training base at the Toronto Cricket Club with coach Brian Orser and his team. It’s another place that tends to attract elite talent).

Arutyunyan’s list of present and past students is as star-studded as it gets, among them 2022 Olympic champion Nathan Chen of the United States (who is also one of Shi’s skating idols). Reigning U.S. national bronze medallist Andrew Torgashev currently works out of Irvine. So do a number of other international talents. It’s that kind of exposure to elite talent that lured Shi away from the club in Mississauga, Ontario, that she formerly called home.

“When I was still at my old club, I was at the highest level there was there. So I wasn’t really able to see past myself and my friends who were on the same level as me,” she said. “I wasn’t going to get better, so I needed to go away.”

Shi didn’t walk blindly into her new situation. When she was going through some early season struggles last season, Shi decided to spend two weeks in Irvine in September with Arutyunyan to sharpen up some of her skating skills. Shi liked it so much, she went back for most of October and felt she emerged from the experience as a better, more confident skater. She is quick to draw a straight line between that training period and the bronze medal in Calgary.

“Going to Raf was part of that. It helped me a lot, the whole Team Raf,” she said. “It was really good in the middle of the season to kind of adjust my jumps and make them consistent. So when I got back to Canada and started running programs every day, they got really good.”

So much so that Shi arrived in Calgary believing she had the goods to land on the podium at nationals — even if there were some moments of doubt after a shaky short program that left her in sixth place.

“It was in my head that I wanted to win a medal. But after the short, I wasn’t in the place to win a medal,” she explained. “At that time, I was training clean long (programs) every day, and I was very confident in myself. So I was just like, do what you have to do. I kind of put on a ‘I don’t really care how this goes’ mentality … I was thinking, you’re in sixth, you’re not going to get a medal anyways, just do your best. And that brought me up.

“It was really crazy. I was really grateful for everything. It felt like all of my work had really meant something.”

It would be a stretch to say it’s been full speed ahead into a new season. Talk to any skater who’s new to Arutyunyan and they’ll tell you about a unique jumping technique that he teaches that can take a season or two to truly master. Shi talked about some of those growing pains during a Zoom call earlier this week, admitting “I’m basically having to relearn everything.”

“With the new technique, it is a little bit hard to adjust … So it feels a little bit restricting. With Team Raf, it’s very different and very hard.”

After winning novice and junior national titles in back-to-back seasons, Hetty Shi landed on the podium at the Canadian Championships in Calgary in January, alongside new senior women’s champion Kaiya Ruiter (centre) and silver medallist Maddie Schizas.

Now, there’s also a long game at play here, and Shi is fully cognizant of that. She talks about wanting to skate for Canada at the 2030 Winter Olympics (she won’t be age eligible for 2026 in Milan-Cortina, Italy) and has other big goals to check off along the way. So the idea right now is to build a strong foundation that’ll last for the long haul.

One of her most immediate technical goals is to lock down the triple Lutz-triple toe combination — the gold standard for senior women. Shi is a triple loop-triple toe girl at the moment, with a triple flip-triple toe combo she describes as “iffy.” But she clearly wants the Lutz-toe as part of her repertoire.

“It’s something that I’m working toward because my Lutz just got better from where it was months ago,” she said. “I’m really working for it to be more consistent.”

The changes in her skating life didn’t end with new coaches. Shi also enlisted two new choreographers for this season: Misha Ge for the short, fellow Canadian Shae-Lynn Bourne for the free. And she’s enthused about what the duo has come up with for her newest material.

For the short, Shi will skate to a piece of music from the French movie classic “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (Michel Legrand’s “I Will Wait For You”).

“He’s a really good person and I really enjoyed working with him,” she said of collaborating with Ge, a two-time Olympian from Uzbekistan. “This program is more my style and I enjoy doing it a lot.

“I grew up skating to classical, slow pieces of music, and I never really grew out of that comfort zone. So this is what that is, which is in (contrast) to my long, which was done by Shae-Lynn Bourne. I skate to a bunch of different pieces from the movie ‘Maleficent’ (they include “Once Upon a Dream,” “Mistress of Evil” and “Maleficent Suite,” by Lana Del Rey, Geoff Zanelli and James Newton Howard). It’s really different from my style because it’s really dark and I have to be more sharp with my movements and stuff. Very different from balletic, elegant moves.”

Shi spoke in Calgary about her desire to “not look like a kid” when she’s skating, and believes these two programs will help her show a more mature look.

“Shae-Lynn kind of told me this, but in order for me to not look like a kid, I have to be bigger in my movements,” she explained. “Kids tend to be shy and not as big with their movements. I really need to portray my character in my program and stand out, so people don’t see me as a little girl who just moved up from junior.”

Due to her age, Shi will remain a junior internationally for one more season (she turns 16 later this month), meaning she will make another appearance on the Junior Grand Prix circuit later this year (because of her move to California, Shi didn’t have her programs monitored by a Skate Canada official until this week, so she expects to be assigned to an event later in the Series, which begins in August and runs through early October).

However, she’s now a full-fledged senior domestically, and believes she has it in her to strive for a Canadian title in the coming season.

“I would like to win senior nationals this year, and I think that I could (do it) if I just get more used to (the new technique she is learning) and get my programs running better and everything. I think it’s possible,” she said. “And I want to do better at my Junior Grand Prix this year, which I also think is possible because every year my placement goes a little bit higher (she was seventh at a JGP event in Thailand last season, after placing 13th in Poland the year before), which is always good to see.

“I’m going to have to work really hard (to win a national title) and really push myself to be better, which is sometimes a little bit harder for me, to get out of my comfort zone. But that’s kind of what I have to do. And run my programs really hard. That’s what I did last year and it really turned out well.”

Canada’s Hetty Shi believes a move to California to train with renowned coach Rafael Arutyunyan has already made a difference in the quality of her skating, and she’s eager to find out how much better she can be.

Shi’s beginnings in the sport are rather humble, to say the least. She was born in Northville, Michigan (about an hour outside of Detroit) and first took to the ice at the urging of her father, who was working in the U.S. at the time.

“My dad told me that since we live in a cold state, I might need to learn skating if I needed to attend birthday parties,” she said. “I started skating and I didn’t want to get off. I wanted to go back every day. Then a coach (Nicole Reitz, at Farmington Hills Skating Club) approached me and my mom and was like ‘she’s kind of good, she should start taking lessons.’”

But it wasn’t until the family moved to the Toronto area — her parents, Qingli Xiao and Yufang Shi, are both Canadian — that her skating really began to take off. It was veteran Canadian skating coach Doug Haw who directed Shi to Parkinson and Evans at CIA, where she began to build her already impressive skating resume under their guidance over the next four seasons. “I’ve done a lot of camps and stuff with (Haw), so we’ve gotten close,” she said. “He recommended that I go to the Canadian Ice Academy and that’s how I got there.”

Ask Shi about her idols in the sport while growing up, and she rhymes off a veritable all-star team of talent: 2010 Olympic champion Yuna Kim of South Korea and Russia’s Evgenia Medvedeva, a two-time World champion; the aforementioned Chen and Japan’s legendary Yuzuru Hanyu, a two-time Olympic gold medallist (Sochi 2014 and PyeongChang 2018).

“Everything they do is very effortless and it looks really easy — whether it is easy or not, it probably was for them,” she said. “They make them look really easy, the jumps and everything. Their movements are really elegant and really soft and flowing. That’s what I try to do in my career as well.

“For the men, the exact same thing. They just make everything so easy and I want to be like that.”

It’s a quest she’ll now continue in California, in a fertile environment she hopes will maximize every ounce of her still blossoming talent.

Another side of the Olympic city

When the flame is lit in Paris on July 26 (six days away from this writing) to officially launch the Paris 2024 Olympics, it will mark the first time in exactly a century since the Summer Games were last held in the City of Light.

That would be the easy storyline for a broadcast to lean into. But CBC Sports has chosen to take, shall we say, a more modern look at the Olympic city.

“(The centennial anniversary) will be mentioned and there will be references to 1924. It’ll be part of the coverage, but I think we’re really focused on trying to make sure that we don’t just focus on the history, which tends to be a bit of an Olympic trope,” said Chris Wilson, CBC/Radio-Canada’s general manager of Olympics for Paris 2024. “We’ve got a really great culture series that we’ll be running that isn’t just traditional Paris. I would call it an unexpected look at Paris. We’re trying to balance history will new energy and even some of our graphical look and feel gives a tribute to parts of Paris life that are not as stereotypical as maybe people are thinking.”

Let the Games begin

We talked about it in this space a few weeks back, but Paris Games organizers are planning a most unique Opening Ceremony, with the athletes parading down the Seine River in boats as opposed to the traditional stadium entrance. It should be a spectacular sights to see, both live and on television.

It all happens next Friday, with CBC airing pre-ceremony show live at 1 p.m. ET. CBC Chief Correspondent Adrienne Arsenault and veteran Olympic voice Scott Russell, who is retiring after these Games, will be on hand to set up the official launch of the Paris Games (Arsenault’s nightly hosting duties for The National will also emanate from the French capital in the week leading up to the opening of the Games).

The ceremony itself begins at 1:30 p.m, with the Toyota Olympic Games Primetime panel of Andi Petrillo, Waneek Horn-Miller, Perdita Felicien and Craig McMorris taking viewers through the production. For those who miss the big show, a prime-time encore presentation will air at 7 p.m. ET on CBC and CBC Gem.