'I really want to establish myself'
David Bondar is moving up to senior domestically this season, and the Canadian junior champion is eager to quickly make his mark among the country's best
We talk a lot (and I mean, a lot) in this space about the state of men’s skating in Canada, and where we might be headed. It’s something we explored just a few weeks back with one of the legendary champions from our country.
And more than once, I’m sure, we’ve regaled you with the rather exclusive list of men from this country who have won World titles (it’s in the column linked above). One of the names in that group, Jeffrey Buttle, soared to the top of the World podium back in 2008 in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s from this point we’ll begin to build the tale of one of the top up and comers in Canadian men’s skating.
We refer to David Bondar, an 18-year-old from Richmond Hill, Ont., north of Toronto, who has a very distinct Buttle connection. He’s the man who crafted Bondar’s new free program for the coming season and also is part of his coaching team at the venerable Granite Club in Toronto, along with Lee Barkell (who, to complete this circle of skating life, was Buttle’s coach back in the day).
Needless to say, there are stories shared here. The kinds of stories that provide Bondar with the motivation to continue on his current path up the men’s skating ranks in Canada. While Bondar hasn't yet had the chance to delve too deeply into Buttle’s memory bank when it comes to his past World and Olympic experience (he won a bronze medal in 2006 in Turin, Italy), he’ll hear things every now and then from Barkell.
Like this, for example …
“I think it was two years ago at junior nationals, I didn’t have the best performance. And (Barkell) told me that actually when Jeffrey first came into juniors, he also placed not too good in his first junior nationals,” recalled Bondar. “Then the next year was a bit better, which was sort of like me. And then the year after that, he actually won. And last year I also won. So you can kind of draw the parallels there.”
Indeed, Bondar would do well to have the kind of career that Buttle enjoyed, which also included three Canadian titles and two gold medals at the Four Continents Championships. But it is still very early in the game for him, with Bondar set to compete in junior internationally for another season (he’s making the move up to senior domestically, on the heels of winning the Canadian junior title back in January in Laval, Que).
In other words. let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. But a conversation with Bondar reveals a young man who talks with a certain level of confidence about what he can achieve in the future. When he arrived in Laval in January, he did so with the thought in mind that he would go home as a national champion — the kind of thinking buoyed by a fall season in which he produced personal best scores over the course of two Junior Grand Prix events, in Czechia and China (68.35 for the short program in Ostrava, and 132.88 for the long and 196.86 overall in Wuxi).
“Coming into the competition, that was sort of my biggest goal, because I knew I had all the goods to become national champion. I knew I had the jumps, I just had to deliver like I did previously in the season,” he says now. “And I was a bit more nervous than for other competitions, because I knew that, first of all, the junior national title was at stake, but also a spot on the Junior Worlds team was on the line. And even though I was really nervous going into the free, I managed to more or less do a clean free and claim the title, which I’m very happy about.”
A year earlier in Calgary, Bondar has finished eighth in junior at nationals. But that he rose all the way to the top of the podium in Laval was testament to the improved level of skating he displayed during the season. Not just in terms of his skating skills, but also the mental side of his game which, as any high-level athlete will tell you, is so important to success, no matter the sport.
“I feel like, in the years before, I sort of struggled a bit more in competition. In training, in practices, competition practices, I was doing really well. I would do clean run-throughs most of the time, and then I would go out and the nerves would hit me and I wouldn’t be able to perform well,” he explained. “But last year, I’m not sure what happened, but I started skating really well in competition. And even if training or the competition practices would not go well, I would sort of refocus and would be able to perform the program well at the competition.”
What no doubt helped his cause was the decision he and his team made last year to spend some time training in the camp of renowned coach Rafael Arutyunyan in Irvine, Calif. Bondar spent about a month there in the summer of 2024, split into a pair of two-week sessions, and went back for some extra work in the weeks leading up to the World Junior Championships back in March in Debrecen, Hungary.
“We decided to start visiting Rafael because we were sort of curious about his technique and in general, the hub there with all the great skaters, I felt like it would really help me, and it really did. And I feel like, in general, when I went back to Granite, his advice sort of stuck with me,” said Bondar. “I would do exercises, I would do edges and over time, even though I wasn’t in California, I would still really improve back at the Granite with Lee and that, I think, really helped me with consistency, because I would do sets of jumps and that would sort of mimic the program. And overall, just the jump consistency went up with the triples and the Axel.
“Before Junior Worlds, I went there for two weeks right after (high school) exams for first semester (he’s currently in Grade 12), because I felt it was really important to have one big final push for Junior Worlds. I don’t go to him that much, but it’s really helping. And maybe in the future with school and everything, I might be able to visit him more often.”
Junior Worlds represented Bondar’s biggest international test yet, and he revelled in the opportunity to compete alongside some of the biggest rising young talents in the sport. He would finish 17th in the event (his 190.29 total score was a mere 0.29 points back of Canadian senior silver medallist Anthony Paradis), but he brought back so much more than that when he considers where he wants to go in the years ahead.
“I really liked it. There were so many good skaters there, and I got to meet so many of the boys I competed with, and it was all just very fun to skate on the same ice as them, eat at the same dinner table with them,” he said. “It was just overall a really fun experience. And I was also able to see skaters my age train and compete, and look at them and be like, oh, I want to be like them. I want to take the best qualities of theirs and sort of incorporate that into my skating. So yeah, I think that really helped me.”
What didn’t help were some skate boot problems that had been plaguing him in the weeks leading up to Junior Worlds, but flared up in a big way on the day Bondar was scheduled to skate his short program in Hungary. So much so that team doctors needed to freeze his ankle with injections to get him through the competition.
“My left ankle, like a week before, started hurting in the boot. We were able to get a new pair, but it didn’t really help a lot. It helped a little bit, but not much. And so I decided to skate on left boot new and right boot old, because the right boot was wasn’t really affected,” he explained. “At practices on the first few days, it was okayish, but then the day of the short program, the ankle started hurting a lot more and I was barely able to jump on that practice.
“Right before the short program, I decided to ask the team doctor to give me an injection to numb the area on the ankle so that I wouldn’t feel it. And it worked. I felt a little bit different in the boot in the short program, and because it was the first time doing this injection, my short might have been not ideal, but I still qualified for the free and going into the free program, I was a bit more experienced with the injection, and we kept doing it before every practice and the free program. And the free program really turned out well.”
You’ve got to think, though, that one new boot and one old boot as a pair isn’t exactly standard procedure, right?
“Yeah, it was a little bit unusual,” Bondar agreed. “Since it was the left boot, the Axel takeoffs were a little bit different, but because (the problem) wasn’t with the right boot, the landings weren’t really affected, and the loop, flip and Lutz jumps weren’t affected, either. It could have been worse, but even with the different sort of feeling on the Axels, I was still able to land all three of them at Junior Worlds.”
The boot problems are thankfully in the past now, he says, and he was able to skate without worry earlier this month, when he got his season started early at the Lake Placid Figure Skating Championships. Bondar produced the top score in both the free (127.97) and short (75.18) programs in the junior competition (yes, that’s an overall total above 200 points).
It also marked the debut of his new free program, skated to the soundtrack from the hugely popular “Game of Thrones” series. Bondar is a fan of the show and the music, and felt Buttle was the perfect choice to craft the program (he is retaining his “Angelica” short program from last season, which was choreographed by Toronto-based ice dance coach Juris Razgulajevs, who is part of the team that guides world silver medallists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier).
“I feel like that’s sort of more his style. And I’m actually pretty happy with the way it came out. So far, I’m really liking both the music and the program,” he said. “We decided to use a good variety of songs. I listened to the soundtrack and I actually really liked it. And because I recently watched the show and I really loved it, I felt that I could really connect to the music and sort of tell a story with it.
“The first piece is about the Lannisters and how they get their revenge at the end of Season 6. I just really loved that scene, and the music is really beautiful there. Pretty much the first two thirds is sort of a Lannister theme, and then at the very end, it’s the Targaryen theme, which is more triumphant and near the end of the story, the Targaryens beat the Lannisters. So that’s sort of how I wanted to end the program.”
Technically, the program will include a quadruple toe jump and two triple Axels, most notably. The quad is something that will get particular attention over the summer months, to gain more consistency in it before the fall season begins. There are also plans to add the quad toe into his short program when he steps up to senior domestically (it isn’t permitted at the junior level internationally).
“The main thing is to get that quad out there and start landing it in competition,” said Bondar, who’s also done some work on the quad Salchow. “Right now I’m really pushing the toe. I’ve been landing it, but it’s not completely consistent. And that’s my main goal in the next couple of weeks, to sort of improve that consistency before NextGen.”
The competition of which he speaks would be the one held by Skate Canada over the summer months (this year, it runs July 17-20 in Gatineau, Que., in the same complex in which the 2026 national championships will be held) which carries particular importance for the country’s top junior level skaters.
“That’s a pretty important competition early on, because that’s where Junior Grand Prix selection takes place. So I really want to be prepared for that,” said Bondar. “I did two of those (events) last year. I feel like last year went pretty successfully, especially with the beginning of the season, and toward the end, I was able show my consistency in the programs.”
Given his current emphasis on four-revolution jumps, it’s perhaps not so surprising that Bondar’s skating idols were some of the biggest quad masters in the history of the sport. Not to mention the current “god” in that area.
“When I was growing up, I really looked up to Yuzuru Hanyu. I feel like his quads really had a really good quality to them, and it wasn’t just jumps, but his skating skills and overall, his presentation, I just really liked it,” he said. “But also, I was a big fan of Nathan Chen because of how consistent he was with all his quads. And now I guess I’d say I look up to Ilia (Malinin), of course, the most out of anyone. And also, I really like Mikhail Shaidorov (who won a surprising silver medal at 2025 Worlds in Boston). I just feel like both of their techniques are just so good, and I really want to work hard to get quads like theirs, because when I watch it, it’s just very impressive.”
Bondar hopes to begin making a splash of his own at the senior level next season, at least at home. And there’s a few numbers out there that might suggest he can at least put himself in that top group in Canada. His winning score in Laval (196.86) would have placed fourth among the senior men, just 1.13 points shy of the podium. His long program score (135.07) was the third-best of the entire competition, behind only Roman Sadovsky and Paradis (bear in mind that two of Canada’s top men — Wesley Chiu and Stephen Gogolev, who is Bondar’s training mate at the Granite — didn’t compete in Laval and Aleksa Rakic withdrew after the short program).
“I really want to establish myself among the top senior men this season, because the transition from junior to senior is really important,” says Bondar. “I’ve seen a lot of skaters that thrived in junior, and then when they go to senior, it didn’t really turn out well for them. And so I want to use that as a lesson for me this year and stay on top of things when I transition to senior.”
While Bondar has been on figure skates since he was 2 1/2 years old, it wasn’t his only love on the ice. Like any Canadian boy, he longed to be a part of the “good old hockey game.” (to reference a famous Stompin’ Tom Connors ditty). His parents, who came to Canada from Ukraine via Israel, finally gave in when Bondar was seven years old.
“And I kept playing it up until last year, I sort of aged out of the GTHL (Greater Toronto Hockey League, the umbrella group for minor hockey in Canada’s most populous city),” he said. “I only play school hockey now, but I still really love hockey, and it’s a really good sport for me.”
Really rough, too, as he’ll tell you. It made for some interesting training days.
“When I was little, on a lot of days, I would have a hockey game and then right after, I would have to change in the car and go straight to skating. And that wouldn’t really affect me because I was energetic and really little but in the past few years, when I was around 16, the hockey games in the GTHL, they would go pretty late, and because they were big boys, there would be hits, and at the end of the game, I would always feel beaten up,” he explained. “I would have to go to bed at one in the morning on some days, then I would have to wake up and go and skate. And I feel like that was really hard, because my muscles were sore. But I feel like it also really helped with my stamina because I was pretty good at hockey, so sometimes my coaches would double shift me, and because of that, I would be really tired, but my stamina would also really improve.”
While Bondar has sprouted to 5-foot-11 over the past few years, he owns a rather lanky frame that he knows is much more suited for figure skating.
“My parents didn’t really expect me to grow to around the height I am now, because they thought that I wouldn’t really have a future in hockey if I would be 5-8, sort of like my parents’ height,” he said. “But in the past few years, I grew some more and they would sometimes tell me, ‘You know what, I think you might have been a good hockey player.’ But here I am, a pretty good figure skater.”
All of this is mindful of Jeff Skinner, a figure skating prodigy in the early 2000s (he won a juvenile national bronze medal in 2004) who eventually turned his full-time attention to hockey and made it all the way to the NHL (he played for the Edmonton Oilers in this year’s Stanley Cup Final). Yeah, Bondar has heard of Skinner, and he’s got a rather fun tale to share about their connection of sorts.
“When I was in juvenile for skating, I won the Central Ontario (sectional) championships and I got a trophy for that. And because it was the last time there were those specific sections in Ontario (there is now one single section in the province), they told me to just keep the trophy,” he said. “And then here it’s in my room and I’m looking at it, and I can actually see Jeff Skinner’s name on it, from 2004. Then when I saw him play hockey, I could really relate to him, with figure skating and hockey.
“It’s a really cool story.”
Kind of like the one Bondar is just beginning to author in his chosen ice sport.