It's more than just a Worlds warmup
Four Continents marks the last big test for Canada's top skaters before they head off to the big show in Boston. It can also be a real tone setter for what's to come in March.
It’s one last big warmup for the big show in Boston. Although, in at least one case in particular, just a little bit more than that is at stake.
We speak, of course, of the Four Continents Championships, which being next Wednesday and run through Feb. 23 in Seoul, South Korea. Skate Canada is sending a full team of three entries in each discipline to the competition, including all of its national champions (for the most part, the medal winners from last month’s Canadian national championships in Laval, Quebec, are on the Four Continents team, with a few exceptions).
Here’s the full team list:
Men: Matthew Newnham, Aleksa Rakic, Roman Sadovsky
Women: Maddie Schizas, Sara-Maude Dupuis, Katherine Medland Spence
Pairs: Deanna Stellato-Dudek/Maxime Deschamps; Lia Pereira/Trennt Michaud; Kelly Ann Laurin/Loucas Ethier
Ice Dance: Piper Gilles/Paul Poirier; Marjorie Lajoie/Zachary Lagha; Alicia Fabbri/Paul Ayer
As always, we’ve got storylines in mind when we ponder what really matters about this competition, or what we’d generally like to see from a group whose next stop will be the World Championships next month at TD Garden in Boston. And what do we have top of mind, you ask? Read on …
Finally, it’s time to decide ‘the guy’
Regular readers of this space know we’ve been talking about this one all season. And now, once and for all, it’s time for the rubber to hit the road, so to speak. Time for Skate Canada to decide which men’s skater they’ll send to Worlds with a rather important mission to take on (we’ll get to that).
Canada has three men’s entries at Four Continents: newly minted national champion Roman Sadovsky (who’s also the veteran of this group), Aleksa Rakic, a national silver medallist a year ago, and Matthew Newnham, who’s been added to the team in place of 2024 national champion Wesley Chiu, who clearly hasn’t fully recovered from the ankle injury he suffered back in November at Cup of China. Only Sadovsky and Rakic have the necessary technical scores to be able to fill the lone ‘TBD’ on the team for Boston Worlds that Skate Canada announced last month.
It’s a truly important selection, given what will be on the line at TD Garden. Next month’s Worlds will set the quota spots for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, Italy. And if Canada wants that number to rise to two, it’ll require whoever goes to Boston to come up with a top-10 finish. Being that Canadian men were 17th and 19th at 2024 Worlds, it’ll be no small feat.
For much of the season, I’ve described that possibility as the longest of shots. But something about the way Sadovsky skated in Laval made me soften that thought just a little bit. The 25-year-old from Toronto wasn’t excellent that weekend, but he was very good. And the important thing is he emerged from that competition realizing it’ll take more than what he showed there to get that top 10 in Boston, and knowing how he can get there.
“I need to do more than this, honestly,” he said after his free skate in Laval. “It’s small things I need to optimize to get another 10-15 points that are floating around in there. There’s still other little things that add up overall. And that’s what I need to get that second spot.”
But first, he has to earn that chance, and that’s what Four Continents is all about. A year ago at this time, Chiu had won his first Canadian title but needed to back that up at Four Continents to earn a ticket to Montreal, which he did impressively. If Sadovsky matches that kind of response himself in Seoul, he’ll be the one heading to Boston. Based on what we saw in Laval, we’d say there’s a good chance that happens.
Rakic, meanwhile, isn’t exactly riding into Four Continents on a wave of momentum. While his fall season was relatively solid, he arrived in Laval coming off a bout with RSV (a respiratory ailment) and pulled out after the short program.
Bottom line: Rakic would have to be miles (kilometres?) better than Sadovsky at Four Continents to give Skate Canada’s decision makers a reason to consider choosing him over Sadovsky for the Boston ticket. Given what is at stake at those Worlds, it might be a rather tall ask at this point.
World champions need to step on the gas
Speaking of the ‘it’s time’ phrase … Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps are running short on it as Boston Worlds approach. At least in terms of showing up in their best form with an opportunity to repeat as World champions, a title they won emphatically a year ago at home in Montreal.
It’s not exactly been the kind of season these two have wanted, to put it mildly, and they would no doubt agree. A particular frustration has come in the long program, in which they posted a 133.82 score at Nebelhorn Trophy (their season-opening event in September) and haven’t improved it since. They were clearly frustrated by that fact in Laval, and barely hung onto their Canadian title in front of a hard-charging Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud (the winning margin was just 2.10 points).
Per the excellent Skating Scores website, there are also these sobering numbers: their season’s best overall score (207.44) ranks fifth in the world to date; it’s exactly 11 points behind world-leading Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin of Germany. Most of that gap comes in the long program, where their SB also ranks fifth. So there’s some serious ground to make up before to Boston (not to suggest it isn’t doable).
(by comparison, the Canadian duo won Worlds last year with a 221.56 overall total, of which 144.08 came in the free program. That total would be No. 1 in the world right now; the long score would be second by a hair).
Here’s the good news, though: Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps have one more run for real at it next week. And if you know these two, they’ve been going hard at it in practice since Laval. Determination is never an issue with them. But a couple of good skates at Four Continents might be just the tonic to have them brimming with an extra dose of confidence before Worlds.
Setting the tone for Boston
Now admittedly, that phrase could apply to just about everyone on the Canadian team who is headed to Worlds, which run March 26-30. But in this case, we’re applying it to Canadian women’s champion Maddie Schizas, who has a major chore of her own to tackle when she gets to TD Garden.
Simply put, it’s the same deal for her as the men — a top-10 finish means two Canadian women in Milan next year. It’s the same task Schizas had on her plate at Montreal Worlds, and didn’t come close to getting done. But the just-turned 22-year-old from Oakville, Ontario, seems to be in a much better place this time around, and Four Continents offers a chance to confirm that.
Schizas broke out a new “Butterfly Lovers” free program in Laval and it seems to have found a sweet spot for her in terms of comfort (while she skated her more intense “Dance Macabre” program strongly back in October at Skate Canada International, it’s a routine she admits was difficult to master consistently). Combine that with the “Lion King” short program she absolutely loves, and it’s easy to see why the three-time national champion is in a good place right now to possibly have a big week in Boston.
Like we said, Four Continents presents a chance to put another stamp on all of that and, perhaps just as importantly, to get the new long program out in front of international judges for the first time. How they see it at Four Continents — and how well she skates it — may well go a long way toward showing just how realistic it might be for her to land that top 10 in Boston.
It doesn’t always mean a lot. But it really does
It’s not every day that two of the top contenders for a World championship square off in a preview of sorts just weeks ahead of time. But that’s exactly what we’ll get to see in the ice dance event at Four Continents.
In the one corner, there’s reigning two-time champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates of the United States. And in the other are Canada’s best, Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, who will be among the Americans’ top challengers for gold in Boston. It’s a pre-Worlds showdown that didn’t happen a year ago at Four Continents, because U.S. Figure Skating chose not to send any of its World team members to Shanghai.
These two teams both qualified for the Grand Prix Final in December, but Gilles and Poirier took themselves out of medal contention in the rhythm dance with Poirier’s freak fall into the boards. Chock and Bates, meanwhile, easily won the competition by nearly 14 points with an overall total (219.85) that is easily the best in the world this season (Gilles and Poirier rank third with the 214.84 they produced at Skate Canada International).
Last year in Montreal, the American duo won the gold by 2.52 points over Gilles and Poirier, who won the free dance en route to the silver medal. Four Continents might give us an early glimpse into just how close things might get in Boston, where Chock and Bates get the “home ice advantage” this time.
About those Four Continents newbies …
Four Continents is often an opportunity for some newcomers to get their feet wet for the first time at an ISU championships event, and so it is for some of the Canadian contingent headed to South Korea.
We’ve already mentioned Newnham, for whom Four Continents represents just his second senior international event (he got the qualifying scores for this one a year ago at Challenge Cup in the Netherlands). But given what is on the line for the other two Canadian men there, it’s actually a nice spot to be for your maiden voyage at this level. Not an ounce of pressure on him at all.
For Katherine Medland Spence, who’s been one of the biggest breakout stories in Canadian skating this season, Four Continents represents the cherry on top of all of this. We detailed it in this space previously, but to briefly recap: the 24-year-old Medland Spence had not competed internationally until back in November, when she won Warsaw Cup in Poland and, as a bonus, got the qualifying scores for Four Continents that same weekend. Then she went to Laval and earned her first-ever medal at nationals.
Last but not least are the ice dance team of Alicia Fabbri and Paul Ayer, who got out early and often this season and rode a real wave of momentum into Fabbri’s hometown of Laval. It’s where they secured their ticket to this event and Worlds next month. For them, next weekend in South Korea should indeed provide a nice little warmup to what lies ahead in March in Boston.
Where can I watch all of this?
The entire competition is being streamed live on CBC’s website (it’s also on the International Skating Union’s YouTube channel). Yeah, the competition being in South Korea is going to test your sleep schedule. Just check out some of the event start times listed below (all in ET) on CBCSports.ca.
Turning back the clock
You might recall that, during last week’s piece in this space about the age discussion in skating, we used the cases of two prominent Canadian men’s skaters (Stephen Gogolev and Nam Nguyen) as “cautionary tales” of sorts about what can sometimes happen when you read too much into results at a particularly young age (in a few words, it’s not always the best idea).
Upon a second look, we found it rather interesting to take a glimpse back at the 2014 world junior championships in Sofia, Bulgaria, an event that Nguyen won as a 15-year-old. What later caught my eye my noticing some of the names below him in the final standings. The third spot on the podium that year was occupied by a young American named Nathan Chen, who was only 14 years old when he competed in Sofia. Yes, the same Nathan Chen who would later go on to win three World titles and an Olympic gold medal in 2022 while showing off a dizzying array of quadruple jumps.
A couple of places below Chen we found Shoma Uno of Japan, someone who would go on to become a two-time World champion and triple Olympic medallist. Canada had a second entrant in that field who would finish 13th. His name? Roman Sadovsky.
There were also some interesting names of note in the women’s event. In what used to be a sometimes familiar sight, Russia swept the medal podium, with future World champion Evgenia Medvedeva earning the bronze medal. Two places below her in the standings was Canada’s Alaine Chartrand, who’d go on to win a pair of senior national titles in 2016 and 2019. A few steps further down in seventh we found Amber Glenn, the American who, a few months back, won the Grand Prix Final at 25 years old and will be a top contender for the World title in Boston next month.
So how good was that 2014 Junior Worlds at predicting future success? In some cases, pretty much spot on. In others … let’s just say it took awhile. But it was an interesting exercise taking that trip back down memory lane.
Around the boards
The international season for synchronized skaters is now in full swing, with two Les Supremes teams from CPA Saint-Leonard in Montreal taking home medals from the U.S. International Classic last weekend in Norwood, Massachusetts. The colour was gold for the Les Supremes seniors, while the junior squad carted home silver medals. Both teams are reigning World champions. The juniors will aim to defend their crown from March 7-8 in Gothenburg, Sweden, while the seniors aim for a record fourth straight World title April 4-5 in Helsinki, Finland … The first Skate Canada Trophy event, which crowned national champions at the novice and pre-novice level, was held last weekend in Edmonton. You can find a list of all the champions right here … The final domestic national championship event of the season, the Skate Canada Cup, goes Feb. 28-March 2 in Waterloo, Ontario. It features novice, gold and open level synchro teams.