#SCI24: Some final thoughts from the East Coast
Canada's annual Grand Prix event always provides an early season benchmark for our top skaters. We dig down a little deeper on what we saw in Halifax, and what it might mean going forward.
Canadian skaters enjoyed a golden weekend at Skate Canada International, taking home half the titles up for grabs at Scotiabank Centre in Halifax. But more than that, it was also an inflection point for the man in charge of Skate Canada’s national team, an opportunity for some early season reflection.
With that in mind, a few of us pulled aside the organization’s high performance director, Mike Slipchuk, for some thoughts on what he witnessed in Nova Scotia. And what it might all mean in the months to come. Here’s some of the things he had to say:
It’s always about ice dance first, right?
If you’re a regular reader of this space, you’re very familiar with the narrative about ice dance in Canada — that it is, by far, the most successful discipline of them all for this country’s athletes on the biggest stages internationally. And so it was in Halifax, with Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier reeling in a fifth straight gold medal (which allowed them to match some Canadian legends) and fellow Canadians Marjorie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha claiming the silver.
But Slipchuk was more impressed with the way all of them went about their business at SCI, presenting new programs for the first time this season and showing why they’re both among the top five teams in the world.
“At the high performance camp (at the end of the summer), with both Piper/Paul and Marj and Zach, we saw everything in full (run-throughs). So we knew they were in the right place.” said Slipchuk. “If an event planned didn’t happen, we knew they would be ready and I think we saw that here. They had a great weekend. Both rhythm dances and free dances were good.”
That might be a bit of an understatement. Gilles and Poirier have done it again with a pair of vehicles that show up their unique style, from the oh so fun Beach Boys-themed rhythm dance to the classic tones of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” that form the heart of their free dance. Lajoie and Lagha have an equally fun rhythm dance, set to music from the Austin Powers movie franchise, while any skate that uses Disturbed’s “The Sound of Silence” as its music choice, I am all here for. It truly is a sight to see.
There’s also some real depth beyond these two teams. The eighth-place finishers in Halifax, Alicia Fabbri and Paul Ayer, are right in the battle to land Canada’s third spot at the 2025 World Championships in Boston.
“We’re now seeing we have a lot of teams that are pushing into that top 24 score-wise in the world,” said Slipchuk. “If they had to step into a World Championship, they could be in that top 16. To me, that’s a big thing. We’re happy there.”
Canada is in the game for two singles spots in Milan
Well, let’s say we’ve got a rising level of confidence in the women’s end of things. The Canadian men? We’ll get to them in a bit. But mainly, this is the moment when we give Maddie Schizas all the flowers for what she did in Halifax. The two-time Canadian champion had her best weekend in quite awhile, putting together the kind of back-to-back skates that can get her that coveted top-10 finish at 2025 Worlds in Boston — the result needed to get two Canadian women to the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy.
And yeah, you bet Slipchuk was highly impressed with what he saw.
“It was a great week for her. She started competing in July. Went to Detroit in July, did the Cranberry event (in August) and then did Oberstdorf and Budapest,” he said. “We put her out more this year — we put a lot of athletes out more this year — but every time out, there was a plan about increasing the technical in the program. She’s now done two back-to-back events with a clean short. At the start of the season, the plan was to try to get two Lutzes in the long and she did it here. For her to come out and hit 190 (score) … that’s kind of the range (that shows) she’s capable of being in that top 10.
“For her confidence … it’s hard skating at home but she came out and laid down two strong programs and she had some of the highest technical scores here. Now you’ve got to keep doing that and the rest of the scores climb with it, but you’ve got to keep putting that out.”
We’re still looking for “the guy” among Canada’s men
On the plus side, it’s always fun going to a Canadian Championships knowing a certain title is up for grabs. It would also be spectacular if that group of men were all lights out and it was a showdown for the ages, and not a problem if one stood up in a big way and said “this one’s mine.” We’ve kinda gotten used to that in Canada over the years when it comes to men’s skating. Some of the hugest stars in the sport’s history come from that area.
Not sure we can go there just yet in Canada. What we saw from Schizas in Halifax, we surely didn’t see in the men’s event. We saw some very good long programs from some people, but not quite the same in the short, and vice versa. But it’s the belief that it still could happen — that somebody could turn in the kind of back-to-back effort Schizas showed — that has Slipchuk still talking optimistically about his top four competitors in this discipline.
“This is a season … there’s a spot there for Worlds and it’s there for the taking. It’s up to someone to step up and grab it.. And it’s going to be an ongoing battle all season with Stephen (Gogolev), Wesley (Chiu), Aleksa (Rakic) and Roman (Sadovsky),” he said. “It could come down to as far as Four Continents before we sort this out (it actually did last season). I have a lot of faith in our men. We haven’t yet seen them come out with those two performances. I think you saw it with Wesley at Four Continents last year where he came seventh. We have a lot of faith, we just need to see that in competition, those two performances that show what they can do.
“We saw it in the short with Stephen (at SCI), didn’t see it in the long. We saw it in the long with Aleksa … we just keep seeing it in pieces here and there.”
And that indeed is the rub. Let’s face it, we all got spoiled over the years watching the likes of Patrick Chan, Elvis Stojko, Kurt Browning, Brian Orser and Jeff Buttle all go on to become World champions. Now, the hope is Canada can get a second men’s berth at the Milan Olympics. And that’s likely a long shot. But this is where we’re at with Canadian men’s skating at the moment.
(an aside: this story from The Canadian Press provides an interesting perspective on the current state of men’s skating in our country, with some solid opinions from a few of the names listed above. It’s well worth your time to give it a read, if you haven’t already).
Rakic probably had the best overall weekend of the bunch (Sadovsky withdrew after the short program because of an injury), and it played into the thought we expressed a few months back that it might be his time to become Canadian champion (though Chiu, the current king, will likely have something to say about that when we get to Laval, Quebec, in January).
“I thought Aleksa had a very good week. Last year, it was his first Skate Canada and it was like his welcome to the Grand Prix,” said Slipchuk. “He did what we usually see from Aleksa in training and what we saw in the summer events. I thought it was two good skates and one of the best scores he’s put up internationally. I think he did everything he could … one mistake in the short, maybe, a small mistake there. But the scores are what we kind of have him tracking at, so I thought it was a very good week for him for sure.”
Don’t fret about the world champions. It’s still early.
For Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps, it was a second straight gold medal at Skate Canada International. But this one hardly felt as good as a year ago, when the Quebec-based duo laid down a brilliant, season-defining free skate in Vancouver. It was rocket fuel for the world championship that would eventually follow in Montreal.
But clearly, there’s still plenty of work to do this season, and they’d be the first ones to tell you that (and they did Saturday). Not that Slipchuk is any way concerned about where his No. 1 pairs team will be by season’s end. It’s still way early, after all.
“With Deanna and Max, I know it wasn’t the free program they were hoping for, but last year they came to Skate Canada and probably had their best skate of the season and they were kind of chasing that all season,” he said. “This year, it’s been a bit more of a progressive climb. It’s a lot different when you’re the reigning world champions. That always plays in the back of your mind and they have to learn how to deal with that and work through that, but I’m glad we’re doing this a year out from the Olympics.
“This is the kind of season for us to sort out where everyone is at. Once Worlds ends, it’s so fast from the end of the World Championships to the Olympics. I know they’re going to be fine. They have a few weeks, and they’ll do Finland and that should get them to the (Grand Prix) Final and then (there’s time to) prepare for the Championships.”
Time to develop
Two of Canada’s top three pair teams were at Skate Canada, with the reigning World champions taking the gold, and the up-and-coming Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Ethier settling in at ninth spot.
The county’s No. 2 team, Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud, gets its Grand Prix season underway this weekend in Angers at Grand Prix de France — an event they won last year en route to the Grand Prix final. But those are the only three teams that are out on the circuit this fall in Canadian colours.
You may have noticed that Canada only filled two of its available three spots in Halifax. And there’s a reason for that. We’ll let Slipchuk explain.
“We have an international criteria that we set and we didn’t have a third team this summer that met any standard that we set to come to an international event. We have teams that were training, but we’re not going to bring a team that has not met (the standard) in any discipline,” he said. “We have to make the decision at the end of August and at that point, no one had shown us they were close to that. Some have met it now, but it was too late at that time.”
One of the teams in that category is the new pairing of Fiona Bombardier and Benjamin Mimar, who will make their international debut in three weeks time at Warsaw Cup, a Challenger Series event.
You’ll no doubt recall that Mimar and Brooke McIntosh were at one time considered one of the rising teams in Canada, placing 11th at the 2023 World Championships after earning the silver medal at nationals in Oshawa, Ontario. But the duo split up after last season and he joined forces with Bombardier, whose previous partner, Gabriel Farand, retired from the sport. The new tandem, which trains with coach Bruno Marcotte in Oakville, Ontario, is still very much in its development phase.
“They’ll go to Warsaw in a few weeks but at that time (at the end of summer), they just weren’t ready,” said Slipchuk. “They just need time to keep developing. We don’t want to put any athlete in a position where you could come out and the result isn’t what you expect or it’s a negative experience.”
The spot Canada gave up at SCI instead went to Uzebekistan’s Ekaterina Geynish and Dmitrii Chigerev, who skated to the silver medal in Halifax.
‘You can see her potential’
We caught up with Tracy Wilson, one of Kaiya Ruiter’s new coaches in Toronto (along with Brian Orser) for a quick chat at SCI about her new student. The 1988 Olympic bronze medallist sees a skater with a sound foundation of skating skills built under the direction of Scott Davis in Calgary.
“First of all, really good training coming up. So her technique she has come to us with is really sound,” Wilson said after watching Ruiter’s short program skate in Halifax. “It’s now about technique under pressure; that’s what we hope to work on. Honing it, the speed, the consistency, the balance going into the elements just to keep up the consistency. She said today was her first time doing Level 4 steps. The performance of it has really come up.
“You can see her potential, you really can.”
Though it won’t happen right away, Wilson says she can see Ruiter working her way up to triple Axels or quads someday.
“She’s got a gorgeous double Axel, so yeah (it could happen),” she said. “It’s one of my favourite jumps of hers, actually … She’s very fluid with her jumps. She gets good spring. It’s just about getting her lined up so she can really access that spring. We’re working on the balance and consistency going in.”
(we hear Orser might know a thing or two about the triple Axel).
Ruiter is also on the entry list for Warsaw Cup later this month. She edged a tiny bit closer to the technical qualifying score for Worlds with her short program in Halifax. Warsaw might be her last shot at it, unless there’s a Four Continents opportunity in her future. But we’ll need to see what happens at the Canadian Championships in January before we can go there.
“With Tracy and Kaiya, there were probably a lot of learnings (at Skate Canada) that can make things better and they’ll go again in two weeks (in Warsaw),” said Slipchuk. “So those will help just to build that plan and strategy and comfort. Scott Davis did a great job with Kaiya, he got her to this level and Tracy will definitely be helpful for her moving forward.”
Grand Prix goes to France
The third stop on the Grand Prix series got underway Friday in Angers, France, with Canada having a small contingent of two entries. In the pairs competition, Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud — who won this event a year ago — opened with a relatively clean short program that landed them in third place (64.38) behind reigning World bronze medallists Minerva Fabienne Hase and Nikita Volodin of Germany (73.72) and Italy’s Sara Conti and Niccolo Macii (70.79). The free skate will go on Saturday.
In ice dance, Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac placed fifth of 10 couples, but their score of 72.54 has them just 1.95 points shy of the bronze medal position. They last won a Grand Prix medal back in 2022, a bronze at Skate America. Lauriault and Le Gac are currently the third-ranked team in Canada, based on placements at the 2024 Canadian Championships in Calgary. Saturday’s free dance will decide how they finish in Angers.
I really hope that Maddie is able to score enough points to allow 2 skaters to go to the Olympics. And naturally, we hope that Kaiya will qualify and go with her.