#SCNats25: The door is open wide for a familiar face
Roman Sadovsky has been here before as a Canadian men's skating champion. And now the door is wide open in Laval for him to get back to the top of the podium.
LAVAL, Quebec — Much as he might try not to think about it, Roman Sadovsky is very aware there’s a big opportunity in front of him this weekend.
Like an elephant, he never forgets. Much as might try to tune it all out.
Yeah, there’s a Canadian championship that is his for the taking right now, especially after a relatively solid short program at Place Bell that has him in the lead by nearly four points over Anthony Paradis. The skater expected to be the other prime contender in Laval, Aleksa Rakic, had a rough night and sits way back in seventh, 19.05 points off the pace.
As we’ve mentioned previously, only four Canadian men have the required technical minimum scores to be eligible for the 2025 World Championships in Boston. And two of them, Wesley Chiu and Stephen Gogolev (whose season is over), aren’t in Laval due to injury.
The door is clearly open, then, for the 25-year-old from Toronto to become a Canadian senior men’s champion for the second time (his other title coming back in 2020). The challenge now, he says, is keeping the focus where it belongs to firm up his grip on the gold medal in Saturday’s free skate final.
Again, we get back to those persistent pachyderms …
“If someone tells you not to think about elephants, what are you going to think about? You’re going to think about elephants,” Sadovsky said with a laugh. “I don’t want to obsess on the outcome too much and just focus on the step-by-step process of getting there … I’ve had a good stretch of training. I really want to show that tomorrow.”
Sadovsky spoke on Thursday about having the hunger to show the skating world that he is capable of producing at a top-10 in the world level (which, as we all know, especially matters this season). He’s extremely motivated to become a Canadian champion again.
For most of his “Unconscious” short program, he was on his game, opening with a quadruple Salchow, then following up with a triple Lutz-triple toe combo. All was going rather swimmingly, but then came a fall on a triple Axel. But Sadovsky gathered himself and got to the finish line, posting a score of 81.44. Paradis, who had the home Quebec crowd on his side, followed at 77.27, with Mississauga’s John Kim scoring 71.32 in his senior nationals debut.
For Sadovsky, it was also helpful to have, well, a season leading into this. You’ll no doubt recall that a year ago in Calgary, nationals marked his season debut, after a fall campaign marred by injury and some rather unreal travel issues (the details are all here if you want to refresh your memory).
He got out internationally on four occasions during the current campaign, although his one Grand Prix appearance at Skate Canada International got cut short after the short program because of wonky back that tightened up (he’s fine now). But he rebounded in November to earn a bronze medal at Tallinn Trophy, a Challenger Series event in Estonia.
Though a bout of illness slowed him down for a time in early December, he’s here in Laval healthy and with some serious tread on his tires.
“That probably helped, just having that momentum. Just going through a routine, every few weeks competition, every few weeks competition … I kind of had that goal for last year,” he said. “Last year was last year, I didn’t have that, but this year, been keeping that competition momentum more and less, and that definitely helped my short program today.”
A victory here in Laval, backed up by some quality skates, also would earn some big points in his favour when it comes to being the choice for the lone men’s berth for 2025 Worlds in Boston, a decision that won’t be made until after Four Continents near the end of February in South Korea.
“Having good skates behind you is definitely a feel good thing for me personally. It’s great for seasonal momentum and it lets you take notes throughout the season,” said Sadovsky. “Oh, I can optimize here and there and the more skates you have, the more notes you can take home. The bigger the sample size, the more you can hone in and customize so you can give your best performances.”
Rakic, meanwhile, had put together a rather solid resume in the fall season, putting himself right in the mix for that Worlds berth. But Friday’s short program, which included a pair of falls on his most difficult jumps, won’t help his cause. A medal here might be a bit of a longshot now for Rakic, who is still working his way back from contracting RSV, a respiratory ailment that made training virtually impossible for him at times. It can be that debilitating.
“It’s been a difficult last 15 days,” he said. “I got really sick and so my training was just lacking coming in, so right now it was in a way all I could do. So I’m not overly upset. There were a couple of days I just sat home in bed, I couldn’t move … To try to get full run-throughs (in practice) was almost impossible.”
That lack of repetitions, he said, may well have eliminated any chance at a medal, or to make a statement in his favour for Worlds.
“(Falling on) the quad toe was a little excusable, the mistake,” he said. “But the flip-toe wasn’t. I should have done it and it was costly … I would have been in the mix very easily if I did that.”
But there is this comforting thought, which is as good as it gets right now.
“Every day is better. I think tomorrow will be even better,” he said. “But it’s really in the past week that I’ve started feeling normal.”
Just like starting over …
It’s been far too long since Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps have been seen in competition … anywhere, really. So much so that the reigning World pairs champions have decided the Canadian Championships will mark a whole new chapter in this current season.
“I really feel like we’re starting the season over. I feel like we’ve metaphorically pressed control-alt-delete and we’re restarting,” said Stellato-Dudek. “So this felt like the first competition of the year again … It was a step in the right direction. I have not done a throw like that in months, which was really irritating. But other than that, it was pretty good.”
What has them feeling that way is everything we talked about on Thursday. The flu-like virus that hit Deschamps like a brick wall, forcing he and his partner to withdraw from the Grand Prix Final in December. It was weeks before he was physically capable of training full-on again, though that hasn’t been an issue since the beginning of the new year. But competition-wise, the duo hasn’t been seen since the Grand Prix event in Finland in mid-November.
“We had this really long break in the middle of the season, which normally never happens,” said Stellato-Dudek. “Everything is usually two weeks, two weeks, two weeks … I feel like it’s been so long since we competed and you have to dust off the competition muscle. I feel like we’re starting over at Autumn Classic again.”
And what better place to do than close to home before a supportive crowd at Place Bell in Laval. It was like 2024 Worlds on a smaller level for them, but welcomed all the same.
“We really felt support from all of the crowd, so that was fun,” said Deschamps. “We are happy with what we did tonight. We still have some things to work (on) … but a lot of good stuff tonight.”
The score they produced (76.31) was good enough for a healthy lead over Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud (70.43). Another Montreal-based team, Kelly Ann Laurin and Loucas Ethier (63.10), stands third. And if that order looks familiar … it’s exactly the way the podium looked a year ago in Calgary.
Pereira and Michaud were stoked to crack the 70-point barrier in a short program for the first time anywhere in competition.
“With a 70, that’s a new PB for us. We hit 66.9 in China, so I guess three points (higher), but still really big for us and the component aspect,” said Pereira.
Laurin and Ethier had biggest home support of any team in the pairs event, with more than 100 of their family, friends and fellow skaters in the house. The cheering certainly made an impression on them both, with Laurin being reduced to tears by the roar they heard at the finish.
“Today was really, really fun and insanely loud,” said Ethier. “I’m not going to say it was as loud as Worlds but honestly, really, really close, with a lot less people. The crowd was really good and we wanted to put on a show.”
It’s the Lia Cho show
She’s a 4-foot-5 dynamo with an affinity for cheese pizza, French fries … and turtles. In other words, just your typical 12-year-old, right?
Until Lia Cho straps on a pair of figure skates, that is. Then she just shines and reminds everyone what an absolute prodigy she is on the ice.
The bright young star of Canadian skating won the national junior title in record fashion on Friday afternoon, lapping the field with a free skate that included a breath-taking seven triple jumps. She got it all started with a sharp triple Lutz-triple toe combination that, for awhile now, has become standard among the most elite of senior skaters. And Cho is still years away from competing at that level.
“It’s pretty remarkable,” said Scott Davis, her coach at the Calalta Figure Skating Club in Calgary. “Not only the daily training that she does, but when she gets into a situation like this, you can see that she really enjoys it, loves it and turns on the performance aspect. She’s quite amazing.”
Cho’s 124.60 score for her “Romeo and Juliet” free skate was more than 20 points better than the rest of the field and her 188.79 overall total established a new Canadian junior record. The old standard bearer? That would be Cho herself, who earned that distinction at the Skate Canada Challenge in Winnipeg in December, when her 186.50 total surpassed the previous record set by Kaiya Ruiter (179.92) in 2021.
Ruiter is Cho’s former training mate in Calgary and one of her idols. Cho was one of the ice patchers at nationals at WinSport last year when Ruiter won her first Canadian senior title (Ruiter won her national junior title in 2020 at age 13). Now she’s breaking her records. Not that Cho sees things like that as a big priority for her.
“It felt amazing. But it’s not about beating anything, it’s just about showing what you did or how much you love the sport,” she said. “Just to perform in front of everyone and show everyone what I’ve been working on, and just performing in front of people.”
While Canadian crowds have enjoyed what they’ve seen from Cho — they bathed her in a standing ovation on Friday — the rest of the world will have to wait. Because of her August birthday, Cho won’t be eligible to compete at the World Junior Championships until 2027 (skaters must be at least 13 years old on July 1 the year before that competition).
As poised as Cho appears on the ice or in front of media, she did admit to a bit of nerves before she skated Friday. Clearly, she conquered those.
“I was really nervous,” she said. “But Scott said ‘take a deep breath’ and then I could skate. And I was really happy. Then I wasn’t nervous at all.”
If you wondering, Cho’s victory didn’t make her the youngest ever to become Canadian junior women’s champion. That honour still belongs to Canadian skating legend Barbara Ann Scott. The 1948 Olympic champion was 11 when she became national junior champion in 1939.
What’s up on Saturday
It’s a senior show the rest of the way at Place Bell, with all four disciplines on display on Saturday. For those not in the building, the event is being streamed live on skatecanada.ca and CBC Gem.
11:30 a.m. — Senior women’s short program
2:20 p.m. — Senior rhythm dance
4:50 p.m. — Senior men’s free program
7:55 p.m. — Senior pairs free program
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