2016 Four Continents Blog #2 by Min & Gamelin

Hey again everyone! Welcome back to Yura Min and Alex Gamelin’s Four Continents blog for ice-dance.com.

The past two days have been pretty routine, with official practices all day. The hotel and competition venue are very nice and the event has been extremely well run. There even seems to be a surplus of volunteers.

We haven’t gotten a chance to go explore Taipei City yet, but we sure are enjoying the palm trees and temperature in the 60’s and 70’s, especially after leaving snowy Michigan in the low 20’s. Another great thing about Chinese Taipei is that bubble tea was invented here! We’ve already gone to get it twice, and wow.

This is the third time in past five seasons that the Four Continents Championships have been hosted by Chinese Taipei (it was hosted here in 2011 and 2014), so many of the athletes here have been here before. However, only a handful of these athletes were here when Taipei hosted a Junior Grand Prix in 2006: Kevin Reynolds and Takahito Mura in men, and Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje, Evan Bates (with Emily Samuelson), and Piper Gilles and Paul Poirer (with Timothy McKernan and Vanessa Crone, respectively) in ice dance.

Another exciting piece of news: this is the first time in history that Korea has three internationally competitive senior dance teams. We’re so honored to be a part of it.

Competition starts later today with the short dance and ladies and pairs short programs, so don’t miss our next update from Taipei!

~ Yura & Alex