Competitor Blog – 2013 Canadians

Ice-dance.com is pleased to have senior competitor Nicole Orford blogging for IDC from the 2013 Canadian Tire National Figure Skating Championships.

January 20, 2013 – Athlete Blog 2: Wrapping up the Weekend

Hello again everyone, sorry this is so much later than I hoped. I had planned to do a post for every day but things just got so busy!

Just a warning, this one might be a long one! Everything that happened before yesterday seems boring in comparison now, but I’ll fill you in anyways.

Friday (Day 2)
On Friday we had another two practices, that was three days ago and I barely remember them by now. Out of the two of us, Thomas is the one with the memory for these kinds of things :p. You could ask me what our score was from this event, let alone past events, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Anyways, I’m pretty sure the two practices went well since nothing bad really sticks out in my mind other than a close call with Paul and Piper, which was my bad… oops!

I was able to catch the men’s short on Friday and was very proud of my BC teammate, Liam Firus, for his first ever triple axel in competition! Liam and I have grown up together in skating. As he would say, we did our “first ever international together” in Calgary at the CODA competition back in 2003 (needless to say it was not an international.. these were the pre-juvenile days when I was still free skating). Since then it seems like our skating career paths have been parallel. We competed at our first ever JGP together in 2009 in Minsk, Belarus. The next season we competed and won our first JGP medals in Sheffield, England. We won our next and only other JGP medals together the following year in Brisbane, Australia. We were both Canadian Junior champions (he beat me to it by one year). We did our last ever JGP together (and bombed miserably) but we were able to redeem ourselves at our last ever Jr. Worlds back in Minsk, Belarus, where our real international careers began. We both finished 6th last year at nationals, less than a point away from 5th and the national team. This year the goal for both him and Thomas and I was to make national team, which we did! So there is some rather useless background history for you. :p

Also in the men’s short, my heart broke for fellow teammate and good friend Jeremy Ten for his 7th place short program, meaning he would not be in the final flight the next day. Thomas and I were in that position last year and it’s not fun 🙁

This moves us to….. Saturday! FINALLY the competition began for us! Thomas and I were very pleased with how our short dance went. The crowd at the Hershey Center was fantastic, so energetic, and we loved that they clapped along to our country short dance. It really makes a difference when the audience responds that way. When an audience claps along to our music, it makes us feel like we’re doing our jobs as performers. Our goal was to break 60 points in the short dance which we accomplished.

Sunday: Nobody likes waking up early on a Sunday morning, but unfortunately that’s what the schedule called for. Luckily I had enough time to take a quick nap between practice and competition since the baby in the room next door to me decided to spend half the night wailing and screaming, keeping me up all night. While cooling down after our practice, it felt so weird to be congratulating all the men’s, ladies, and pairs skaters, who were there for their gala practices. Knowing that they had been done since yesterday and we still had one more to go was such an unfamiliar feeling to me. I have never been the last event to finish before, but I think I did an okay job at staying focused on the competition.

Now came the time to compete… finally. I have never skated for such a packed house (except for maybe in Japan, but I think skating for a home crowd is a little different, even though the Japanese fans are absolutely incredible!). I had so much fun skating the free dance! And Thomas and I (and Megan and Aaron) were all so happy with our scores. Our goal was to break 90 in the free and we met that goal.

The exhibition gala was a complete gong show. Since we had no idea we would be skating in it, I had no dress to wear. Fortunately, one of the moms was able to run back to the hotel and get me Caelen Dalmer’s short dance dress. We learned the finale number backstage as the show was starting and had all of 10 minutes to re-learn our own show number from NHK (which even there we kind of had no idea what we were doing). Needless to say our exhibition performance was far from perfect but we had fun anyways! We had a lot of fun skating in the finale number as well, I’m just glad I managed to remember all the choreography! I think (I hope) that the audience had fun too!

Placing 3rd exceeded all of our expectations for this weekend. I am still in shock. We were all very surprised. Thomas and I realize that all of our competitors are extremely talented and beautiful skaters, but some unfortunate mistakes were made, which allowed a door to be opened for Thomas and I, and it all came down to consistency. Thomas and I are very proud of how we skated and our bronze medal.

Standing on the podium next to Tessa and Scott is something I thought I would never get to experience. We are absolutely over the moon. We are so looking forward to competing at Four Continents in Japan.

Thomas and I would like to thank all of the volunteers at the 2013 Canadian National Figure Skating championships, as well as the fans who came out to watch all the events! Us athletes could never do it without you. I would like to congratulate all the athletes who competed this week and hope to see you all next year! And finally I would like to thank Melanie Hoyt and ice-dance.com for giving me this opportunity to be a guest blogger for them!

-N

January 19, 2013  – Athlete Blog: Day 1 (for me at least)

Melanie at ice-dance.com has asked me to be a guest blogger for them this weekend at Canadians. I’ll admit I’m a little nervous, but I’m also very excited to be blogging for ice-dance.com!!!

Let me start out by saying a HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to my fellow ice dancers and team mates Spencer Soo/Danielle Wu, Brianna Dalmaestro/Graeme Gordon and Alexa Linden/Tyler Miller for sweeping the novice dance podium!

Alright, so, as senior dance is the last event this weekend we were the last of the team BC/YT members to arrive. We flew in Wednesday evening. As we turned on our phones we were eager to find out how our junior dancers had done in the short dance and we were pleased to find out that they were sitting in 2nd and 3rd. Later in the team room we watched the final flight of Junior Ladies compete where I’m happy to say fellow BC/YT Teammate Larkyn Austman took the gold!! But I’m not going to count this as my “day 1”.

Day 1 starts on Thursday, our first day of practice. We had one unofficial practice in the morning and one official practice. On our first practice it was just Thomas and I and our friends and teammates Larissa Van As and Troy Shindle. Later we had our official practice. We were on the ice with the others skating in the final flight and the energy on practice was fantastic! More of a sense of camaraderie then that of competitors, although I’m sure that will change as the days progress :p. I am so excited, proud and honored to be skating in the final flight with such amazing skaters for the short dance this year at Canadians, even though the event is such a small event. Thomas and I spent most of the season hoping that we would be skating in the final flight for the Short Dance (and hopefully the free!) this year.

Thursday evening we watched the end of the junior dance event. Having both our BC teams skate back to back could be one of the most emotionally intense and stressful things I’ve ever experienced. As one of the older skaters at our rink I feel like I’m their big sister (in Maddies case, we used to actually be confused as sisters before I started dying my hair). Since I’ve known all four of our junior dancers since they basically were babies, I feel such a sense of pride when I watch them… #proudmama. Caelen and Shane had the perfect ending to their season, after a series of unfortunate events that have always seemed to keep them off the podium at nationals they finally made it! And I couldn’t be happier for them! I was a blubbering mess after they skated but I calmed down enough to be able to see Maddie and Zhao Kai through my tears. Both our teams skated beautifully and Maddie and Zhao Kai took the gold, I’m so proud of both of them!

Then it set in…… all the BC dancers are done competing and we haven’t even started… and we didn’t even get to start the next day!

Just another day of two practices which I’ll write about tomorrow!

That’s it for now, thanks for reading! 🙂

Cheers,
N