Skating Siblings #2: Caroline & Gordon Green

by Daphne Backman

For Caroline & Gordon Green, skating runs in the family. Their father, Richard Green, loved to skate as a child in upstate New York, and he wanted his children to enjoy skating as well.

When they were five and seven years old, respectively, Richard took Caroline and Gordon to public skating sessions to get them used to the ice. While Gordon liked to skate around the rink really fast, Caroline would skate to the music in the middle of the rink.

 “Gordon started taking Basic Skills lessons at our local rink in Rockville, Md., because he wanted to play hockey,” Mary Green, their mother, said.“When Gordon made it to the Basic 3 class, Caroline was tired of watching, so we put her on the ice in the class below him.”Elena Novak and Dmytri Ilin, coaches from the Wheaton Ice Skating Academy (WISA), were teaching those two classes. When the coaches found out they were brother and sister, Novak and Ilin approached Mary about having both kids join the academy.

When the Greens joined WISA, the coaches taught them separately at first, but after three months, they put them together as a team and they have been having fun ever since.

“We really enjoy learning new choreography each season from our coaches Elena and Alexei [Kiliakov],” Gordon said. “It is exciting when we get to hear the music for the first time and learn the new free dance. We also like getting new costumes.”

Caroline, now 9 years old, & Gordon, 11, attend regular school near one of their training rinks. A typical training day during the school year usually varies between one and three hours of ice time. They train six days per week, and they also have classes in ballet, off-ice conditioning, and ballroom dancing.

WISA was founded in 2003 by Kiliakov and Novak with the intention of creating a world-class ice dancing program. In recent years, the academy has produced U.S. national champions at the juvenile, intermediate, and novice levels. In addition, WISA teams have been junior national medalists and competitors at the Youth Olympic Games and the World Junior Championships.

“The junior and senior-level skaters at WISA inspire us every day with their incredible skating skills and amazing discipline,” Gordon said. “We learn by watching them do run-throughs of their programs, and they are very supportive of all the younger skaters. We feel lucky to be in such a great training environment.”

Though skating with your brother or sister can sometimes be a challenge, it also has its advantages. Younger skaters sometimes struggle with bonding with a partner that they do not know very well, but siblings do not have this problem.

“The best thing about skating with my brother is executing lifts,” Caroline said. “Since he is my older brother, I completely trust him because he’s been picking me up practically my whole life.”

“I like traveling to new cities together for competitions as a family,” Gordon said. “I (also) love the excitement of competing and visiting a museum or landmark in the cities after we compete.”

Like most non-sibling partnerships, they each label a different element as their favorite. While Gordon’s favorite element is learning and trying to master footwork, Caroline loves doing lifts the most.

Their first competition was the 2010 Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships, where they competed at the pre-juvenile level at just six and eight years old. Two and half years later, in January 2013, the duo won the U.S. national juvenile ice dancing title, an experience that they
will not soon forget.

“Our favorite skating memory is winning the juvenile gold medal in ice dance at the National Championships this year in Omaha, Neb.,” Gordon said. “We especially loved the fan fest that the people of Omaha hosted, which had a lot of kids’ games and activities. We also got to watch the senior-level skaters practice up close, and during the senior short and free dance competitions, they let us sit in the row behind the judges.”

“We also enjoyed cheering on our friends at WISA that competed in the upper levels,” Caroline added. “It was incredible to watch the Skating Spectacular which was a great ending to our experience in Omaha.”

Caroline & Gordon also have fond memories of attending the Ice Dance Camp sponsored by U.S. Figure Skating in Laurel, Md., for the past three years.

“We have enjoyed meeting other ice dancers from around the country,” Gordon said.

“Participating in the on-ice classes taught by Olympians [Tanith] Belbin, [Ben] Agosto, [Meryl] Davis and [Charlie] White, as well as the other seminars, has been an incredible opportunity for
us.”

The Greens began their first year of intermediate-level competition this summer, with terrific results already. At the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships in late July, they were decisive champions in both the pattern dances and the free dance.