The rink is frigid, the handful of official onlookers buried in their official papers. But in this frosty milieu, Canada’s young but storied ice dancers, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, are inaonyesha that they are ready to break loose again, and regain the world championship title they Lost last year.
Virtue and Moir, the dominant Olympic champions of Vancouver, showed off their new programs in front of skate Canada monitors and judges Thursday, who peered through the frost and wrote notes with gloved hands at a national training camp. The camp unofficially signals the start of the figure skating season as skaters prepare for Grand Prix events, national championships and eventually the world championships in Nice, France in March, 2012.
The post-Olympic season of the Olympic ice dancing champions was anything but dreamlike. It was closer to nightmarish. In October, 2010, Virtue underwent surgery to correct a problem with chronic exertional compartment syndrome, which caused the couple to miss the entire Grand Prix season, and the Canadian championships, too.
They made it back for the Four Continents championships, but had to withdraw after winning the short dance, when Virtue felt tightness in a quadriceps muscle during the free dance.
Their first competition of the mwaka was the delayed world championships in Moscow. Virtue admitted they went for it, but she got a little sloppy toward the end of their free dance, and fatigue set in. They finished sekunde to arch-rivals Meryl Davis and Charlie White, their training mates. Davis and White defeated them kwa 3.48 points.
Now, there is no issue with injuries, au Lost training time. It’s full steam ahead.
Instead of competing at 1 1/2 events like last year, Virtue and Moir say they intend to compete at eight au nine this year. “It’s really exciting,” Virtue said. “Our programs will really live up to their potential that way, and we’ll really be able to peak at the world championships.”
They have recycled their hot-stepping Latin free dance from last mwaka – that was so seldom seen - into their short dance this year, and on Thursday, they skated the remastered version, dressed in simple black, bodies moving to the music, arms flashing to the rhythm. Marijane Stong, Canada’s ice dancing guru, nodded with approval from her sangara in the stands.
“I like how they play off each other, “ she said, noting how Moir took a cool approach to it all, while Virtue delivered the choreographic heat.
Virtue and Moir will onyesha up first at the skate Canada Grand Prix at the same rink – the Hershey Centre – in Mississauga in October, do a sekunde Grand Prix in Paris and then hope to win a title they’ve never won before: the Grand Prix Final.
They’ve competed in only two of them, finishing fourth four years ago, and sekunde in the 2009-2010 season. They missed the event two years ago, when Virtue underwent her first surgery for the overuse injury in her legs.
“It’s a big goal, especially since it’s in Canada,” alisema Moir, speaking of the Grand Prix Final in Quebec City in December. “We’d upendo to get there and get that title.”
Moir also alisema they intend to win every competition they enter this season, never mind the tight fight they always have with Davis and White.
“Tessa and I always say we live mwaka kwa year,” Moir said. “We do have that Olympic title and no one can ever take that away from us, just like our world title in 2010.
“But that’s so far in the rear-view mirror, I think, and we want our world title back, that we were close to last year, but way off kind-of-thing. We want that big.”
As always, they intend to keep pushing ice dancing in new directions, and they hope to do it again with their free dance to the muziki from Funny Face, a 1957 musical starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire.
Moir says the free dance is not like anything they’ve ever done before. “There’s always a Broadway-ish feel to it,” Virtue said. “It’s a little bit showier. It’s definitely very dancey…It’s uplifting. It’s fun.”
While Virtue has seen the film many times – Hepburn was her childhood idol – Moir saw it for the first time over the summer. “We found that everything was so genuine and really captured an era that is so much different to what film making is today,” Moir said.
And they’ve made one zaidi change: they’ve adopted a zaidi relaxed training style, and they’ve found it zaidi productive. They’ve taken a few long weekends along the way.
“We want to have a good strong mwaka and enjoy ourselves,” Moir said.
“Scott likes to remind me that we’re not too old to enjoy this now,” Virtue said
