Tara Lipinski, Johnny Weir preview World Championships men’s, pairs events

Javier Fernandez, Yuzuru Hanyu
0 Comments

The last time Yuzuru Hanyu skated in Shanghai, he fell five times during his performance, with a bandage wrapped around his head and a blood-stained chin on Nov. 8.

The Olympic champion is back in the Chinese city this week, looking to become the first Japanese skater to repeat as World champion.

“He’s had quite a challenging season with a number of obstacles,” said his coach, two-time Canadian Olympic silver medalist Brian Orser, according to The Associated Press. “But each time he seems to bounce back.”

RELATED: World Championships schedule

In November, Hanyu and China’s Yan Han collided violently in a warm-up at a Grand Prix series event in Shanghai.

Hanyu, 20, was checked by medical staff and performed his free skate less than an hour later, finishing second overall despite fall, after fall, after fall, after fall, after fall.

He returned to Japan the next day, being wheeled through an airport in front of many fans. Three weeks later, Hanyu fell on jumps in both of his programs at his next competition and finished fourth.

Still, he snuck into December’s Grand Prix Final, the biggest competition this season outside the World Championships.

At the Grand Prix Final, Hanyu again fell in both of his programs. Yet he still won by a whopping 34.26 points.

Then came his next problem, bladder surgery that kept him off the ice in January.

Despite all that, both NBC Olympics analysts Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir tapped Hanyu as the favorite at Worlds this week.

“Hanyu was so strong at the Grand Prix Final, and despite making the one mistake [the fall], he was in such good form, so classy and so dignified, and skating a way that an Olympic champion should skate,” Weir said. “It will be hard for anyone to overtake him because he is so respected by the judges and the International Skating Union.”

If anyone can deny Hanyu, Lipinski and Weir agreed it’s Kazakhstan’s Denis Ten, the Olympic bronze medalist who won the Four Continents Championship in Seoul in February.

Ten’s total score at Four Continents — 289.46 — would have beaten Hanyu at the Grand Prix Final, but Ten didn’t qualify for the Grand Prix Final due to early season struggles.

“When [Ten] is on, it’s magical,” Lipinski said. “He sets himself apart from the group because he is the all-around skater. He has every part of the package. He has the speed, the quads [jumps], the beautiful quality of his skating.”

Another rival is Spain’s Javier Fernandez, who took second to Hanyu at the Grand Prix Final and is the two-time reigning World bronze medalist. But Fernandez’s best skating this season hasn’t rivaled Hanyu or Ten at their best.

Then there are the three Americans, who are unlikely to grab the first U.S. men’s medal since Evan Lysacek‘s gold in 2009 but hopeful of retaining three berths for the 2016 World Championships in Boston.

Lipinski and Weir agree that’s a very reachable goal. The top two U.S. men, out of Jason Brown, Adam Rippon and Joshua Farris, must have combined placements equal to or better than 13 to attain it. For example, Brown to finish sixth and Rippon seventh.

The best American may be Farris, even though he was third at the U.S. Championships in January and is making his senior Worlds debut. The 2013 World junior champion could have won the U.S. title had he not mistakenly put three double toe loops in his free skate at Nationals.

Farris, 20, took a planned quad jump out of his short program due to boot issues, but he is coming off a breathtaking second-place performance at Four Continents.

“Josh is proving that he has staying power,” Lipinski said. “He is a breath of fresh air. The style he skates in, the way that he feels the music. He’s in tune with his performances and brings a very different style than someone like Jason.”

RELATED: Farris expects Worlds perfection, four months after embarrassment

Brown, also 20, in January became the youngest U.S. champion since 2004 and in Sochi became the youngest U.S. Olympic men’s singles skater since 1976.

He will not put a quad jump in either program in Shanghai, after two-footing a landing on his first in-competition quad attempt at Four Continents. That might be a decision that hangs with Brown beyond Worlds and into next season.

“Once you do [a quad] once, at your very first event, and it doesn’t go too well, then taking it out and not trying it, all summer it becomes this elephant in the room, and you can blow it out in your mind,” Lipinski said. “It becomes tough to overcome.”

RELATED: Brown explains quad decision for Worlds

Then there’s Rippon, a two-time World junior champion making his third Worlds appearance and first since 2012. Rippon has a quad Lutz in his arsenal, but landing it and keeping the rest of his program intact is far from a sure thing.

“He doesn’t have the consistency,” Lipinski said. “It’s all about the mental game.”

A U.S. pair could finish higher at Worlds than the best U.S. man for the first time since 2011. U.S. champions Alexa Scimeca and Chris Knierim boast a quad twist and were fifth at Four Continents, against a field of the top U.S., Canadian and Chinese pairs.

Throw in the Russians this week, but Scimeca and Knierim are aiming for the top six. That would match or better the best U.S. finish in pairs since 2006.

“It’s realistic, but for me they’re a team that if they do make a mistake and start to get sloppy, it upsets the whole performance,” Lipinski said.

Lipinski, Weir preview Worlds women’s, ice dance events

Swiss extend best streak in curling history; Norway continues epic winter sports season

Switzerland Women Curling
Getty
0 Comments

Switzerland’s Silvana Tirinzoni extended the most dominant run in world curling championships history, skipping a women’s team to a fourth consecutive title and pushing an unbeaten streak to 36 consecutive games.

Tirinzoni, along with Alina Pätz (who throws the last stones), Carole Howald and Briar Schwaller-Hürlimann, beat Norway 6-3 in Sunday’s final in Sandviken, Sweden.

They went 14-0 for the tournament after a Swiss team also skipped by Tirinzoni also went 14-0 to win the 2022 World title. Tirinzoni’s last defeat in world championship play came during round-robin in 2021 at the hands of Swede Anna Hasselborg, the 2018 Olympic champion.

In all, Tirinzoni’s Swiss are 42-1 over the last three world championships and 45-1 in world championship play dating to the start of the 2019 playoffs. Tirinzoni also skipped the Swiss at the last two Olympics, finishing seventh and then fourth.

Tirinzoni, a 43-year-old who has worked as a project management officer for Migros Bank, is the lone female skip to win three or more consecutive world titles.

The lone man to do it is reigning Olympic champion Niklas Edin of Sweden, who goes for a fifth in a row next week in Ottawa. Edin’s teams lost at least once in round-robin play in each of their four title runs.

Norway extended its incredible winter sports season by earning its first world medal in women’s curling since 2005.

Norway has 53 medals, including 18 golds, in world championships in Winter Olympic program events this season, surpassing its records for medals and gold medals at a single edition of a Winter Olympics (39 and 16).

A Canadian team skipped by Kerri Einarson took bronze. Canada has gone four consecutive women’s worlds without making the final, a record drought for its men’s or women’s teams.

A U.S. team skipped by Olympian Tabitha Peterson finished seventh in round-robin, missing the playoffs by one spot.

OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!

Ilia Malinin eyed new heights at figure skating worlds, but a jump to gold requires more

0 Comments

At 18 years old, Ilia Malinin already has reached immortality in figure skating for technical achievement, being the first to land a quadruple Axel jump in competition.

The self-styled “Quadg0d” already has shown the chutzpah (or hubris?) to go for the most technically difficult free skate program ever attempted at the world championships, including that quad Axel, the hardest jump anyone has tried.

It helped bring U.S. champion Malinin the world bronze medal Saturday in Saitama, Japan, where he made more history as the first to land the quad Axel at worlds.

But it already had him thinking that the way to reach the tops of both the worlds and Olympus might be to acknowledge his mortal limits.

Yes, if Malinin (288.44 points) had cleanly landed all six quads he did instead of going clean on just three of the six, it would have closed or even overcome the gap between him and repeat champion Shoma Uno of Japan (301.14) and surprise silver medalist Cha Jun-Hwan (296.03), the first South Korean man to win a world medal.

That’s a big if, as no one ever has done six clean quads in a free skate.

And the energy needed for those quads, physical and mental, hurts Malinin’s chances of closing another big gap with the world leaders: the difference in their “artistic” marks, known as component scores.

Malinin’s technical scores led the field in both the short program and free skate. But his component scores were lower than at last year’s worlds, when he finished ninth, and they ranked 10th in the short program and 11th in the free this time. Uno had an 18.44-point overall advantage over Malinin in PCS, Cha a 13.47 advantage.

FIGURE SKATING WORLDS: Chock, Bates, and a long road to gold | Results

As usual in figure skating, some of the PCS difference owes to the idea of paying your dues. After all, at his first world championships, eventual Olympic champion Nathan Chen had PCS scores only slightly better than Malinin’s, and Chen’s numbers improved substantially by the next season.

But credit Malinin for quickly grasping the reality that his current skating has a lot of rough edges on the performance side.

“I’ve noticed that it’s really hard to go for a lot of risks,” he said in answer to a press conference question about what he had learned from this competition. “Sometimes going for the risks you get really good rewards, but I think that maybe sometimes it’s OK to lower the risks and go for a lot cleaner skate. I think it will be beneficial next season to lower the standards a bit.”

So could it be “been-there, done-that” with the quad Axel? (and the talk of quints and quad-quad combinations?)

Saturday’s was his fourth clean quad Axel in seven attempts this season, but it got substantially the lowest grade of execution (0.36) of the four with positive marks. It was his opening jump in the four-minute free, and, after a stopped-in-your tracks landing, his next two quads, flip and Lutz, were both badly flawed.

And there were still some three minutes to go.

Malinin did not directly answer about letting the quad Axel go now that he has definitively proved he can do it. What he did say could be seen as hinting at it.

“With the whole components factor … it’s probably because you know, after doing a lot of these jumps, (which) are difficult jumps, it’s really hard to try to perform for the audience,” he said.

“Even though some people might enjoy jumping, and it’s one of the things I enjoy, but I also like to perform to the audience. So I think next season, I would really want to focus on this performing side.”

Chen had told me essentially the same thing for a 2017 Ice Network story (reposted last year by NBCOlympics.com) about his several years of ballet training. He regretted not being able to show that training more because of the program-consuming athletic demands that come with being an elite figure skater.

“When I watch my skating when I was younger, I definitely see all this balletic movement and this artistry come through,” Chen said then. “When I watch my artistry now, it’s like, ‘Yes, it’s still there,’ but at the same time, I’m so focused on the jumps, it takes away from it.”

The artistry can still be developed and displayed, as Chen showed and as prolific and proficient quad jumpers like Uno and the now retired two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan have proved.

For another perspective on how hard it is to combine both, look at the difficulty it posed for the consummate performer, Jason Brown, who had the highest PCS scores while finishing a strong fifth (280.84).

Since Brown dropped his Sisyphean attempts to do a clean quad after 26 tries (20 in a free skate), the last at the 2022 U.S. Championships, he has received the two highest international free skate scores of his career, at the 2022 Olympics and this world meet.

It meant Brown’s coming to terms with his limitations and the fact that in the sport’s current iteration, his lack of quads gives him little chance of winning a global championship medal. What he did instead was give people the chance to see the beauty of his blade work, his striking movement, his expressiveness.

He has, at 28, become an audience favorite more than ever. And the judges Saturday gave Brown six maximum PCS scores (10.0.)

“I’m so happy about today’s performance,” Brown told media in the mixed zone. “I did my best to go out there and skate my skate. And that’s what I did.”

The quadg0d is realizing that he, too, must accept limitations if he wants to achieve his goals. Ilia Malinin can’t simply jump his way onto the highest steps of the most prized podiums.

Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at the last 12 Winter Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCSports.com.

OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!