Hubbell, Donohue defend Skate America title to extend U.S. dance legacy

By Rachel LutzOct 19, 2019, 11:31 PM EDT

Getty

Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue extended the U.S.’ ice dance legacy Saturday evening at Skate America in Las Vegas, winning their second straight title at the event.

Hubbell and Donohue, two-time and reigning national champions, performed their free dance to selections from “A Star is Born,” scoring 124.58 points, for a total score of 209.55 points. It was their season debut and the duo are slated to compete next weekend at Skate Canada to lock up a spot in December’s prestigious Grand Prix Final.

“We were happy to put it out for the first time and looking forward to getting a lot of feedback,” Hubbell said afterward through U.S. Figure Skating. “There were good things and not so good things, and we feel like we can make a lot of progress for next week. There was a nice crowd reaction and there was a good connection between the two of us and that’s a great place to start.”

“I’m hoping to have two working lungs by Skate Canada,” added Donohue, who revealed he has bronchitis.

U.S. ice dance teams have now won 11 straight titles at Skate America, and 15 of the last 17 titles, going back to 2003.

Aleksandra Stepanova and Ivan Bukin, who sat fourth behind Hubbell and Donohue at the 2019 World Championships, finished runner-up by a 2.98-point margin. Their free dance to Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” won the phase with 124.66 points, but their overall score of 206.57 landed them in second place.

Canada’s Laurence Fornier Beaudry and Nikolaj Sorensen claimed the bronze medal. Their free dance tallied 118.36 points and they earned an overall score of 197.53 points. Until January 2018, the team represented Denmark. This Skate America bronze is their first-ever Grand Prix medal.

Skate America results are here.

The other American teams in the field finished sixth and seventh. Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko earned 180.55 total points, while Caroline Green and Michael Parsons scored 173.03. Green and Parsons were skating in their Grand Prix debut as a new team this season. Green formerly danced with her brother and Parsons was previously partnered with his sister.

“I’m very pleasantly surprised at how well she has adapted to senior,” Parsons said of Green, who last year competed on the junior level. “She has done really well and I couldn’t be happier.”

“I think that it is a challenge that I am ready for,” Green said of the change. “I’m happy to see that. I think this competition sort of solidified in myself that I’m capable of competing at the senior level. It was definitely a little confidence boost there.”

U.S. ice dance wins at Skate America:

2003: Tanith White and Ben Agosto
2004: White/Agosto
2005: White/Agosto
2007: White/Agosto
2009: White/Agosto
2010: Meryl Davis and Charlie White
2011: Davis/White
2012: Davis/White
2013: Davis/White
2014: Madison Chock and Evan Bates
2015: Chock/Bates
2016: Maia Shibutani and Alex Shibutani
2017: Shibutani/Shibutani
2018: Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue
2019: Hubbell and Donohue

MORE: How to watch Skate America | Nathan Chen, Jason Brown atop men’s field | Shcherbakova lands two quads to win ladies’ event

As a reminder, you can watch the events from the 2019-20 figure skating season live and on-demand with the ‘Figure Skating Pass’ on NBC Sports Gold. Check out a free trial of the Figure Skating Pass during Skate America from Oct. 18-20. Go to NBCsports.com/gold/figure-skating to sign up for access to every ISU Grand Prix and championship event, as well as domestic U.S. Figure Skating events throughout the season. NBC Sports Gold gives subscribers an unprecedented level of access on more platforms and devices than ever before.

OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!

Follow @rchlltz

❓ How dizzy would you get?

🔗 https://t.co/EtFjiFr7cH

#⃣ #GPFigure #FigureSkating pic.twitter.com/2e7geQcl0N

— ISU Figure Skating (@ISU_Figure) October 20, 2019

Mikaela Shiffrin finishes World Cup with one more win, two more records and a revelation

By OlympicTalkMar 19, 2023, 7:43 AM EDT

Mikaela Shiffrin finished a season defined by records with two more.

Shiffrin won the World Cup Finals giant slalom on the final day of the campaign, breaking her ties for the most career women’s giant slalom wins and most career podiums across all women’s World Cup races.

Shiffrin earned her record-extending 88th career World Cup victory, prevailing by six hundredths over Thea Louise Stjernesund of Norway combining times from two runs in Andorra on Sunday.

ALPINE SKIING WORLD CUP: Full Results

She won her 21st career GS, breaking her tie for the most all-time on the women’s World Cup with Vreni Schneider, a Swiss star of the 1980s and ’90s.

She made her 138th career World Cup podium across all events, breaking her tie for the most all-time on the women’s World Cup with Lindsey Vonn. Shiffrin earned her 138th podium in her 249th start, meaning she has finished in the top three in 55 percent of her World Cup races dating to her debut at age 15 in 2011.

Earlier this season, Shiffrin passed Vonn and then Ingemar Stenmark, a Swede of the 1970s and ’80s, for the most career Alpine skiing World Cup victories. She won 14 times from November through March, her second-best season after her record 17-win campaign of 2018-19.

In those years in between, Shiffrin endured the most difficult times of her life, was supplanted as the world’s top slalom skier and questioned her skiing like never before.

On Saturday afternoon, Shiffrin was asked what made the difference this fall and winter. There were multiple factors. She detailed one important one.

“I had a lot of problems with my memory,” she said in a press conference. “Not this season, so much, but last season and the season before that. I couldn’t remember courses. And when I was kind of going through this, I couldn’t keep mental energy for the second runs.”

Pre-race course inspection and the ability to retain that knowledge for a minute-long run over an hour later is integral to success in ski racing. Shiffrin is so meticulous and methodical in her training, historically prioritizing it over racing in her junior days, that inspection would seem to fit into her all-world preparation.

She didn’t understand how she lost that ability until she began working with a new sports psychologist last summer.

“That was a little bit like less focus on sports psychology and more focus on, like, psychology psychology and a little bit more grief counseling style,” she said. “Explaining what was actually going on in my brain, like chemical changes in the brain because of trauma. Not just grief, but actually the traumatic experience itself of knowing what happened to my dad, seeing him in the hospital, touching him after he was dead. Those are things that you can’t get out of your head. It had an impact. Clearly, it still does.”

Shiffrin had a “weird a-ha moment” after her first course inspection this season in November in Finland.

“I didn’t take that long to inspect, and I remembered the whole course,” she said. “Oh my gosh, I was like coming out of a cloud that I had been in for over two years.”

What followed was a win, of course, and a season that approached Shiffrin’s unrivaled 2018-19. Fourteen wins in 31 World Cup starts, her busiest season ever, and bagging the season titles in the overall, slalom and GS in runaways.

“After last season, I didn’t feel like I could get to a level with my skiing again where it was actually contending for the slalom globe,” she said. “And GS, I actually had a little bit more hope for, but then at the beginning of the season, I kind of counted myself out.

“I feel like my highest level of skiing has been higher than the previous couple of seasons, maybe higher than my whole career. My average level of skiing has been also higher than previous seasons, and my lowest level of skiing has also been higher.”

There are other reasons for the revival of dominance, though Shiffrin was also the world’s best skier last season (Olympics aside). She went out of her way on Saturday afternoon to credit her head coach of seven years, Mike Day, who left the team during the world championships after he was told he would not be retained for next season.

“He is as much a part of the success this entire season as he’s ever been,” said Shiffrin, who parted with Day to bring aboard Karin Harjo, the first woman to be her head coach as a pro.

Shiffrin’s greatest success this season began around the time she watched a a mid-December chairlift interview between retired Liechtenstein skier Tina Weirather and Italian Sofia Goggia, the world’s top downhiller. Goggia spoke about her disdain for mediocrity.

“Ever since then, pretty much every time I put on my skis, I’m like, ‘OK, don’t be mediocre today,’” Shiffrin said in January.

During the highest highs of this season, Shiffrin felt like she did in 2018-19.

“It is mind-boggling to me to be in a position again where I got to feel that kind of momentum through a season because after that [2018-19] season, I was like, this is never going to happen again, and my best days of my career are really behind me, which it was kind of sad to feel that at this point four years ago,” said Shiffrin, who turned 28 years old last week. “This season, if anything, it just proved that, take 17 wins [from 2018-19] aside or the records or all those things, it’s still possible to feel that kind of momentum.”

After one last victory Sunday, Shiffrin sat in the winner’s chair with another crystal globe and took questions from an interviewer. It was her boyfriend, Norwegian Alpine skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde.

“Excited to come back and do it again next year,” she replied to one question.

“Yeah,” he wittily replied. “You will.”

OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!

Follow @nbcolympictalk

Mikaela Shiffrin ties Lindsey Vonn record at World Cup Finals

By OlympicTalkMar 18, 2023, 11:05 AM EDT

Mikaela Shiffrin tied Lindsey Vonn‘s female record with her 137th career Alpine skiing World Cup podium, taking third place in the slalom at the World Cup Finals in Andorra on Saturday.

Shiffrin, racing for the second time since breaking Ingemar Stenmark‘s career Alpine World Cup wins record last Saturday, finished 86 hundredths behind Olympic champion Petra Vlhova of Slovakia, combining times from two runs.

Shiffrin was fourth after the first run. The top two after the first run stayed in that order after the second run — Vlhova, followed by first-time podium finisher Leona Popovic (the best World Cup finish for a Croatian woman in 16 years).

“Every single race I feel the weight of having to be one of the best in the world no matter what the day is, which is actually quite a privilege, but some days it’s quite heavy,” Shiffrin said, according to the International Ski Federation (FIS). “But today it didn’t feel heavy. It just felt like a really good opportunity.”

Six of the 22 skiers skied out of the second run on soft snow.

In Shiffrin’s previous race at the season-ending Finals, she was 14th in Thursday’s super-G, which is not one of her primary events.

ALPINE SKIING: Full Results | Broadcast Schedule

Shiffrin earned her 137th podium in her 248th start, meaning she has finished in the top three in 55 percent of her World Cup races dating to her debut at age 15 in 2011.

The only men with more Alpine World Cup podiums are the Swede Stenmark (155) and Austrian Marcel Hirscher (138).

Shiffrin’s first chance to break her tie with Vonn comes in Sunday’s giant slalom, the last race of the season, live on Peacock.

Shiffrin, who broke Vonn’s female career wins record of 82 in January, clinched season titles in the overall, GS and slalom before the Finals.

Also Saturday, Swiss Marco Odermatt won the men’s giant slalom by 2.11 seconds — the largest margin of victory in any men’s World Cup race in four years — for his 13th World Cup victory this season, tying the men’s single-season record.

He also reached 2,042 points for the season, breaking Austrian Hermann Maier‘s men’s record of 2,000 points in one season from 1999-2000.

Slovenian Tina Maze holds the overall record of 2,414 points from 2012-13.

“We partied hard on Thursday,” after winning the World Cup Finals super-G, Odermatt said, according to FIS. “Today wasn’t easy because of those damn 2,000 points. I really wanted the podium today. So, another victory, two seconds ahead, I don’t know what to say.”

OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!

Follow @nbcolympictalk

More: Olympics

More: Olympics