Canadian Pairs 2017/2018 Season News and Updates

Do you have to qualify to compete at Skate Canada Challenge? If so, are there any exceptions?
 
jlmart said:
Do you have to qualify to compete at Skate Canada Challenge? If so, are there any exceptions?
Click to expand...

The answer is yes, there is a qualifying process, but usually, in pair, there is not enough competitors so everybody could move to the next level.

Selection Criteria and Qualifying System
Skate Canada Sectionals
Sectional events are held for juvenile, pre-novice, novice, junior and senior competitors. For pre-novice, novice, junior and senior competitors, these are the qualifying competitions for Skate Canada Challenge. Sectional competitions are held annually in each of the 10 Sections.

Juvenile competitors at the Skate Canada Sectionals do not progress any further.

The top placements in pre-novice, novice junior and senior advance to the Skate Canada Challenge.

Section BC/YK AB/NT/NU SK MB ON QC NB PE NS NL
Pre-Novice and Novice 4 4 3 3 16 8 3 3 3 3
Junior and Senior 3 3 2 2 15 8 2 2 2 2
Skate Canada Challenge
This competition qualifies athletes for the Canadian Figure Skating Championships. In novice, junior and senior events a maximum of 18 men, 18 women, 12 pairs and 15 ice dance teams.

Pre-novice competitors do not progress to the Canadian Figure Skating Championships and the winners will be declared the Pre-Novice Champion of Canada.

Byes
Byes may be granted through sectional or challenge level of competition. The granting of a bye permits a skater to pass to the next level of competition without competing at a prerequisite level. Byes are classified as: (1) Automatic when granted to all skaters or teams in a given situation (e.g. the competitors who placed first, second and third nationally in senior the previous year), (2) Individual when granted to a particular skater for medical or international assignment reasons.

For example, if there are two senior women byes awarded then a maximum of 16 women only could qualify at the Skate Canada Challenge for the Canadian Figure Skating Championships, where a total field of 18 women would be entered.
 
Registration for Souvenir Georges-Ethier are closed. Not many pairs in the higher levels.

In Senior, Dana/Paradis from Korea are alone.

In Junior, there will be the Frantz, Lévesque/Hudon and Wang/Howe (USA)

Only 4 pairs in Novice. Confirming Forest/Foster are out for the year (Foster injury) and Roy/Guay are probably splitting (too many concussions). Still some chances Samir Andjorin with his new partner to be at the next event. So for now we will have
Perreault/Pierro
Pouliot/Simard
Turbide/St-Louis
Bergeron/Labelle

6 pré-novice couple and 3 juvenile. I'm expecting Audelin-Dubé/Éthier to take the lead. The others may have some potential but are younger.
 
Congrats to Walsh & Michaud for winning the bronze medal at the JGP in Riga, Latvia today. They won the freeskate but were a bit behind so didn't finish first overall but still a great result. Love that the JGPF is in play as that would be really nice for a Canadian team to make the finals in pairs.

And congrats to Choinard & Ostiguy who had to deal with massive music problems in the free to finish 7th overall. They got all their risk elements except the throw triple sal. Mathieu is developing into a fine pairs skater and Chloe keeps improving each time she goes out there.
 
Walsh and Michaud missed the silver by one second - the time violation deduction in the short program (they ended up .2 out of second).
A really nice thing in the free skate - Trennt's sister, a member of the Canadian forces who must be stationed nearby, was there to watch with a number of her colleagues and see her brother win a medal.
 
I for one am thrilled that Sydney Kolodziej & Maxime Deschamps got the host pick for Skate Canada as I've been a fan of Max's skating for a long time now and thought they looked great last night in the SP from Salt Lake City and were under-marked. So looking forward to seeing them in person in a few weeks in Regina and I promise not to fangirl too much :p
 
Is Justine Brasseur now skating with Spencer Howe?

My mistake - I gather they are both training at the same rink in Montreal which is why they are pictured together.
 
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There is an article about Seguin and Bilodeau in the Journal de Quebec today. It is in French, but if my French translation skills are correct, some highlights are:

- They would love to go to Olys, but are trying to not think about February yet and take things one step at a time.

- They are thrilled about Worlds 2020 being in Montreal; Josee Picard, their coach, thinks that will be their time as she predicts only two teams in the current world top ten will still be skating competitively after this season.

- Julianne estimates that over the past year, they were probably only able to spend about two months total actually healthy and practicing full elements, because she had to recover from multiple concussions. (It says "a series of concussions", so I guess at least two?)

- They feel they have learned from these injuries and the time they had to spend out of competition.

Bonne chance to Julianne and Charlie at Autumn Classic! :cheer2:
 
I'm not exactly a writer, so I won't win any bonus points for style - but here's my attempt at a translation:

They stand to become the first dyed-in-the-wool Québecois pairs team to participate in the Olympic Games in 20 years, but Julianne Séguin and Charlie Bilodeau aren't letting themselves get carried away just yet.

It's not because of snobbishness or disinterest that this 'team of the future' for figure skating in Canada won't let themselves be blinded by the Olympic rings shining in the distance. Their reticence comes rather from wisdom and good sense, a surprising attitude coming from these two athletes in their early 20s, who have been working together for less than 5 years.

"Everything in its own time", as Bilodeau told us a few times, just before the start of the Autumn Classic, which will take place at the Sportplexe in Pierrefonds, from Thursday to Saturday.

And yet, these two partners are indeed knocking on the door of the Pyeongchang Games. Canada will send 3 pairs to the Olympic competition, and this pair from Québec is among the 4 most likely candidates, including Megan Duhamel and Eric Radford, world champions in 2015 and 2016, who are virtual locks for the team.

An Olympic season can be hard on the nerves when you're a candidate for the Canadian team. Each major result from the current and previous season will be considered by the High Performance Committee, but it will be Nationals, taking place in Vancouver from January 8 to 14, that will carry the most weight when nominating the team that will go to Korea.

"Right now, it's only September, and we're not thinking about February yet. We've always taken this approach each year", says Bilodeau, who counts some of their successes on the international stage as proof, starting with their silver medal at Junior Worlds in 2015.

This foresight comes from what was a difficult second half of their season last winter, which resulted from a series of concussions suffered by Julianne Séguin. The season began well, notably with their victory at Skate America in October. Added to their first place finish at the Autumn Classic, their performance during the first few months of the season merited a nomination to the team for the World Championships in Finland last March, even though they had to skip the Nationals in Ottawa, as a result of Julianne's first concussion.

"It's an experience that has helped us to grow", says the 24-year-old skater.
"Every journey is different, but no one can ever take away the experience that we've gained. We would never wish for injury, and of course we would hope for an easy path, but that doesn't always happen. Despite everything we've been through, we've made it, and we have grown and learned from it", says her partner, who estimates that the pair has only had a total of about 2 "healthy" months of training since January.

Carey Price and Jonathan Drouin will have to share the goodwill they receive at the Bell Centre, as Julianne Séguin and Charlie Bilodeau have already taken out an "option" on the building, in advance of the World Figure Skating Championships to be held there in 2020.

The "pair of the future" for Skate Canada will be in the spotlight at home on Thursday morning, when the national federation will confirm what we have known since June: The Bell Centre has been awarded this prestigious event by the ISU, to be held from March 16-22, 2020.

In the face of the uncertain future of Olympic and World champions, such as Patrick Chan and teams Megan Duhamel and Eric Radford or Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, much of the promotion surrounding the Montreal Worlds will fall on the Québecois duo, already in line to participate in the upcoming Olympics despite their young age. Their presence at the announcement this morning already confirms it.

"This is a team who will definitely be thinking about Worlds in 2020. In two years, most of the current top teams won't be around anymore. From the current top 10, I'd say there might be two left", observes their coach, Josée Picard.

You need to have lived the Worlds from the inside to really get a feeling for this level of competition. Séguin and Bilodeau have already been twice; in Helsinki last spring, where they finished 11th at the end of a season marked by injury, and in Shanghai in 2015, with their surprising 8th place finish, even though they had been skating as juniors up until that point.

The memory of skating in front of 18,000 spectators in an almost religious silence at the Shanghai Oriental Sports Centre still lives on with them. "We had the best performance of our entire career", recalls Julianne Séguin, who was only 18 at the time.
 
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That Muse program does not come across well when there's lots of mistakes. It's too late for a new program isn't it?
 
Is the problem really the program? they had a lot of success with it and it probably feels like visiting an old friend...
It's odd to see meg fall like that ... uncharacteristic for sure
 
clairecloutier said:
Muse 2.0 gets a bumpy debut
https://bevsmithwrites.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/muse-2-0-gets-a-bumpy-debut/
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Thanks for the link! :COP:
They are puzzled, both of them. “We need to go back and make some changes so we can access it,” Radford said.

If they were to mess up once in a while, no big deal. But nightmares keep happening.

They shown the program in front of judges three times, once at a training camp, once in front of judge monitors and here. Each time, with somebody watching, and they’ve put the program all together in once piece, everything goes pear-shaped.
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Interesting... Watching the program yesterday, I felt like the element placement in the first half of the program didn't work as well for me as a viewer as the Muse 1.0 layout, although of course that might've been because of the falls and D/R skating off-kilter. Anyway... Based on this interview, I wouldn't be surprised if they tweaked the layout to resemble Muse 1.0 more but I also wouldn't be surprised if they do an Aljona and change their program.
 
I'm sure they are seriously frustrated. I'm hearing they are practicing both programs quite well and do many clean run throughs. My open question is that does that create unrealistic expectations for perfection in competitive skates...? That on top of all the other stuff that weighs on your mind going into an Olympic year.

I was at camp and saw the long there. Worse disaster if you can believe it, including Meg tripping and falling building speed for a lift that consequently never happened. All four jumps were doubles, falls, hand down. A mixed bag of merde.

In this skate the 3Z mistake was a fluke and something she never does. Falling hard like that has got to completely wreck your concentration. I wasn't surprised that the whole program failed after that mistake. When a freak accident happens that you don't plan for or ever do in practice, it's hard to regain focus. If she just put her hand down I think we have a very different program that follows. So to me I don't look at it as a bad skate in totality, but rather one freak accident that is unlikely to happen again.

They will assess and come back strong at SC.
 
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FWIW, I love S/B's programs this year. Both of them. Love them even more given I was totally over both programs last year.

Really sucks about their injuries this cycle that have prevented them from upgrading their technical elements. Regardless, I want to see them and D/R make Korea. As for the third spot, whoever skates for it I'm good with. Love both teams although I'm so not feeling I/M's long. Love THEM, but that long is borderline horrible, other than the crescendo throw lutz at the end. Le sigh.
 
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"Radford said they’ve been having troubles trying to translate stellar training efforts of their free skate to Muse into competition success. “In the last little bit, we’ve done five run-throughs and to be honest they’ve all been like this,” he said. “ Just lots of misses. And lots of bizarre misses."
yup i stand corrected ... they need a new program..... yikes
 
Rock2 said:
FWIW, I love S/B's programs this year. Both of them. Love them even more given I was total over both programs last year.

Really sucks about their injuries this cycle that have prevented them from upgrading their technical elements. Regardless, I want to see them and D/R make Korea. As for the third spot, whoever skates for it I'm good with. Love both teams although I'm so not feeling I/M's long. Love THEM, but that long is borderline horrible, other than the crescendo throw lutz at the end. Le sigh.
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Where did you see their long ? I haven't seen anything and I am dying waiting.
 
Saw it at Thornhill. ETA @clairecloutier could be right...might have been at camp. I attended both but only saw it once (somehow). Can't remember which. Billy Vera and the Beaters. "At this Moment". 80s tune.

Judges love THEM (what's not to love?). So they could skate to the sound of a cat accidentally backing into a fan and the judges would throw marks at them.
 
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Did they skate an ex there off-schedule? The competition was streamed and they only competed in the short.
 
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