Pairs will rebuild quickly.
Charlie will be back at nationals next year with likely Lubov, while Julianne is expected to repartner to compete at nationals next year based on her latest comments.
If B/B continue their trajectory we'll quite quickly be bemoaning the fact that we have elite pairs that have to stay home from world's as we don't have enough slots. Not worried.
Forgive me for being pessimistic, but I am not as hopeful. If Charlie ends up skating with Lubov, my prediction is that the same jump troubles will plague her and that they either won't last long or will not make a huge impact. Julianne finding a partner that is of equal calibre to her
and staying healthy enough to be able to put in the hard work to make it in a new partnership is something I greatly hope for, but odds are not great. Brasseur/Bardei have already been plagued with injury issues and who knows if he'll get his SBS jumps together for them to progress to their potential. Most of the junior teams that have potential are too young (or at least have girls that are too young) to compete as seniors for a few years, at least internationally. Maybe I'll be wrong and B&B will rise quickly or a new partnership will make a big impact fast, but if I was putting money on it, I'd say that this is going to be a weak quad for Canadian pairs.
In terms of Lubov's potential with Charlie or anyone else (I think it'll be pretty funny if they don't end up skating together after all this conjecture), I think she's lovely, but I also think that the sky-high thoughts about her potential are just that -
potential that might be somewhere in an ideal world, but will likely never come to fruition. People said many of the same things about her potential in her partnership with Dylan, but none of it really came together all at once. Her jump problems are not just "mental" as some posters claim; there are definite technique issues and even in the few instances she stood jumps up, there were often UR calls. She was never super-consistent on throws, either, although I will say her throws were beautiful when she landed them. As other teams up the technical ante, I don't see her ever having the jumping skills to land anything harder than a SBS 3T or 3S, and I doubt that quad throws would be successful for her either. Even racking up GOE on lifts, etc. would not get a team medals if they could rarely land SBS jumps
and were outdone in difficulty by many other teams who were able to gain consistency with harder technical elements.
There is also the issue that no one seems to bring up that she is a recovering anorexic. (Eating disorders, being mental health conditions, are never considered "cured"; one is always in recovery.) Obviously, a huge part of that problem was the pressure and abuse she received from her partner (and I believe coach as well?) in Russia, but people who suffer from EDs are also known to have issues with both pressure and control. Going back to dealing with high pressure competition, especially with a partner who is publicly making it loud and clear that he is looking for high results fast
and has a former partner who has said to the media that he pressured her about weight issues ("Je sais que je n’étais pas dans la plus grande forme de ma vie. J’y pensais beaucoup. Et Charlie aussi. Il me l’a dit" said Julianne in the recent
Radio Canada interview) does not seem to be an ideal situation for a woman who had serious ED issues in the past. Top that all off with the fact that she is 27 years old, which is not young for a female pairs skater (especially one starting over with a new partner after not competing or training for competition for over a year), and, well... again, maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, and we don't even know if she actually
is returning to competition, but I don't have particularly high hopes.
If the partnership ends up being real and they manage to overcome all the issues I wrote about above, all the more power to them! I would be less pleased if all the problems remained and they somehow managed to GOE their way to medals with the same level of inconsistency in SBS jumps and no real difficulty improvements in other areas.
