Athleticism in figure skating sometimes lost amid grace and glamour

VANCOUVER — Imagine running the 1,500 metres — with a smile on your face.
Amid the grace and glamour and glitzy outfits of figure skating, the pure lung-busting, quad-burning athleticism of the sport often gets overlooked.

Christy Krall, the American coach who has been guiding Canada’s Patrick Chan for the better part of a year in the young skater’s quest for Olympic glory, can recite the biomechanics of skating like the alphabet.
“In the short program, Patrick’s heart rate will reach what an Olympic 800-metre runner reaches, and the long program is like running a mile,” Krall said. “They are exerting that kind of intensity, only they’re looking great out there, and they’re turning and spinning, and they’ve got 12 triples and multiple spins, and all these levels from the (new judging system) have made this such an intense physical activity, you cannot imagine.
“These guys are very fit.”
Take the triple Axel, a three-and-a-half revolution jump named for Norwegian skater Axel Paulsen that is the big gun in Chan’s arsenal.
“He’s travelling at 12 miles (19 kilometres) an hour, he’s going to push up four times his body weight on the way up, he’s turning at four-and-a-half turns per second, that’s 200 pounds of centrifugal force per square inch on his body, and he’s going to land with seven times his body weight,” Krall said. “And he’s going to do that on a little bitty blade.
“It’s tricky business out there.”
Chan, who’s known for his exquisite spins and footwork and pure artistry, has been working with Krall in Colorado Springs, Colo., using video analysis to perfect his jumps ahead of the Vancouver Games. Through an imaging program called Dartfish — Swiss-developed technology that’s widely in sports such as diving and skiing — Krall can compare Chan’s jumps frame-by-frame with that of the world’s best jumpers, including Russian Evgeni Plushenko, the 2006 Olympic champion who came out of retirement for another shot at Games gold.
Canada’s alpine ski team used Dartfish in its Olympic preparation, to help the skiers determine the fastest line down the Whistler track.
“Not only does Patrick get to see what he’s doing, then we work on exercises that help him time it so he’s really in that perfect moment when he’s jumping,” Krall said.
That perfect moment means soaring nearly two feet off the ground, and tucking his body into its tightest position a mere two-tenths of a second after take-off.
“Biomechanically speaking, you have to have a certain height to do a quad toe for example, you have to be 21 inches off the ground. Patrick is very gifted, he’s much higher off the ground, he’s doing about 26, 27 inches off the ground,” Krall said. “His technique is obviously very good, but we really tightened up his tightest position. He had to be in his tightest position by .21 seconds in the air. That’s something you can’t see with the eye, so we brought in high-speed digital cameras, and we’ve really aligned him to get him to that tightest rotation position by that point.”
Chan, who skates the short program Tuesday night at the Pacific Coliseum, won’t do a quad in Vancouver. He had been practising the four-revolution jump, but a calf injury suffered in the fall cost him valuable training time, and the 19-year-old will stick to what he does best — his stunning spins and step sequences. The quad has polarized the men’s field with Plushenko, for one, insisting the jump is a must, while others say the overall performance is more important.
The new judging system, implemented after the pairs judging debacle at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics that nearly cost Canada’s Jamie Sale and David Pelletier the gold, awards overall performances rather than just monster jumps. But because virtually every spin, spiral, and step in between is marked, programs are more physically challenging than they used to be. That’s why any jump landed in the second half of a program is worth more than in the first half.
“I just have a whole new respect for what they’re trying to do compared to what they tried to do 10 years ago, because all that artistry and choreography and levels of spins have transformed them,” Krall said. “There’s not: four crossovers and then wait, wait, wait, wait, jump. You have to get all those transitions in and that’s what complicates it.”
Chan, the reigning world silver medallist, ends his long program, set to music from “Phantom of the Opera,” with a complicated step sequence that travels the length of the rink and then a combination spin — nearly a minute of intense effort that has his muscles screaming.
“Absolutely, it’s quite difficult,” said Chan’s coach and choreographer Lori Nichol. “The step sequence alone is about 30 seconds and the spin is about 15 seconds. Yeah, he’s really putting himself out there, he’s not holding back. I heard a specialist say once that the Patrick Chan step sequences are equal to the complexity or difficulty of the quad, and it needs to be revered.”
There were 138 medals captured at the 2006 Turin Games by athletes using Dartfish technology, according to the company’s website. The video imaging program was also used by numerous television broadcasters there.