After the cruelty of a long program gone completely haywire at Autumn Classic a few weeks ago, Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford have hit the reset button.
They will be coming to Skate Canada International in another 10 days feeling settled after some clever reworking of their Muse 2.0 free program.
“We had a big breakthrough with a training run of a clean long program for the first time this season,” Duhamel said Monday.
“Since we’ve made those changes, I think that we are starting to skate with a lot more confidence,” Radford said. “And a lot more consistency.”
At Autumn Classic in Montreal, Duhamel and Radford presented a stunning short program to Bono’s “With you, Without You,” as voiced by April Meservy. Thanks to the music and the choreographic collaboration between their long-time program designer Julie Marcotte and new one, John Kerr, Duhamel and Radford have never looked like this: their program breathes and whispers at the same time.
But all that euphoria came crashing about their heads during their long program to Muse, as Duhamel feel three times, on a triple Lutz, a triple Salchow and their throw quad Salchow. They were left confused and rather dazed by it, but not surprised: at home when training five run-throughs of it, they just could never seem to make it work, especially when somebody was watching.
They went into panic mode. To fan the flames of this angst, Duhamel and Radford had committed to a skating show in Verona, Italy and were to leave the next day. They sat with their coaches and Marcotte for hours, wondering if they should just ditch Muse altogether, or try to fix it. They called Kerr in Florida and asked him if he could come to Italy. “At that moment, I thought we shouldn’t be going to Italy,” Duhamel said. “There was too much work to do.” And Skate Canada wasn’t far off.
In the end, they decided to make Muse work. “We knew that it could still be great,” Duhamel said. “Things kind of calmed down.” Fortunately, the show producers allowed Marcotte to accompany them to Verona – and how could they miss a show like this: Intimissimi on Ice, featuring Andrea Bocelli singing with Shizuka Arakawa, Stephane Lambiel and Evgeny Plushenko skating.
So they solved their problems in Italy.
They figured that the pacing was off between various elements, and that all of that threw them to the winds. The throw quad had been later in the program, but they moved it to the third element. “It was just a lot more difficult than I thought it would be,” Duhamel said. “These were all things we didn’t know until we tried.”
So now they will do triple twist, triple Lutz, throw quad Salchow, side-by-side spin and then a three-jump combo in the first part of Muse.
“The pacing feels very natural like this and now we have a more comfortable setup going into the throw quad,” Duhamel said. “We were trying it out of a lift, and we were always stuck in the corner out of the lift and anyways, it was so much later in the program. Not only did we fall on the quad at Autumn Classic, we were never landing it in the run-through at home, either.”
The routine has a better flow now, with the change of pacing. And they feel settled.
Radford figures they had tried to push the artistic side too far, and just assumed that the technical elements were going to work. With the changes, however, the artistic flow will be there, just as it is in the short program, but “just in a totally different colour than the short program,” he said.
Somehow, they handled all of this while doing a show in Italy. They used one of their routines to “practice” their short program, more or less. They skated basically the same program, to different music. “We worked really hard when we were in Italy to still be able to enjoy this spectacular show, to also be doing our job training, because we knew Skate Canada was going to be coming fast by the time we got home,” Duhamel said.
Italy worked for them. “I think that Eric and I love to perform in shows,” Duhamel said. “And we improve so much every time we perform in a show. And the fact that we got to perform three nights in a row in this amazing show and we had great performances. It gave us back our confidence, that we could perform well. We could do it.”
In one of their routines, they landed triple Lutzes and a throw triple Lutz.
When they came home, they felt like they had hit the restart button. It’s as if the season did not start with Autumn Classic, but it will start with Skate Canada. They returned refreshed. “We had this energy and this excitement about what we were creating,” she said.
“We had probably one of the more spectacular weeks of training last week,” Duhamel added. “Every program we ran was basically clean.” Including that Muse long program.
They are problem solvers. “I think that it’s just that we had to make those kind of mistakes to figure out how things really needed to be,” Radford said. They have taken an interesting path to get there, but they are back on track for Skate Canada.
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