MONTREAL
Riku Muira and Ryuichi Kihara have had a largely silent, troubled season since they became the first Japanese pair team to win a world figure skating championship title last year – at home in Japan.
Much loved because of their engaging personalities on ice, Muira and Kihara left a cheery little hole on the skating scene as new teams surged to the fore from countries that had not traditionally been skating powers. Perhaps aiming to do what this Japanese team had done, shooting from the bottom of the heap to the top.
Injury came between Miura and Kihara and a glorious swish around the world in the lee of their historic win.
“It was a big injury,” said coach Bruno Marcotte, who trains them in Oakville, Ont. “Nothing career threatening, but something we had to take extremely seriously because our focus is the Olympic Games and we don’t want to compromise their immediate and long-term future.”
Shortly after the world win, Kihara started to complain about a pain in his back, but the twosome went off to do some shows at home in Japan. Kihara said he get some tests done in Japan, and they would figure out the next steps after that.
Muira and Kihara competed at the Autumn Classic in Montreal early in the season, but were soundly defeated by Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps. They did not look ready. They looked like a shadow of themselves.
The report came back with an ominous ring: stress fracture in Kihara’s back.
Next move? There were options. But as a team, they all decided that the Japanese should skip the Grand Prix season altogether. “His health at worlds and Olympics is way more important than the Grand Prix season,” Marcotte said.
It was a hard decision to make. The Grand Prix season is the vehicle where the teams run their programs, and it’s a great test for the second half of the season. “You see what works, what doesn’t work,” Marcotte said.
The timing of the injury was also hard because the skaters didn’t get any mileage on their new programs.
So here they were, stars of Japan, stalled. “Once you are world champion, life changes a little bit,” Marcotte said. “They didn’t change. They are the same people. But when they go to Japan, things are different, that’s for sure. The expectations are same, for sure.”
Marcotte said it was important for them to remember to set their own expectations, to always remember that it is all about themselves and what they set themselves to achieve.”
Returning was a slow process. Very slow. They finally got back to full-out training, with run-throughs of their program, only two weeks before the Four Continents Championship in Taipei
That competition was vital for them. They needed competition pressure, and if there are questions during training, competition answers the questions, Marcotte said.
Is what they are doing going to work? Is it not going to work?
“Even though we all knew that we were not perfectly ready, I think there was so much to gain by going there,” Marcotte said.
They finished second in the short program with 65.61 points, well below their personal best. Muira doubled a toe loop. The triple Lutz was landed on two feet. Their death spiral was a level three.
The technical elements were very difficult in the free program. There were some problems in a three-jump combo. Although their throw triple Lutz was a wow, Muira fell on a throw triple loop and they got only a level two for their death spiral. Second again to the Canadian champions.
Muira said they had only two full-runthroughs of the free before the event.
But Marcotte got many of the answers to his questions there.
For this world championships this week, they have gone back to their Olympic free skate: “Woman, She was Waiting for her Mother at the Station in Torino “ by Shawn Phillips.
They completely changed the step sequence in the short program. They added a significant transitional move before the death spiral. And they added a lot of musical notes and many voices into the music of the short program (“Dare You to Move from the String Quartet” , to bring out more highlights.
They abandoned their free program that they had been using this year because they just didn’t have enough mileage on it. They had competed with it only twice. Muira didn’t feel comfortable in it. There was something about it that caused them to lose confidence. So many things needed to be changed. Just too many.
They decided to make only changes to the short, and swap out the old long.
The “Woman” program felt like a comfortable old shoe. They’ve also been focusing on getting the levels they missed at Four Continents.
And everything came back. Their confidence came back. Their speed came back. “I think it was the right thing to do,” Marcotte said.
“I believe there is nothing like practicing to regain your confidence and obviously before Four Continents, we couldn’t practice that much or that hard,” Kihara said.
Obviously they can do much more now than they could a month ago.
“We’ve been practicing very well for the past five weeks,” Kihara said. “So we’re feeling pretty confident coning in. We have no jet lag, so we’re feeling good.”
They feel the old long program is “more like us,” Kihara said. “The way it ends with the choreo sequence, we get more of a climax.”
During the practices here in Montreal, children in the stands cheered wildly when they skated by.
“You are a bit like Canadian representatives and people support you,” one Japanese journalist posed to them.
“We’re very thankful for that,” Kihara said.
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