Stars On Ice Becomes Hot Ticket

Outside the Air Canada Centre, there was sturm. Inside there was drama. A post-Olympic Stars On Ice had come to Toronto. But it wasn’t like any Stars On Ice we’d seen in years.

The Air Canada Centre was packed. Stuffed right to the rafters. That means 17,000 seats sold. A sell-out in Canada’s largest city. And it’s happening across the country, all across Eastern Canada such as Halifax (Scotiabank Centre , 11.093 capacity); Hamilton (FirstOntario Centre, 19,000), London (Budweiser Gardens, 9,100), Victoria, B.C. (Save On Foods Memorial Arena, 7,400), and Vancouver, too – and we’re talking the major Rogers Arena, seating 18,630.

“We will sell out six of 12 shows,” said Byron Allen, senior vice president of International Management Group (IMG) which stages Stars On Ice.

There are a smattering of tickets available in the nosebleed seats at Rogers Place in Edmonton (capacity 18,000 to 20,000), at Sasktel Place in Saskatoon (15,800 is record attendance for a Garth Brooks concert) and Bell MTS Place in Winnipeg (16,345).

The most wide-open venue, where seats still abound, is the Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary, site of the 1988 Olympics, and it can seat 19,000.

Not since the days of Kurt Browning and Elvis Stojko squaring it off during the early 1990s have people flocked to arenas in Canada in such numbers. “We had some big years in the early 2000s but nothing compared to 1993-94 [the peak of Kurt Browning’s eligible career] until this season,” Allen said.

Time passes. And this time, decades later, Browning was in the audience, watching for the first time. And Stojko was still performing at age 46, his temples now greying, his schtick intact, letting loose with a triple Lutz, and witnessing the light falling across a packed audience from the floor.

Just imagine trying to get out of this place when the show is over. The subway at Union Station next door was clogged. You couldn’t get to it. It didn’t help that a crazy accident closed off two streets surrounding the arena just before people disembarked. And it didn’t help that a fierce storm, packing winds of about 120 kilometres an hour, wreaked havoc with the subway system and at one point killed electricity for 100,000 people.

People continued to stream to their seats for at least half an hour after the show start, thwarted by the subway disruptions (One open area of the rails was blocked mysteriously by a mattress. Go figure.) and by trying to get through security at the arena when the numbers of patrons were so daunting.

The Air Canada Centre seemed almost like a little oasis in the storm. The lights were on. So were cell phone lights, which particularly began to wave when Gabby Daleman stepped out in the second half. She was a member of the Canadian Olympic gold medal team from Pyeongchang and the star power itself could have powered the arena on its own.

It was during the show at Bell Centre in Montreal (which will stage the 2020 world championships) that the cell phones began to wave. “The response to the show was off the charts,” Allen said of Montreal.

Best group of Stars skaters, ever

Jay Ogden, senior vice-president for IMG said he knew it was going to be like this as the figure skating events unfolded at the Olympics.  “I started to discern this might be something special, with the results they were getting,” he said. “But then I saw this group on the medal podium. And I saw their faces. And I saw, when the Canadian anthem began to play, I saw them singing. I thought: ‘This is going to resonate in Canada.’”

The party continued at the world championships in Milan, with Kaetlyn Osmond winning the world title, after some of the other veterans stepped away.

Allen said he began to see in early March just how big the tour was going to be this year.

“This is a once-in-a-generation group of skaters,” Ogden explained. “And what’s great about it is that the Canadian public has really recognized that fact. They had an incredible Olympics, and that has galvanized the popularity of this group. I compare it to the group that we had with [Tracy Wilson and Rob McCall, Brian Orser, Barbara Underhill and Paul Martini, Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler.] It is very special when you put them all on ice.”

The skating platform – that large rectangular sheet of ice – never changes. It’s the stage. “You’d better have great talent on that space,” Ogden said. “And that’s what’s happened this year.”

Post-Olympic year is always highly sought. But this post-Olympic year is something else again. So many stalwarts of the Canadian skating scene have announced their retirements or are likely to: Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford (third in Pyeongchang pairs), Patrick Chan, a three-time world medalist with an uncommon gift; and the incomparable Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, two-time Olympic gold medalists. Add Osmond to this list. She’ll lead the team in coming years.

The U.S. Stars tour up, too

It’s not quite the same in the concurrent US tour, which now has only 22 stops, down from 65 cities in 2000. Ogden says the shows are averaging about 10,000 spectators, flocking to see Nathan Chen, who redeemed himself after a troubled Olympic short program by winning the Olympic free program and then the world title a month later; and other members of the U.S. Olympic bronze medal-winning team. Adam Rippon has been a break-out personality star and so has Mirai Nagasu, who became the first woman to land a triple Axel at the Olympics. Bradie Tennell, the new US champion, also helped win that team bronze.

“Unfortunately the girls did not do so well,” Ogden said of the discipline that tends to drive U.S. interest. “We had three shots at it. It’s no one’s fault. As Dick Button says: ‘It’s slippery out there.’”

Even so, Allen said the U.S. tour is up 15 per cent over the 2014 tour that followed the Sochi Games.  “We are pleased by this, considering that {Meryl] Davis and [Charlie] White won gold in Sochi,“ he said.

The China Factor

A two-week tour in Japan sold very well, as expected. And Stars On Ice is now also entering the China market. A show last December in Beijing sold 8,000 tickets – a good number for a first show – with 60 per cent of the spectators so enthusiastic they were seen dancing in the aisles, Ogden said. The rest watched placidly, perhaps unsure of what they were seeing. But it’s a huge market. In the years leading up to the 2022 Olympics – only four years away in a city, Beijing that rarely sees snow – China will try to ramp it up, and quickly.

According to the state-owned China Daily News, the country plans to create almost an entirely new winter sports industry in the next four years. It wants to build 800 hew ski facilities and 350 rinks to foster 300 million new skiers, skaters, hockey and other winter athletes. Ogden notes the country wants to create a population of winter athletes that equals the entire population of the United States. It seems like an unreachable target.

But who can doubt it? On May 5, the China Horse Club – a group of upscale Chinese business folk – became part owners of Kentucky Derby winner, Justify. For several years, this group has been buying very expensive yearlings with a five-year plan to make a splash in the U.S. industry. They did it in three. They say winning the Derby is like winning an Olympic gold medal.

In Canada, figure skating is a prime sport, at one time rivalling hockey with its fan interest. It has faded in recent years. But not this spring.

In Toronto – and by the sounds of it across the country – Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir (the Canadian Olympic flagbearers, don’t forget) were the stars of the show. Eardrums took a beating from the cheers. There weren’t all that many standing ovations in Toronto, but one of them was reserved for Virtue and Moir’s “Moulin Rouge” routine which had been tarted up for show in a very effective way and preceded by a video montage of their career. Their “Moulin Rouge” never gets old.

The other standing ovation went to Patrick Chan, who skated his Olympic free program, “Hallelujah,” just the way he likes it, not riddled by endless jumps, just mostly Chan-like skating. Here, at Stars On Ice, this program was at its most powerful.

Of course the first group routine was apt: Pink singing “Raise Your Glass.” And choreographer Jeff Buttle, mindful of what the crowd was witnessing, created another memorable group number of “Fields of Gold” that ended with a group hug among all the members of the Olympic gold-medal team. Of course. Of course.

Gabby Daleman gets high fives for her second-half number to Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing.” Suddenly, as happened in earlier shows on the tour, people in the audience began to wave their lighted cell phones like swaying branches while she skated.

A favourite number was a men’s group number. All cloaked in charming chapeaux, they skated to “Feel It Still,“music with an infectious beat. You had to keep one eye on them and the other (split screen in the mind) on the accompanying videos on screens throughout the arena where each of them by turn did dance moves. Hilarious. Fun.  Offsetting this was an earlier group number by the women, dressed in various pastels derived from the soft purple and blue spectrum.

Always, you see unusual pairings among skaters in these group numbers: Fascinating to see Andrew Poje dancing with Virtue.

Duhamel and Radford, also extremely popular, debuted unusual moves we’ve never seen: Duhamel launches a double toe loop after landing a throw, then both of them land another double jump. Cool.

A wonderful moment: a video clip in which a sofa full of world champions welcom Kaetlyn Osmond to the world championship club. Clever.

Most stunning was Javier Fernandez, (the only non-Canadian in the group, but really, he is Canadian isn’t he? He’s lived here so long, we’ve adopted him.) skating to exquisite music, “Prometo” by Pablo Alborian. Fernandez like we’ve never seen him. Far-sprung from his cheeky superhero routine.

And did we know that Kaitlyn Weaver has sponsored a child through World Vision?

Finally, in the closing number, the cast was set loose like a flock of white doves. Perfect. Worth seeing for sure. This has become a historic, memorable tour. One for the books.