Practice Reports, Seekrats, News, whatever....

Anything and evrything behind the scences goes here, especially Mens practice reports on one skater in particular.

Photo gallery

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/photogalle...lery/sports/gallery_1903/xml/gallery_1903.xml

Skate Canada official press conference

Mike Slipchuk explains the SC's strategy to maximize the number of spots for Canada at Worlds.

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/figureskating/

I saw two of the men's practice sessions yesterday (between the Junior Ladies Free and Junior Pairs Short). Fedor Andreev was in the first group. He was doing a lot of double axels, light and high, lots of air. He may have done a 3A, I'm not sure, I was watching one of the other skaters and just caught what might have been a 3A out of the corner of my eye. He ran through his free program, skating through the jumps, but the first two jumps planned are both axels from what I could tell. His presentation was awesome, no surprise there! His free is to a Tchiakovsky violin concerto. Classical Russian music suits him. I did see Joey Russell do a 3A as well. I'm looking forward to seeing Elladj Balde skate tonight. He was struggling a bit in practice, but he's got a muscular style to him, he reminds me a little of Elvis, actually.

The second group included Ian Martinez, Kevin Reynolds, Vaughn Chipeur, Shawn Sawyer and Patrick Chan. I'm pretty sure Kevin did at least one quad, and several triple axels. Vaughn was struggling with the 3Z-3T, but was finally landing it well towards the end of the session. Ian landed the 3A. So did Shawn! I was surprised and pleased to see it, the jump looked really good, there was nothing iffy about it. Please, Shawn, do that again in your programs! Not sure whether Patrick landed the 3A during the session. But his last attempt was memorable. The announcer had asked the skaters to clear the ice, and the other skaters were taking their bows, when Patrick went up for a 3A, landed it cleanly, then slipped off the edge and skidded across the ice on his backside. So the practice session ended with a good chuckle.

(My apologies for being hung up on the 3A, but knowing that Shawn's and Patrick's have been iffy, I was interested to see who was attempting and completing them.)

Looking forward to the Men's Short tonight!

Thanks a million for your report, SubRosa! We've only seen a "rough draft" version of Fedor's "Violin Concerto" LP on-line, and I'm eager to see what the finished product will look like!

I've been praying to the Skate Gods day and night for Shawn to land a good 3-Axel in competition, so I'm happy to hear that he performed a clean one in practice.