Canada's Patrick Chan salutes the crowd following his free program in the men's competition Thursday March 25, 2010 at the World Figure Skating Championships in Turin, Italy.Paul Chiasson
Patrick Chan, figure skater, has a way of making a simple trip an adventure.
Last Sunday, a few days before he was to arrive at Skate Canada's national training camp in Mississauga this week, Chan crashed on a mountain trail near Colorado Springs where he trains.
Chan, 19, of Toronto, was riding a mountain bike, climbing up a trail, when his bike began to fall sideways, and he couldn't shake loose from some new clip-ins that lock him onto the pedals.
He careened into a group of medium-sized rocks, and landed squarely on one of them, back-first.
On Thursday at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, Chan almost proudly displayed his war wounds, large, ugly dark red, deep bruises on his lower back and right down to his butt. He also bruised the sacroiliac joint in his pelvis, which supports the spine.
Thursday morning, he landed a quadruple toe loop - triple toe loop at a practice, even though three days before, he could not walk or sit, or bend over.
On Sunday, he said, it hurt so badly, he took a day off skating. He couldn't skate Monday. Just before he was to leave for Toronto, he tested out his jumping skills and found he was still able to do quads. "I was very relieved," he said. But still sore.
The point is, that even while injured and stiff, Chan is now landing quads, a jump he did not do last Olympic season, when he finished fifth at the Games in Vancouver.
This year, without any Olympic pressure, the sky is the limit for many skaters. As Chan says: "It's a good time to try something new and see if it works. If it doesn't work ... people will forget about it, enough that they won't remember it by the time the Olympics comes around."
If there ever was a season for him to start inserting quads into his programs, it is this one. Not only does he plan to do a quad in his long program (to last year's music from Phantom of the Opera), but also in his new-style short program.
Trying a quad in a short program is a high-risk move. But Chan is going for it, and it will show up first at the Skate Canada international Grand Prix in Kingston, Ont., from Oct. 29 to 31.
Chan is also trying something new this year in the music he's using for his short program: Take Five. At first he was skeptical about using the laid-back, jazzy, non-classical music. He said he worried about performing it in front of his peers in Colorado for the first time, because, he said, there's a fine line between looking slick and cool, and looking "like an idiot."
The principle behind the Take Five routine, choreographed by Lori Nichol, is a young man at a bar trying to catch the attention of a girl. He tries to impress her. In mid-routine, he finds two girls, but the boyfriend of one of them punches him out.
At the very end, Chan's energetic footwork routine is an illustration of a last-ditch attempt to get the girl: kicking, dancing and jumping through hoops, he said.
His Phantom of the Opera has been reworked totally so that even high-performance director Michael Slipchuk did not recognize it when he first saw it at a summer competition in Philadelphia.
There, quietly and without fanfare, Chan landed his first quad in competition - in the short program - and earned high grades for its execution. He missed it in the long program, but this season, it seems, Chan seems well on his way to his major goal: to win a gold medal at the world championships in Tokyo next March.