Newly crowned Canadian champion Patrick Chan will skip the Four Continents Figure Skating Championship next month in Taiwan to prepare for the world championships in Tokyo in March.
However, Olympic champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir will go to both the Four Continents and the world championships even though they missed the Canadian championships, Skate Canada announced Sunday.
Skate Canada officials are still reeling over the achievement of Chan, who won the men's event with a score of 285.85 points, higher than the world record of 264.41, set by current world champion Daisuke Takahashi of Japan.
However, William Thompson, chief executive officer of Skate Canada, said scores from the past cannot be compared to scores this year because the judging system has evolved. This year, the International Skating Union took a footwork sequence out of the men's short program, and replaced it in the long with a step sequence that has limited opportunities for building up points, compared to last year.
Mike Slipchuk, the high performance director of Skate Canada, said if Chan had skated under last year's rules, his score might have been eight to 10 points higher.
There will be doubters, who often claim scores at national championships are inflated, as a send-off for teams going to the world championships. But Slipchuk said that's not the case with Chan's score. His free skate score of 197.07 alone - without the short program added in - would have placed him fourth overall in the men's event.
"There is always a lot of chatter worldwide when results come out of a national championships, that the marks are inflated, and it's home-field advantage," Slipchuk said. "Honestly I don't know how you could look at that and say it's not marked correctly."
Both Slipchuk and Thompson watched Chan's free skate with astonishment.
Thompson judged the men's event at the Turin Olympics (won by Evgeny Plushenko) and other world championships. "And I've never seen a men's free skate performance like that in my life," he said. "That was incredible."
Slipchuk said he saw Chan train two weeks ago in Colorado Springs, hearing that he would do two quads in his free skate instead of one. The first day, he saw Chan land a quad-triple in his runthrough, considering that it was so well done that it would earn him two of three possible bonus points. Then he saw Chan do the second one.
Chan went on to do the rest of the routine, missing only one element. "I saw the potential of it, but what I was really surprised with was how comfortable it was. You never know when they put it into a program, how things will change. And doing it during a competition in front of a home crowd makes it that much more difficult," Slipchuk said.
"I've never seen a skate like that," said Slipchuk, a former Canadian champion skater. "And I would have to say, I've seen a lot of the best."
He said he was "spellbound," during Chan's routine. "It wasn't just two quads, it was everything," he said. "Every element was done to perfection. The rink was silent as he skated."
He said it was "kind of scary" to realize that as much experience as he and Thompson had, neither of them could imagine how high Chan's score would be. "We've not really seen that before," Slipchuk said.
Chan, who turned 20 only on New Year's Eve has a lot of upside yet to his career. He's still learning and growing and getting better. "We are going to be able to see where he's going to move this sport, and where he could go," Slipchuk said.
Last week, the International Skating Union also announced that Canada has been awarded the Grand Prix Final for next year. Thompson said the site hasn't been confirmed yet.