Sunskate

part 1: July-November 2025

2025 Skate Canada Challenge (Calgary, AB November 29-30, 2025 Sheri Moir, Alma Moir for IAMO)

Bashynska/Perron 8th place (7th RD, 9th FD) Lauriault/LeGac 1st place🥇(1st RD, 1st FD) Robinson/Portz 3rd place 🥉 (5th RD, 3rd FD) Hensen/Lickers 2nd place 🥈 (2nd RD, 2nd FD) Anderson/Dawson 2nd place jr 🥈 (2nd RD, 2nd FD) Corneil/Emery 9th place jr (7th RD, 10th FD)

i haven't been able to find the entire event, but the CBC broadcast with Carol Lane and Kurt Browning shows a dozen of the top teams (of 30) and these NBC videos have groups 2/3 and 5/6 with Ben Agosto and Tracy Wilson commentating. the CBC video has bonus VM from after they announced their comeback

i know it's not the golden, but i wanted to watch a waltz event that's closer in time to now before i watch 2010 Worlds. and oh, waltzes on ice are so beautiful - very excited to get a season of a real dance after the watered down dance parties of the last 3

so in 2016, there's lots of Marina, Igor and early Gadbois --

Leia is Canadian but with family roots in Italy, i believe, and had competed for Hungary with a previous partner before teaming with Pietro. he was a junior national ice dance champion in Italy, had trained with Matteo Zanni and moved to Canada to partner with Leia

they competed in Lake Placid in 2022 at Madi and Adrian's first competition as coaches:

and Leia wore Tessa's Hip Hip Chin Chin dress for their Latin RD. their FD was Adios Nonino, and they weren't yet as in sync as they would be later, but you could see from the start that they were musical, and this FD was memorable, i liked them right away. they competed at 3 Challengers and the University Games and ended the season with silver at Egna Dance Trophy

their 2023/4 season had their Nessun Dorma FD, maybe my favorite program of theirs, it ends with a dramatic choreo slide - they won bronze at Italian Nationals and competed at Europeans

they gravitated towards moodier FD's, a little different in their sensibility than most teams - in the 2024/25 season they skated to Asaf Avidan, had a playful RD and won another bronze at Nationals. they were expressive and well matched, he has a big wingspan and open carriage, they made many pretty pictures together. i like a team who make you feel they're responding in the moment to the music, and they always did

this past season seemed like a challenging one - they changed FDs - the music for the first one had a voice counting numbers which was distracting - but the 2nd one was to Ennio Morricone's lush La Califfa soundtrack. their RD had one of my favorite walk around 3s into the PSt of the field. they ended their season at Italian Nationals and then Pietro announced the end of their partnership in January 2026. no word on Leia's plans, but Pietro just announced a new partnership and that he's training with Barbara Fusar-Poli

More importantly, how you manage junior teams requires tact. I came across this Igor interview from 8 years ago (from David Lease) that I found very pertinent to nowadays:

https://youtu.be/sehESel9Z-A?t=1h21m09s

He always talks from the lense of the male athlete - Charlie, Scott, Vadym… The female athletes come as an afterthought (even a prodigy like Tessa).

And in 2018, he was training CPom, fresh off a silver medal at Junior Worlds (after bronze in the previous year), and he only mentioned how very excited he was about this new team of his - Nguyen/Kolesnik. How do teenagers, who had already proven themselves internationally, react to their coach blatant favoritism? It can create insecurity, resentment, overtraining, or a feeling that the coach’s affection is conditional on being “the chosen project.”

All schools have “top teams”, but being tactful in how you create an environment that encourages the growth of your teams (specially young teams) is, to me, the mark of great coaches. And one of the reasons why I’m on the fence about Igor.

any team training full time with a coach is trusting them with their physical well being and careers - tact is the bare minimum. considering the big picture and being supportive and caring in public and private is the job and their responsibility, especially to younger teams

so yeah, some of Igor's statements haven't met this expectation. for someone who must be politically savvy, he doesn't seem to hear how his words come across sometimes. but maybe it's better that he doesn't hide his favoritism - his other teams can see where they stand and act accordingly, like CPom did

i remember that Dave Lease interview and how Igor singled out Charlie and Scott for individual praise and had nothing specific to say about Meryl and Tessa, but i'd forgotten he laid out clearly how he sees ice dance:

"It's equal, it's always a team - I'm not putting one ahead of the other. I started talking about boys because to me, male initiates things. Male not initiate the move, not initiate skating, nothing's gonna come from girl. so I want to give the credit to the boys. but I mean obviously the girl not responding, if the girl's not connected, then that would be hard to do. Because you can be the greatest skaters in the world [but] if you don't have this connection as a team, every little simple turn would suffer if you don't understand the partnering. And we credit to both of those girls that were amazing in the way how they feel [their] partner, how they respond to the partner, and Meryl and Tessa were the best examples of how the partner in the partnership should work. There was immediate response to both of those girls"

so he very much believes the man leads, the woman follows. i'm not sure if seeing what Madi and Scott did for Christina has changed Igor's mind at all, because Emilea has been only effusively complimentary publicly about him, but Christina was languishing and had disordered eating when she was at Novi. Madi Chock, too, is a stronger skater and performer in her IAM era than Novi. Igor's pov seemed to keep him from seeing the female partner as someone with equal agency and autonomy as a person and artist, and that was a huge problem

this attitude that the male partner is more important, is the initiator, that the woman is the follower isn't just an ice dance issue and is insidious in the way it creeps into how we're treated. we heard from Gabi how detrimentally it impacted her that from childhood she was told to follow Gui and not question. it stemmed originally from a difficult family dynamic, but she felt invalidated by that being continued in some of their training environments

i agree with you that though IAM has (major) failings, they have been pretty successful at least in public at balancing the competing interests of their teams. it helps that their top teams have creative control over their own material, and it's a strength of the school that their students tend to improve but develop/keep their own identities. and i can't recall Marie-France and Patrice speaking about the teams in a way that would indicate favoritism or lack of consideration (Romain, on the other hand, has sometimes made remarks that might not be well received by the team, like when he said Chock/Bates's weakness was their skating skills - not untrue, but also not tactful or wise, coming from their own coach right before the Beijing games)

IAMO does an excellent job of giving their teams the appropriate level of support -- the programs teams get reflect the goals for the season and feel carefully considered and calibrated for them. and while CPom is the top team by far, Lauriault/Le Gac, Lily and Nathan, Layla and Alex and more - they all got excellent programs that had a lot of thought and care and ambition behind them

Amber at an SOI q&a :

"[if there's] anything skating has taught me, it's taught me resilience, it's taught me sportsmanship, it's taught me how to get back up after you fall - that's something that some people have asked me - when you fall in competition how do you get back up?

i'm like, i don't really have a choice - part of me wants to get off the ice immediately, but i can't really do that - [have to] finish what you started

there's a few that have really helped me over the last few years especially, one of them being if you uplift the people around you in your everyday, that also lifts you up

because for so many years, especially in women's figure skating, we were all climbing over each other to get to the top, and it didn't matter who you stepped on or what you did, it only mattered that you succeeded. and then people would eventually get there, and it was so lonely. it would be miserable - it's like, oh i have this success, who do i share it with now - the people that i hurt? no. so leading wtih kindness is so much - you're so much more fulfilled that way, and in life things can get really intense, and the want to succeed can get so *harsh* that sometimes we forget that, and we need to show others and ourselves that kindness"

love her - one person can make a difference to an entire culture and change things for the better a bit at a time. and there are more and more like minded people in skating

Elliana Peal & Ethan Peal

Toast to Milan is on USFS youtube now

there wasn't much if anything that was new, but the team has a good energy together - they've definitely bonded, between Milan and SOI. Vadym loving Costco is practically part of their brand now. i'd forgotten that Christina was born with dislocated hips, and that they weren't sure she would be able to walk, let alone skate. Anthony says he felt a lot of pressure and expectations when he was young, even before he stepped onto the ice, about his OGM parents - but that around 4 years ago, he took ownership of his identity, that he's building his own path - it feels poignant since it coincides with his surgery and is close in time to the coaching change

Madi Chock says her dress got a big rip at Olympic practice day of a performance - she says "we" stepped on the skirt, but Evan owns it was him

and spotted in the audience:

Utana Yoshida & Masaya Morita clip of their new RD filmed in Kinoshita Academy ice arena -