Successful skating pairs reveal what makes their on-ice relationship work
BY NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Boy meets girl. Boy picks up girl. Boy tries to not drop girl on her head.
This is the world of pairs figure skating and ice dancing, the beautiful sports where a woman and man skate in unison across the ice.
But how do these skaters meet? How do they stay together? And what is the secret to their success?
Pairs skating turns out to have a lot of parallels to relationships in real life. Not the least of which is the potential for conflict while in proximity to very sharp objects.
Some pairs meet by accident, some are matched up by coaches or friends. Some seek each other out on the Internet.
At the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Spokane in January, all manner of pairs were on display. The most successful was Caydee Denney, 16, and Jeremy Barrett, 25, who won the U.S. pairs title and competed in the Vancouver Olympics, finishing 13th last week.
Denney and Barrett began skating together in Florida in 2006, but Denney and her family moved to Colorado. They moved back to Florida in 2008, and Denney and Barrett picked up again.
Like a lot of successful partnerships, they are careful about what they say. Barrett blamed himself for some “poor throws” during nationals, and praised his partner for landing them anyway.
Finishing second at nationals were Amanda Evora and Mark Ladwig, who went on to finish 10th in Vancouver. In the tangled world of pairs, Barrett has dated Evora for years. The two teams skate at the same rink and have the same coaching team, making them training partners yet rivals at the same time.
Pairs skating is a complicated effort. Partners have to have absolute faith in each other to pull off all the jumps, spins and landings, some with names like “the death spiral.” The male partner must be strong enough to hoist the female into the air and set her down without apparent effort. This puts pressure on the man to stay strong and the woman to stay thin.
Finding a partner can be difficult. Pairs hopefuls have been known to advertise in skating magazines, through e-mail, and on Web sites such as icepartnersearch.com.
Skater Ameena Sheikh used that site, which is endorsed by U.S. Figure Skating, to find partner Aaron VanCleave. The site currently lists 59 males and 235 females looking for partners, which illustrates another challenge in pairs skating: There are a lot more women than men.
Women are encouraged to look for potential partners among hockey players, roller skaters, dancers and gymnasts.
Often, one skater has to move to be closer to the other for practice purposes.
VanCleave, for instance, moved from British Columbia to the Detroit area after he and Sheikh decided to skate together. Spokane was their second competition, and while they only finished 14th, they are staying together.
“We are going long-term, all the way,” Sheikh said.
Ice dancer Tanith Belbin was born in Canada, but moved to the Detroit area in 1998 because she was not able to find a good dance partner. She was partnered with Ben Agosto by coach Igor Shpilband, and they have enjoyed a lot of success.
At the Turin Olympics in 2006, Belbin and Agosto won the silver medal in ice dancing, the highest Olympic result of any American team in the discipline, and the first American ice dancers to win an Olympic medal in 30 years. In 2008, they moved to Ashton, Pa., to train.
They finished second in ice dancing in Spokane, behind Meryl Davis and Charles White, and both teams were scheduled to compete in the Vancouver Olympics.
Agosto contends they have never had an argument in 11 years of skating together. Successful skating partners have to be able to work through mistakes without exploding on each other, at least in public.
Source: freep.com
