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Patrick Chan’s next challenge? Matching Kurt Browning’s figure skating legacy
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vancouversun.com
NICE, France — The tone isn't one of envy, when Kurt Browning speaks of Patrick Chan, but it is not exactly a chummy "welcome to the club," either.
Browning is a four-time world champion, for one thing, and Chan hasn’t yet won his second, though he is favoured to do so this week at the world figure skating championships. Browning is a figure skating Hall of Famer, he’s royalty. Chan’s lone title got lost, even in his own country, in Canada’s all-consuming preoccupation with the Stanley Cup playoffs last spring.
So if Chan is the heir apparent to Browning’s status as Canada’s greatest, most complete skater of all time … well, there’s still a load of work to do before he gets to wear the crown.
Fortunately, Chan loves work.
What they do share, unequivocally — the 45-year-old from Caroline, Alta., and the Ottawa-born, 21-year-old boy wonder — are the lengths to which they had to go to fill the gaps their skating.
What Browning needed in 1992 when he left Edmonton’s Royal Glenora Club and his longtime coach Michael Jiranek for choreographer Sandra Bezic and coach Louis Stong in Toronto, was to unlock the performer within himself — the clown, the actor, the entertainer.
Chan already had a swift and effortless grace, and the feet of a dancer, when he split with his venerable Florida-based coach, Don Laws, a mere five weeks before the Vancouver Olympics. What he needed from an enclave of U.S. coaches and specialists all the way across the continent in Colorado Springs was what Browning had almost from the first: the elusive quadruple toe loop, without which Chan knew he could never join the world’s elite.
Typical of each, though, was that the free-spirited Browning made his decision almost on an emotional whim, while the methodical Chan plotted his course like a wiring diagram.
“It didn’t feel risky to me — I considered it punishment for not winning the (Albertville) Olympics,” said Browning, who’s in Nice to do commentary on the CBC telecasts. “I was ready to be done competing. I wanted to join Stars On Ice and skate with Kristi (Yamaguchi), and go.
“I was sitting there at the Glenora and going: ‘Where are all my friends?’ Well, they left. Slipper (Mike Slipchuk), Norm (Proft), Kristi … they were gone and I was being punished and having to stay after class. So it was a combination of that, and the allure of Sandra Bezic, who just seemed to be the girl to go to, the one with the answers, for me to grow as a skater.”
The back problems that had plagued him in the buildup to Albertville healed in time, and the alliance with Bezic and Stong produced his most memorable vehicle, the Casablanca-themed long program that won him his farewell world title in Prague in 1993. From there, a series of TV specials and a Stars On Ice lead role that has lasted to this day (though not as robust a paycheque as it once was) would follow.
Chan’s path was more scientific. Like the computer he built from parts in his spare time in Colorado, he has been assembling the pieces of a skating package which — now that he has tamed the quad, as much as anyone ever tames it — is in a league of its own at the moment.
But he knew he had to go to a team of specialists, including coach Christy Krall and quad technician Eddie Shipstead — he also has choreographer Lori Nichol, a sports scientist, a movement and balance coach, a physiotherapist and a strength and nutrition expert at his disposal at the famed U.S. training site — to complete the puzzle.
“Of course, without the quad, I wouldn’t be in the position I am,” Chan said Tuesday evening. “I think my doing it may have been part of the reason skaters have started to do it more, because they’ve seen they need it to beat me.”
He has no doubt he wouldn’t have conquered the jump if he hadn’t made the move to Colorado.
“The harness, working with Eddie, helped me a ton,” he said. “Not only did I get the quad out of Colorado, I think if I hadn’t gone there by this point, I’d have quit skating, because Florida was not a great environment, there were no skaters. Being in Colorado keeps me motivated — and now it’s got to the point where it may be too stimulated an environment. I’m getting used to it now, so next season we may have to look into taking some time in Toronto and some in Colorado, to keep it fresh.”
“I think it’s one of those environments down there that’s percolating, like the Glenora was,” Browning said. “It was fun. The skating was fun. Every practice seemed important, even if it was just to keep up. If you’re in a current that’s moving, and you can rest for a minute and still be swept along, it’s nice. I think that’s what he feels there … the energy of skaters coming through the door with that anxious, get-on-the-ice feeling.”
The club where Chan trains has produced six U.S. national champions, in men’s, women’s and pairs, in the last five years.
“When I went there and spent some time with him, I was blown away,” Browning said Tuesday. “Because there was nothing in anyone’s training, in the old days, that was so sophisticated and thought out. It wasn’t even the style back then, but it wasn’t my personality, either.
“If I had an afternoon off … I don’t know. I’d get some buddies together and throw the football around. Get some wings. Go for a bike ride.
“To get up in the morning and know what he’s doing every minute of the day … Patrick has every minute scheduled, and it’s all about skating.”
Browning was the ultimate “What do I have to do today to win?” competitor, who would add jumps or combinations depending what the skater before him did. Chan is so thoroughly trained, he’s a lot less apt to ad lib.
One thing Browning knows, after skating alongside the kid in Colorado Springs: the old legs are no match for Chan’s, and maybe they never were, even in their prime.
“We were just doing cross-ice stuff, ordinary stroking, and I said to him, ‘You could have slowed down a little,’ and he said, ‘I did slow down,’” said Browning, who was fast in his day, but not this fast.
As a total performance package, within the constraints of the Olympic-style programs, perhaps Chan is already Browning’s superior. One day, he may pass him on all counts. His next chance to put down an instalment comes in the short program Friday.
But there is no rushing those world titles. They’re only offered once a year, and for Patrick Chan, No. 2 is not in the books yet. He dreams of changing the sport, but the firmament is still a ways off.
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