Our favorite performances in icenetwork era, and mine is...(see below)
/We've seen some incredible skating over the last 11 years. We asked our writers tell us what their favorite performances were since the launch of icenetwork in 2007.
Writer: Jean-Christophe Berlot
Performance: Patrick Chan's The Four Seasons/Concerto Grasso free skate at 2013 Trophée Éric Bompard
Video link: http://web.icenetwork.com/video/v31228747
At the 2013 Trophée Éric Bompard, Patrick Chan skated a beautiful short program to take a three-point lead over Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu. The true challenge for the brilliant Canadian, however, would be the free skate, which that season was the program that gave him the most problems. No matter: Chan rose to the occasion with what may have been the best skate of his career. Watching it now, that performance showed Chan at the peak of his powers; his score of 196.75 was, at the time, the highest ever recorded for a men's free skate. That day, Chan touched perfection -- and put his audience in a state of grace.
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Writer: Sarah S. Brannen
Performance: Jason Brown's Riverdance free skate at the 2014 U.S. Figure Skating Championships
Video link: http://web.icenetwork.com/video/v31300281
The first time I saw Jason Brown's Riverdance program, in the summer of 2013, I told him I thought it was going to be a classic. I love traditional Celtic music, and although the Riverdance music may be a tad overproduced, I'm a sucker for it anyway. Brown's program, choreographed by Rohene Ward, combined elements of Celtic step dancing with Brown's signature flexibility and joie de vivre.
His free skate at the U.S. championships in Boston in January 2014 encapsulated what I love about skating. An underdog has the performance of his life, hitting every element perfectly. The crowd rises to its feet, roaring with joy, before the program ends. The skater is rewarded with stellar marks. Goosebumps.
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Writer: Lois Elfman
Performance: Meryl Davis and Charlie White's Scheherazade free dance at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games
In the years I've spent covering figure skating, I've seen so many talented U.S. ice dance teams not get their due. Then came Meryl Davis and Charlie White. I remember waking up early the morning of the free dance of the 2011 World Championships and watching it live on icenetwork. Seeing Davis and White win the gold that year in Moscow and fulfill the dreams of generations of American ice dancers was deeply poignant. It was almost like disbelief: The moment for U.S. ice dance had finally arrived. Three years later, they made another, even greater moment. Watching their free dance performance at the 2014 Olympics, I was brought to tears. When I named them my icenetwork People of the Year for 2014, fellow U.S. ice dancer Kim Navarro said Davis and White had crossed the finish line for all the teams that went before them. I will always remember that magical day in February 2014 when those two kids from Michigan made history.
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Writer: Philip Hersh
Performance: Yuna Kim's "Concerto in F" free skate at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games
Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoMkWIA2jVY
The greatest performance I have seen in the icenetwork era also is by far the greatest performance I have seen by a female singles skater in the 11 Winter Olympics I have covered, beginning in 1980.
What made it special? Doing it on the sport's biggest stage, of course, as well as the extraordinary national pressure on the athlete who did it.
But the best way for me to explain why Yuna Kim's free skate at the 2010 Olympics is my ne plus ultra is the way I described it in the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 26, 2010:
VANCOUVER - They already called her "Queen Yuna" in South Korea.
And Yuna Kim spread her dominion to an absolute reign over the women's figure skating world after the Olympic women's figure skating final Thursday night.
Skating a stunningly difficult program without an error, floating like a feather in the wind to the airy, jazzy rhythms of Gershwin's Concerto in F, unflinchingly bearing the weight of her country's hopes, Kim crushed her rivals with a performance for the ages...
...The South Korean national hero may have been a little tight on some of her early jumps, but she nailed them all: triple lutz-triple toe loop combination, four other triple jumps, all with highly positive grades of execution.
"If this was track and field, we just watched an 8-second 100 meters," said Jamie McGrigor, a skating analyst doing in-house radio commentary.
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Writer: Klaus-Reinhold Kany
Performance: Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron's "Piano Concerto No. 23" free dance at the 2015 World Championships
Video link: http://www.icenetwork.com/video/v55229583
I saw parts of this program for the first time during my summer visit to Montreal in August 2014. The program was not ready yet, and Gabriella and Guillaume and their coaches let me watch practice only if I promised to keep the music a secret until their first competition. I thought it would be a fantastic program, once it was ready. It was different from other teams' programs: Despite being set to a conservative Mozart piece ("Piano Concerto No. 23"), it showcased a very modern style. The team's big breakthrough came at their first Grand Prix, Cup of China, where they beat the reigning world champions, Anna Cappellini and Luca Lanotte, but it wasn't until their second Grand Prix, in Paris, that I was convinced they had something special. They continued to wow audiences with their astounding free dance during the rest of the season, which included their first career titles at the European and world championships.
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Writer: Vladislav Luchianov
Performance: Julia Lipnitskaia's team event free skate (to Schindler's List) at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke0iusvydl8
To me, Julia Lipnitskaia's free skate in the team event at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games went beyond perfection. It was so deeply emotional, so moving -- the kind of performance that opens up your mind to the possibilites that exist within the pre-established boundaries of a sport. It was, to put it simply, a work of art.
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Writer: Nick McCarvel
Performance: Jason Brown's Riverdance free skate at the 2014 U.S. Figure Skating Championships
Video link: http://web.icenetwork.com/video/v31300281
2014 was actually the first U.S. Figure Skating Championships I covered in person as a journalist, and I was rinkside for Jason's free skate. You could feel the momentum building with Jason that weekend, and it all culminated in this performance. As the program went on, TD Garden roared to life, and a full 10 seconds before he was done, the entire arena was on its feet. It wasn't the perfect skate, but in an Olympic year, with all of that pressure, it was as close to perfect as a skater can ask for. It was spine-tingling. It still is.
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Writer: Amy Rosewater
Performance: Patrick Chan's "Élégie in E flat minor" short program at the 2013 World Championships
Video link: http://web.icenetwork.com/video/v2177228683
Patrick Chan, to me, is the quintessential skater, the one who can blend quality edges and artistry with magnificent jumping ability better than anyone. When he is on his game, he's the best. Make no mistake, there was "Chan-flation" over the years, but he was quite truly masterful at many points in his career.
At the 2013 World Championships in London, Ontario, Chan had the pressure of not only defending his world titles from the previous two seasons but skating in his home country of Canada. He came out in the short and was absolutely brilliant, performing a perfect program on his way to earning a score of 98.37 -- three points better than the previous record, set earlier that season by Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu at the NHK Trophy.
"Going into my last spin, I just felt this surge from the ice going through my boot and through my body," he told reporters afterward. "I was so excited because I finally did it on the day that counts in front of my home crowd. The world championships will never be this amazing during the rest of my career."
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Writer: Lynn Rutherford
Performance: Maia Shibutani and Alex Shibutani's "Fix You" free dance at the 2016 U.S. Figure Skating Championships
Video link: http://web.icenetwork.com/video/v540474683
Maia Shibutani and Alex Shibutani always had beautifully crafted, demanding programs, but after the siblings won a third U.S. silver medal in 2015, they knew they needed a change. That off-season, they took creative control of their material, threw caution to the wind and dug deep within themselves to produce the cathartic "Fix You," a technical and emotional tour de force that propelled them to their first U.S. crown and set them on a course to the Olympic podium two years later.
(This article originally appeared on icenetwork.)