This year, as in many others, Ottawa’s Minto Summer Skate presented the first major outing for many of Ontario’s dance teams at all levels — including national and international medalists at both junior and senior.
With Grand Prix and national silver medalists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier debuting their free dance — a piece, per one source, of “quirky” and “cool” contemporary choreography described by coach Carol Lane as “The Theatre of Modern Movement” — much attention has been paid to the senior ranks, though an absence of livestream has also meant an absence of visual data to accompany what’s a very organized results and protocol page.
Video is, however, available for the debut senior free dance of Lauren Collins and Shane Firus, in their second year together. Finishing second in the segment (first in the short dance, also recorded), the team picked up 82.16, comparing favorably with a free dance mark of 84.07 in their junior silver medal-winning performance at the 2015 Canadian Tire National Skating Championships:
The senior dance event also marked the introduction of new team Jocelyn LeBlanc and Danny Seymour — senior debuts for both — while also featuring a host of teams representing the Czech Republic, Great Britain and Australia, an international phenomenon also apparent at the junior ranks with Mariposa’s Katia Fedyushchenko and Lucas Kitteridge (GBR) and Scarboro’s Nicole Kuzmich and Alexandr Sinicyn (CZE), Jack Osman and Sasha Fear, and Lilah Fear and Jacob Payne (both GBR).
It was the Canadian teams making the biggest impact in that junior event, though, with the new team of Mackenzie Bent and Dmitre Razgulajevs in their first event taking a lead after the short dance; a score of 56.56 was a point above Bent’s 2015 Nationals senior short dance mark with Garrett Mackeen, with whom she’d made last season’s Junior Grand Prix Final and multiple Junior Worlds teams. While a second-place finish with a Prince of Persia-scored free dance also brought a decent score of 74.02, that segment belonged to JGP Riga-bound Hannah Whitley and Elliott Graham, third in the short dance with 50.78, who earned a 76.02 for their Bollywood number — combined, a more than 9-point improvement over their total at 2015 Nationals.
The junior event also included a move up for some of last year’s novices. Though 2015 novice bronze medalists Ellie Fisher and Parker Brown withdrew from the competition in advance of the short dance, Ashlynne Stairs and Lee Royer (fourth at 2015 Nationals) and Victoria Oliver and George Waddell (fifth) made their own debuts, with Stairs and Royer finishing a solid fifth and sixth in each segment.
And for a few couples, including Stairs and Royer, Minto came fast on the heels of a season opener at Lake Placid. Among those four teams who competed both segments at both events — Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships for Audrey Croteau-Villeneuve and Jeff Hough, Lake Placid Ice Dance International for the others — it’s perhaps unsurprising then that little change could be measured in scores, though one couple proved a particular exception:
Up Next:
Montreal has become host to several of the world’s top and talked-about dance and pairs couples — and about half of them are set to compete this weekend at the Championnats québécois d’été (Quebec Summer Championships).