NORWOOD — Elite figure skaters were back on the ice at The Skating Club of Boston on Wednesday morning, preparing for their next steps after last week’s US Figure Skating Championships.
Maxim Naumov and pairs skaters Emily Chan and Spencer Howe hit the ice to begin the work for the biggest competition of their lives — February’s Winter Olympics — and met the media.
They not only want to do themselves and the United States proud, but the club. The trio is the largest contingent sent to an Olympics by the club since 1992.
“We have three members of The Skating Club of Boston at the Olympics, what more can you ask for?” Naumov said.
Naumov’s national championships performance captured the hearts of many across the country. He had his best-ever performance on the senior men’s level, a bronze, at the first nationals since the loss of his parents and coaches, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, in the collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a US Army helicopter last January outside of Washington, D.C.
Naumov was peppered with questions about the tragedy all week at the championships, and again Wednesday. He continued to face it all with thoughtfulness and introspection.
“Making the Olympic team is such an honor, but my finding the courage and strength to actually go to Nationals and compete and do my job, that just brought tears to my eyes,” he said.
Naumov pointed to Chan and Howe’s free skate, where they moved up from eighth in the short program to fourth overall, as further motivation for his own Olympic-berth clinching free skate.
“They showed so much courage also coming back from the short that had a few big mistakes in it, and them pulling through and locking in completely in the free, it was inspiring for me too,” said Naumov.
Howe and Naumov are former roommates. After Howe learned he and Chan made the team Sunday, he awaited word on Naumov as the Olympic team gathered for NBC’s selection show.
“As people were rolling into the locker room, we were starting to see who’s on the team and congratulate each other,” Howe said. “I was just praying the whole time, ‘I want Max to walk through that door.’
“Ironically, he’s one of the last ones to come through. And when he did, he looked at me and I was like, ‘What’s up, man?’ And he literally jumped on me, we screamed and jumped up and down for a minute.”
Chan and Howe are relieved to have made the Olympic team. Their seven-year partnership has had more of its share of challenges, including years of shoulder injuries for Howe. At Wednesday’s practice, they were focused on the details of their short program: the execution of side-by-side spins and the way Howe exits a death spiral.
“We’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing and, and so when we get to the Olympics, we can rely on the training and all the hard work that we have put in,” Howe said.
All have some non-skating things they want to do in Milan Cortina. Naumov wants to see a hockey game (particularly one with Canada’s Tom Wilson, his longtime favorite player), Chan hopes to be at the games with her boyfriend, Estonian skater Aleksandr Selevko (who will find out this weekend if he will be competing), and Howe plans on doing his competition ritual: “Eat, pray, and take a nap.”
“(My parents) told me that the Olympics is such a celebration,” said Naumov. “It’s the culmination of just years of your life dedicated to this one thing. I want to soak that all in.”
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Training mates Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov won their second straight national title and would have made the Olympic team if Efimova’s quest for expedited US citizenship had been successful. Instead they are preparing for the Four Continents Championships next week in Beijing.
It is a whirlwind to go from winning a national title to hopping on a 16-hour flight to an important competition a week later.
“We are physically in good shape, knock on wood, because we just came back from competition,” Mitrofanov said. “For us it’s more of a mental aspect of how to calm our minds and reset ourselves.”
The disappointment in not being eligible for the Olympic team doesn’t easily go away. Efimova said nationals and citizenship experiences will influence the pair’s offseason decisions.
“I feel definitely this situation and these Nationals, it left us with some kind of hunger to make it,” said Efimova. “If in four years [we make it] to the Olympics, I think it would be even more valuable, even more precious.”
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