While he seemed to notice nothing surrounding us, my eyes darted between all the other pairs. Hannah Williams and Benji Coleman were chatting near the men’s dressing room. Julie Mercier was talking animatedly with her hands while her partner, Adam St. Pierre, laughed. Meanwhile, Daria Petrova was standing in silence, leaning against a wall, looking at the ground and bobbing her head ever so slightly. I wondered where her partner was, but a moment later Feodor Rybakov was back with a water bottle in his hand.
I swallowed hard, acutely aware of the fact that they all seemed relaxed as they waited next to their partners. Dom was only a few feet away, but it felt like an insurmountable gap. He might as well have been in his own little world, oblivious to me or the stress I was feeling. I wouldn’t be surprised if the othershad picked up on it. We would normally talk now, with Dom telling me some ridiculous tale that was probably based in truth but exaggerated for the sake of a good story. His dumb stories always made me laugh and helped me take my mind off what we were about to do. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on them to keep my stress at bay until I didn’t have them.
A woman with a clipboard was out a couple of minutes later. “Okay, I need all twelve of my pairs skaters to get ready to go on the ice in two minutes. Two minutes until the warmup begins.” Her voice was clear and booming, easy to hear despite all the inevitable noise of so many people crowded in such a small area.
One by one, the other pairs started making their way to where we would head to the ice. I bit my lip as I watched them. We should join them, but I couldn’t go by myself. Now more than ever, I had to be with Dom. I straightened my shoulders. There was no time like the present to break the silence. “Are you ready to go?”
“As ready as I will be,” Dom said. It didn’t sound like a joke. He gestured for me to go in front of him with an open hand. “After you.”
The warmups passed in a blur. The noise increased exponentially as soon as we were out near the ice, with the giant open space above us letting the sound travel unimpeded. People filled the seats, many of them holding flags or colourful poster board signs announcing their love of a country, skater, or team. I gave myself a few seconds to look around and take it all in while I took off my skate guards. After that, I had to focus. This was going to be hard enough, even with all of my attention.
There are only a few minutes of ice time dedicated to warming up before a skate, and you have to share it with everyone else in your flight. With six pairs, it feels a lot more crowded than usual. By the time I finished my individual laps around the rink, getting stretched out and practicing a couple of simplified versions ofelements, I had to scan the brightly coloured costumes and jackets for Dom.
I skated around Yang and Shen, coming out of jumps, then gave plenty of room to Benji Coleman as he did a camel spin. When I was a few feet away from Dom, he reached out for me and grabbed my hand in one smooth motion. He gave me a gentle tug in the direction he wanted to go, and I instinctively matched his speed. I was not quite as nervous with his hand in mine, but I didn’t get the usual wave of peace washing over me that usually accompanied us skating together. I was in worse shape than I’d thought. I needed to get my head in the right place, and fast.
By the time we got off the ice, I was pleasantly out of breath. Focusing on getting my breathing under control would give me something to focus on to help keep my mind appropriately blank.
The predictability of everything that followed from there was comforting. I got my skate guards on and my jacket zipped up, completing my off-ice look, before putting my headphones in again. I looked over to see what the rest of my team was doing once I had my music on and was surprised to see Dom looking at me. I expected him to look away, but he didn’t. Instead, he gave a jerk of his head, which I took as him asking, “Should we go?”
When I started off, I was relieved that he followed close behind me. Not only that, but he stayed closer than he had been. He must have also been uncomfortable with how the physical distance was going to affect us as we got ready for one of our last skates of the year.
Every time my thoughts drifted to Olga’s critiques from the last couple of weeks, I forced her voice from my mind. Right or wrong, it was too late to think about our shortcomings. All I could do was try to picture us skating the routine perfectly and then work towards that goal. And while Dom was still standingjust a bit too far away from me and he was looking away a little too fast, I knew we were of one mind here. As I watched him move his upper body ever so slightly, going through our skate in his head, I felt some comfort that at least some things remained the same as at every other competition. If we could stay in that headspace, we would be fine.
Mark must have been having similar thoughts. “Don’t overthink,” he whispered as I handed my things off to him in the minutes before our skate. “You have done this so well so many times. One clean skate today, that’s all you need.”
I tried to say, “Right,” but I couldn’t find my voice. Instead, I settled for a nod. I was glad he was thinking positively. It was the headspace we needed to be in, so those sorts of comments were much better than advice. It was too late to think of improving. The power of positivity would see us through.
The ever familiar announcement of “Skating for Canada, Hazel Pierce and Dominic Hughes!” came sooner than expected. It had already started by the time Dom tapped his hand on the back of mine and I returned it. A bit late, but better late than never.
I tried to absorb the positivity of the cheers, letting them put me in a good headspace. These people had no idea that we had been having problems in practice recently. What they did know was that we’d had a personal best already this year, and that there was a chance that we could beat it today. That was what I had to think, too.
I got into position on the ice and looked at Dom. In the seconds before the music started, he gave me the tiniest nod. No matter what had been happening, I had to believe that we could do this.
My body went with the music. There was so much happening so fast that I didn’t have time to think about anything other than the move I was doing and what came next. A bracket, aMohawk, and a change in edge. Then we were around the corner and turned to skate backwards. I had a sharp intake of breath as Dom’s hands gripped my hips. I focused on the twist with everything I had, paying attention to a million small details at once. After so many screw ups in practice, I wanted to be sure that it was up to our usual standard.
I landed cleanly but didn’t have time to feel relief. There were only a few seconds of steps and a single hop before we had to move into our next move. Even though the short program was under three minutes long, we had to fit in seven required elements and countless bits of footwork. Every single step was a potential hurdle. I was acutely aware of every wobble, every slip of the hand, and every other mistake. I knew I couldn’t dwell on any of it, but for once I was finding it hard to stay completely in the moment. I rarely had any problems pushing the mistakes from my mind, but now they were all I could think about. Our continued screw-ups in recent days had really gotten to me.
When the music stopped, I was running through all the mistakes in my mind and the areas I did not think our grade of execution would be up to our usual standard. I hadn’t gotten as high as I usually did on the twist, which felt like the biggest failure. After so many attempts at the quad, we should have consistently been able to get more height. I didn’t think we had stayed in sync throughout the side-by-side spins either. We had gotten back on track, but that brief time when we were out of sync could cost us valuable points. As for the rest, I felt like we had done decently, but not as well as we had in Vancouver. Had we done as well as we had in Moscow? I hoped so, but I couldn’t be sure.
Dom and I skated off the ice side by side. I fought the urge to look at him anxiously. Even though we had finished, I had to project confidence. If I felt like we had screwed up more than we actually had, I would feel like an idiot for acting worried. Andanyway, if I didn’t believe in us, that would be a terrible thing to portray. I got the sense that Dom wasn’t looking at me, either.
My eyes scanned Mark and Olga, looking for a sense of how we had done. At times like this, I always hoped that their professional exteriors would crack. The only time that happened was when we had done as well as we could have hoped. When we hadn’t been spectacular or, on rare occasions, when we had massively screwed up, it was hard to get a sense of what they thought.
My nerves were back in full force by the time I had my skate guards and jacket back on. All of the things I had been concerned about on the ice were suddenly magnified in my mind. “How was that?” I whispered to Mark.
There was the slightest hesitation before he answered me. “We will see in a few minutes,” he answered.
Shit, I thought. That hadn’t been the response I had been hoping for. I had hoped that he would have encouraging words. His noncommittal answer made me even more concerned. True, this wasn’t the time to get into everything, but still. I bit the inside of my cheek on the way to the kiss and cry. There wasn’t much time to wait, at least.
“The marks for Hazel Pierce and Dominic Hughes,” came the announcement. With that, I sat up straighter, as though that would somehow help me hear better.
Our score was not what I had hoped for, but it was not as bad as it would’ve been had the competition been a couple of weeks earlier. I wondered where we had lost points. Grade of execution? Had there been a big mistake I hadn’t noticed? I suppose I would find that all out later. We would look over every tiny detail of the skate, trying to figure out the parts I had gone well at and the parts that needed to be improved upon. I would have plenty of time to analyze every move of the hand and every step to get a sense of where I could improve for next time.
Even with this knowledge, it was hard to put a smile on my face and look content while I waved to the crowd. I really should focus on the next skate, not on what we had just done. There wasn’t that much time before our next performance. You never knew what could happen with the other pairs, both good or bad, so it was important that we try to close the gap between us and the pairs of us. At our second World Junior skate, two of the teams that had been in contention for first place after the short program had made disastrous errors in the free skate. Instead of being first and second, they had ended up third and fourth. It had been a huge upset, but one that Dom and I had been able to take advantage of. We had not been the favourites, being quite a bit younger than the highest-ranked pairs, who were about to move into the senior level of competition. We hadn’t had time to build the experience or strength that our toughest competitors had. It had been their mistakes that had landed Dom and me in second place. It had been as surprising as it was thrilling. I never wanted to have to count on something like that to happen again for a good placement, but knowing that it could happen was enough to keep hope alive until the final free skate was done.
There was nothing to do but wait for the rest of the pairs to finish after that. Dom and I stood close to each other but not touching or talking, watching our competitors skate. I hardly dared to blink, not wanting to miss a moment in my assessment.
I cursed to myself when the final results came in. Dom and I have ended up in fourth place. Or, if I was less positive about it, we were in the bottom three. Fourth out of six was worse than we had done in a long time.
