Figure skating returns with a new twist — backflips
The move is now legal, but will it catch on?
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The 2024-25 Grand Prix of Figure Skating tour opens on Friday night as Skate America gets underway in the Dallas area.
For those who don't know, the Grand Prix is the top series of competitions in the sport. From now through late November, a total of six meets will be held in different parts of the world. Skate Canada is next week in Halifax, followed by stops in France, Japan, Finland and China.
Skaters are allowed to compete at any two of these events. Once they're completed, the top six in each discipline — men's, women's, pairs and ice dance — are invited to the Grand Prix Final in France in early December. Apart from the world championships, which will take place in Boston in late March, the Grand Prix Final is the most prestigious global event of 2024-25. By the time the season is over, we should have a better handle on the top medal contenders for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
With Skate Canada coming up, most Canadian athletes are waiting until next week for their Grand Prix season debut. That's when we'll see the pairs team of Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps, who won Canada's first world title since 2018 last March in Montreal, and ice dancers Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, who took silver for their third worlds medal in four years. Kaiya Ruiter, who captured the national women's title last season at the age of 17, is also among the Canadians slated to compete in Halifax.
Canada has three entries this weekend at Skate America. Nineteen-year-old Wesley Chiu, who won his first national title last season but has yet to crack the top five in a Grand Prix, will compete in the men's event. Two Canadian tandems — Alicia Fabbri and Paul Ayer, and Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac — are in the ice dance.
Former Canadian ice dance champions Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Nikolaj Soerensen were initially scheduled to compete at Skate America, but that's not happening after Soerensen received a six-year suspension for "sexual maltreatment" following an investigation into an alleged sexual assault.
WATCH | That Figure Skating Show previews the upcoming season:
The international skater to watch, as usual, is American star Ilia Malinin. The 19-year-old Quad God soared to his first world title last season by mastering the quad axel — the most difficult jump in figure skating — after becoming the first person to land one in competition the year before.
Malinin is planning to introduce another new wrinkle at Skate America — a backflip. Thanks to an off-season rule change, skaters can now perform the move and other "somersault type jumps" without a penalty for the first time since 1976.
Bringing back backflips seems like a cool idea. My memory is a little foggy on this (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but I think Kurt Browning and Elvis Stojko were known to throw a backflip into their gala/exhibition skates back in the day, and I seem to remember everyone enjoying that.
More famously, after a poor opening round knocked her out of medal contention at the 1998 Olympics in Japan, French star Surya Bonaly put a backflip into her free skate — penalty be damned. She nailed it, and skating fans still talk about it.
Another high-profile backflip happened at last January's European championships. Unconcerned about the point deduction because he enjoyed a huge lead, French skater Adam Siao Him Fa added a backflip to his free skate en route to winning his second consecutive men's title. He did it again at the world championships in Montreal, where he vaulted from 19th after a terrible short skate to a third-place finish despite the illegal move.
But figure skating fans seem more divided on the backflip than you might expect. Some argue (pretty convincingly) that they're not as aesthetically pleasing as, say, a triple or quad axel. Others worry that they're too dangerous.
In any case, the return of backflips probably won't change the sport very much — at least not right away. They're not mandatory, and they're not even assigned a point value like other jumps. The only thing they can change is a skater's component (artistic) score.
As a result, only a small number of athletes are expected to attempt a backflip this season. But, if enough stars like Malinin and Siao Him Fa keep landing them, it's certainly possible that the trick could catch on. Here's more on the backflip and other things to watch on the Grand Prix tour.
How to watch the Grand Prix
Every stop on the tour will be streamed live on CBCSports.ca and CBC Gem, starting Friday night with the Skate America pairs and women's short programs.
There's no CBC TV coverage of Skate America, but there will be some for Skate Canada next week. Here's the CBC Sports TV schedule and here's the sked for figure skating streams.
