2012 PRUDENTIAL U.S. FIGURE SKATING CHAMPIONSHIPS JUNIOR - ICE DANCING
ALDRIDGE, EATON HAVE
THE LUCK OF THE IRISH by LYNN RUTHERFORD
D
etroit, home to GM, Ford and Chrysler, has long been known as the Motor City. Lately, though, its number-one export seems to be ice dance.
Te top three teams at the 2011 World Figure Skating Champion- ships train in Canton, a Detroit suburb. Teams number four and five — French European champions Nathalie Pechalat and Fabian Bourzat, and Canadians Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje — make their home at the Detroit Skating Club (DSC) in nearby Bloomfield Hills. Te company they keep makes all the difference to new U.S. ju- nior ice dance champions Alexandra Aldridge and Daniel Eaton, who trained at DSC even before they teamed up in the spring of 2009. “We absolutely love it,” Aldridge, 17, said. “Along with working
Alexandra Aldridge/Daniel Eaton
and training hard, we all get along great. It’s a really calm environment and we’re motivated to improve when we’re on the ice, whether it’s to skate as fast as the senior teams, or express the character of the music as well as they do.” Striving to keep up with the world’s best is working well for the duo, who placed fourth at the Junior Grand Prix Final last December. In San Jose, they skated a sizzling Latin American short dance that won the day with 54.42 points. Te short dance, an International Skating Union–devised hybrid of pattern dances and three additional elements, debuted in the fall of 2010. Tis season, juniors must include two sequences of the Cha Cha Congelado, done consecutively. “We will go hours, or weeks if Natalia (Deller) could, working on Cha Cha sequences over and over again,” Eaton, 19, said. “It’s prob- ably one of the best things we’ve ever been able to do. We get to break down the dances, and we get the Russian aspect from Natalia and the American style from Liz (Swallow).”
Teir coaching doesn’t stop there. Pasquale Ca- merlengo, a former Ital- ian ice dance champion, heads up the team and handles much of the choreography. His wife, Anjelika Krylova, a two- time World ice dance champion, and Massimo Scali, a European med- alist, are also integral to the group. “All of them are al-
ways on the ice with us,” Aldridge said. “Tey each bring something different to our skating, whether it’s Pasquale getting our free dance to be perfect or Natalia and Liz work-
38 MARCH 2012
Lauri Bonacorsi/ Travis Mager
Lorraine McNamara/Quinn Carpenter
ing on our Cha Cha sequences. Tey all want us to be the best we can be.”
Te DSC team made a bold choice for its free dance, step- dancing their way through Lord of the Dance, the Irish
extravaganza. Te dynamic program opened with an excellent straight- line lift with Aldridge in an upside-down position, followed by a speedy three-part twizzle sequence. It earned 87.68 points, and Aldridge and Eaton finished with 142.10, outpacing the field by nearly 10 points. “Tis free dance was probably our favorite to compete so far,” said Aldridge, who got the idea for the program when the Lord of the Dance troupe visited Detroit. “We had so much energy and the crowd was great, clapping along the whole time.” Lauri Bonacorsi and Travis Mager, who train in Aston, Pa., under
1980 Olympic champions Natalia Linichuk and Gennadi Karponosov, placed second in the short dance and second in the free dance to win their second-consecutive U.S. junior ice dance silver medal. Te couple’s dramatic and smoothly skated free dance to Sandra
and Tony Alessi’s “Close to You” featured a fine three-part twizzle se- quence as well as attractive lifts. It earned 80.34 points and they ended with 133.73 points overall. “We were really happy with how we skated this week,” Bonacorsi,
18, said. “We got a clean start with the short dance and then the free dance. We put our heart into it and really enjoyed skating.” “My favorite thing about skating is skating with Lauri,” Mager, 21,
said. “When we get to skate, especially in front of a crowd, it brings out the best in us as people. I thought we made a great connection on the ice today.” Just 12 and 15 respectively, Lorraine McNamara and Quinn Car-
penter of the Wheaton Ice Skating Academy in Maryland took bronze after a difficult and energetic free dance to a techno version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Te duo, who have skated together for a remarkable seven years, finished with 126.10 points. “It felt great to be able to entertain everybody, to be able to put on
an act together,” McNamara said. “We’ve been skating together for so long that it’s just like one of us really.” “We like to think of each other as one, not two separate people do-
ing things,” Carpenter said. “San Jose has been a really great experience for us.”
Last season’s novice ice dance champions, Rachel Parsons and Mi-
chael Parsons, arrived in San Jose fresh from their fourth-place finish at the 2012 Youth Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Tey placed third in the short dance and fourth in the free dance to take fourth place overall. Next stop for the top two teams, plus Parsons and Parsons: the
2012 World Junior Figure Skating Championships in Minsk, Belarus, Feb. 27–Mar. 4. “We’re going to bump up our training and try to get ourselves to
peak at Junior Worlds,” Eaton said. “We’re going to train as hard as we can with our coaches and go for a medal.”
PHOTOS BY JAY ADEFF
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