U.S. JUNIOR CHAMPIONS—ICE DANCE
Alexandra Aldridge and Daniel Eaton
LEAPS OF FAITH ALDRIDGE, EATON MAKE IT WORK by LYNN RUTHERFORD
Ask a top pair or ice dance team about their initial tryout and more than likely they will tell you, “We knew right away this was it.” Junior ice dance champions Al- exandra Aldridge and Daniel Eaton, who have won two U.S. titles in three seasons together, tell a different tale. “It wasn’t perfect,” Aldridge, 18, said of their tryout at the De- troit Skating Club in the late spring of 2009. “It took a little while.” Te 20-year-old Eaton was
equally uncertain. He and Sameena Sheikh had placed 10th in novice at the 2009 U.S. Figure Skating Cham- pionships, and he had more compe- tition experience than Aldridge, who had yet to compete nationally. Hav- ing missed a season after major ankle surgery in late 2007, he didn’t want to make a mistake. So when Sheikh retired due to a hip injury, he was cautious about a new partnership. “Anjelika [Krylova] was there with us for two days,” he said. “Af- ter the first day I thought wow, this isn’t going very well. I told Anjelika, “I just don’t know if this is right for me.” But Anjelika said ‘No, it is right, I can see it. Train as hard as you can and you’ll be great for years to come.’” So Eaton took a leap of faith. As it turned out, Krylova — a two- time Russian World ice dance cham- pion and Olympic silver medalist — was right. Just two months later, Aldridge and Eaton won the novice event at the Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships, the first time either
skater had stood atop a podium. Tey went undefeated that season, winning the U.S. novice ice dance crown in Spokane, Wash.
“Tat first competition in Lake
Placid was the turning point,” Eaton said. “It was huge change in both of our lives. Tat’s where it all started.” Actually, it all started for the
Florida-born Eaton at age 5, when he took the ice in the footsteps of his father, Dennis, a singles skater who once ran an ice rink. When Daniel was 12, the Eatons moved to the De- troit area. “My dad had a huge influence on my skating,” Eaton, an only child, said. “He definitely loves the sport as much as anyone out there.” When Michigan native Aldridge — whose older brother, Keaton, is a baseball player at University of Mem- phis — began skating at age 3, hock- ey was the plan, until she caught sight of the figure skaters’ costumes. “I told my parents, ‘I want to
do that,’” she said.
After their success in the novice ranks, Aldridge and Eaton picked up where they left off, winning their junior group in Lake Placid in the summer of 2010.
“Tat was a shock,” Eaton said. “I thought, ‘I can’t get a better life than right now.’ We just finished an undefeated season and we started off the next season the same way.” Reality hit hard at their first Ju-
nior Grand Prix event in Courchev- el, France, where they placed sixth. Although they climbed to fourth
Aldridge and Eaton had plenty of support and guidance on their journey this past season from Detroit Skating Club coaches (l-r) Liz Swallow, Massimo Scali and Pasquale Camerlengo.
at their second event in Sheffield, England, both knew international success would be hard-fought. “Our first year junior wasn’t
so hot,” Aldridge said. “We had to work so hard to do better.” “Competing against Euro- pean skaters, we had to reteach ourselves how to perform our programs and how to achieve our goals,” Eaton said.
Te 2011 U.S. Champion-
ships brought more challenges. Af- ter a solid short dance and strong start in the free dance, disaster struck: Aldridge had a misstep and fell. Tey placed fifth, and in that moment took another leap of faith: they would stay together and give their partnership time to grow. “After [the free dance], we had
a huge Hallmark moment,” Eaton said. “Alex turned to me and just said, ‘Sorry.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be sorry; this wasn’t our year to win. Next year will be our season.’ And we took a week off and then got back to the rink and just trained our butts off.”
Aldridge has almost identical
memories. “He said, ‘It’s OK, we have
two years of Junior Grand Prix age- eligibility left and we’re going to continue skating for next year,’” she said. “In a way, it kind of brought us closer together and motivated us to work so much harder.” A third leap came soon after,
when Krylova presented the duo with an idea for their 2011‒12 free dance: music from Riverdance, the popular Irish stepdancing show.
Again, Eaton needed some convincing before tackling the exciting, but lightning-quick and
30 JUNE/JULY 2012
hard-driving, program. “I told everybody it was a bad idea, because I thought it was go- ing to be too hard to do, and judges might not like it because we’re not skating together,” he said. “It took Alex and our coaches a week to con- vince me to go through with it.” Te free dance turned out to be Aldridge and Eaton’s ace in the hole. It gave them a convincing win at the U.S. Championships in San Jose, Calif., where they out- paced the field by nearly 10 points. Time and again — at the JGP
in Latvia, where they won bronze; the Junior Grand Prix Final in Que- bec City, where they placed fourth; and the World Junior Figure Skat- ing Championships in Minsk, where they climbed from fifth after the short to win a bronze medal — it impressed international judges and connected with the crowd. “Minsk was great,” Eaton
said. “We had a pretty good short dance; we were fifth, a good place- ment for us. Te free dance felt great. We had the crowd involved and we loved every moment of that program. We knew it was going to be the last time we were going to [compete] Riverdance and we let everything flow naturally.” “We just have this really great
bond,” Aldridge said. “I feel we have this really natural expression on the ice. We just train our pro- grams so hard that when it comes time to compete, we can just kind of enjoy it.” A few weeks after winning
bronze in Minsk, Aldridge and Eaton met with their DSC coaches — Krylova; her husband, former Italian competitor and renowned choreographer Pasquale Camer-
PHOTO BY JAY ADEFF
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