Manitoba quartet qualifies for skating championships

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This article was published 01/12/2024 (279 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s representation for the 2025 Canadian figure skating championships doubled over the weekend when Winnipeg’s David Howes and Dauphin’s Breken Brezden delivered on their considerable potential at the nationals qualifier held at Seven Oaks Arena.

Pair skaters Ava Kemp and Yohnatan Elizarov, the reigning Canadian junior champions, had booked their ticket to the national championships on Friday.

Kemp, 16, and Elizarov, 21, finished atop the standings in their return to competition after a lengthy lay-off that gave Kemp the time she needed to rebuild after a back injury. Over the next six weeks, the Winnipeg duo plans to up the technical ante in their programs, determined to defend their title in Laval, Que. in mid-January.

Junior men’s competitor Howes, 17, who claimed bronze a year ago in the qualifier, upgraded to silver this time with a stellar performance of his Sound of Silence long program, choreographed by Canada’s multiple world medal-winning ice dancer Kaitlyn Weaver.

“I really love this program. It’s been a really great vehicle for me to begin to add more difficult choreography, as well as adding more jumps. I love skating it,” said Howes, who now trains in Richmond, B.C.

“I felt relaxed today. It felt exactly like training and I was able to execute all the elements like in training. A big relief was when I got the (triple)lutz-(triple) toe done and I was able to just settle into the rest of the skate. That’s my main risk element.”

Howes’s scores for skating skills, choreography and performance outdistanced the rest of the 20-man field by a significant margin, lifting him from fourth after the short program. He has work to do to ensure he consistently gets full rotation on all of his triple jumps, however, in order to boost his technical score.

Howes shared the podium on Saturday with two other Davids, both from Ontario. Bondar climbed from sixth to take gold (209.47) in convincing fashion, while Shteyngart earned bronze (197.41.) Howes tallied 198.73, his highest score to date.

Fourth at the 2024 national championship, Howes hopes to land on the podium in Laval although he tries not to think too much about placement.

On Sunday, Brezden, 18, showed why she is now considered among Canada’s top senior women with a solid, fifth-best free skate performance that lifted her from eleventh place in the opening round to seventh overall on 154.79 points. B.C.’s Amy Shao Ning Yang claimed the gold medal with 170.02.

Had it not been for a misfire on her triple-triple jump combo that cost her about six points in the short program and a fall on her triple lutz in the long, Brezden could well have finished top-five here, if not on the podium.

“I did make a few mistakes still so there’s room to grow and improve for nationals. But, overall, I’m happy with how I was able to fight back,” Brezden said after Sunday’s finale.

“In my head, as soon as I made the first mistakes, I was like, ‘Okay. You can’t let go of any more points. You need to fight for every single thing moving forward.’

“I’ve been running clean programs at home, building my confidence, but there’s still sometimes you mistime things or your nerves and adrenaline play a role when you compete,” Brezden said.

Of the 25 senior women who competed at Challenge, only the 14 top scorers advance to the Canadian championships. Four women, including the reigning and a former Canadian champion, had byes to nationals.

Beside medals, Team Canada assignments for the 2025 senior and junior world championships and Four Continents Championship are up for grabs in Laval.

Kemp and Elizarov, who now train in Toronto, should be a good bet for one of the three pairs berths available for junior worlds in Hungary in late February. They ranked sixth at the global meet the past two seasons.

Howes has a shot at earning one of two men’s spots open for junior worlds although Skate Canada has several candidates to consider including those who graduated to senior competition nationally but are junior age-eligible.

Brezden’s best chance is to be one of three Canadian women selected for Four Continents in Seoul, Korea, in mid-February.

Before Brezden and Howes can turn their full attention to training for the fast-approaching Canadians, both have university exams to write. She’s studying life sciences at McMaster, while his focus at UBC is sociology.

In all, 150 junior- and senior-level figure skaters from across Canada competed at Skate Canada Challenge.