‘We’ll be back here in four years’

Yes, it is pretty cool being world junior champions.

That’s the consensus opinion of Winnipeg’s Ava Kemp and Yohnatan Elizarov whose hard work these last five years elevated them from pairs figure skating newbies to best-on-the-planet status among the world’s elite junior competitors.

“It’s kind of funny that just because we have this title, a lot more opportunities will come up. Even in the past few weeks (since winning the ISU championship in Estonia), eyes kind of turn and we have more attention, so it’s a bit weird because we didn’t change as people or a team just because we have that title,” Kemp said this week at the start of a much-needed, two-week break from training.

“But it’s cool. We’re going to keep working. We’re super excited to step into senior (competition) this season.”

A huge, forest-green banner recognizing their two junior national championship titles — and, soon, their 2026 world title — hangs at the Granite Club ice rink in Toronto, where Kemp, 17, and Elizarov, 22, have trained for the past three seasons. The tribute is positioned alongside banners celebrating club alumni including Canada’s world champions Kurt Browning, Patrick Chan, and Barb Underhill and Paul Martini — the last Canadian pair to win the world junior pair title in 1978.

Until now, Kemp and Elizarov have set annual goals and operated with a season-long training plan. In their next career phase, the two are eager to map out a four-year strategy intended to carry them to the 2030 Olympic Winter Games.

“We’ll be back here in four years,” Elizarov told Mayor Scott Gillingham on Wednesday after he and Kemp received the Mayor’s Award for Sports Excellence at Winnipeg City Hall.

En route to the Games, a senior Canadian title and even a world podium finish are on the wish list. Kemp and Elizarov couldn’t speculate when they might reach those heights, but they are set on competing at the 2027 ISU World Championships in Finland next March.

The partners chuckled when asked if they would have to work even harder going forward.

“I don’t think we can work any harder. Some of those sessions get so tough, so mentally and physically exhausting. I think that’s why we’re showing results, because of how hard we’re working now. I think we just keep doing what we’re doing,” Elizarov said.

“We’re very competitive people. We like to train and push our bodies.”

“We’re very competitive people. We like to train and push our bodies.”

Kemp advised that their well-honed work ethic won’t change, but they are learning how to train more efficiently and what kind of training would benefit them most.

Counterintuitively, Kemp and Elizarov attribute their three gold medal wins this season not to earlier successes but to their most “difficult” competition experiences.

“I know it’s cliché, but you learn so much more from the hard ones, from poor results. Last year’s junior worlds was a pretty big hit on us because we really wanted to medal and we had a lot of mistakes,” Elizarov said, recalling their 10th place finish.

“Our injuries, even the junior worlds before, Ava’s back (injury), it was a lot of the negatives that really helped us trust each other more and build our partnership because, you know, some partnerships start to pull apart when things like that happen. Ava and I got stronger and our partnership got better.”

Kemp and Elizarov had competed as singles skaters before they teamed up in 2021 at ages 13 and 17, respectively. She was a pre-novice competitor at the start of her career while he was on the verge of quitting the sport after hovering around 10th place in junior national competition.

“We had seen pair skating, but I honestly didn’t know a lot about it. Just learning the elements kept us busy for the first year,” Kemp said of the technical skills that are unique to pair skating.

Once they had the overhead lifts, death spirals, throw jumps, twist lifts and synchronized spins under their belts, Kemp recalled thinking, “‘OK, we could be good at this.’”

“Then, we won the national novice title and we were pretty excited to keep training,” Elizarov added.

The pair soon realized their success could open a lot of doors — membership on the national NextGen team, junior Grand Prix competition, a trip to the world championships.

Even this week, their voices rose with excitement as they recalled those realizations and that heady second season together when the possibilities became reality.

“I would say from novice to our first year junior we were on high (speed), just going up, up, up,” Elizarov said.

In short order, however, they found themselves overcoming setbacks from injuries, and making the difficult choice to leave Winnipeg when their coach Kevin Dawe decided to move to Toronto.

Still, they persevered. This past season, they flourished.

At the Granite Club, Kemp and Elizarov have benefitted from an expanded coaching team that includes Dawe, veterans Lee Barkell and Juris Razgulajevs, and the choreographic expertise of Jeff Buttle, Sandra Bezic and David Wilson.

The three choreographers are currently collaborating on selecting music for the pair’s new short and long programs while Dawe and Barkell devise training goals and strategies.

Kemp and Elizarov will ramp up their off-season training come May with more hours on and off the ice.

In the meantime, the championship gold medals that the duo donned for the City Hall event will get tucked away alongside their ever-growing collection of hardware — Kemp’s in a box in her bedroom closet and Elizarov’s in a grey lululemon bag.

winnipegfreepress.com/laurienealin