By Hiro Yoshida

Despite having the best season of their partnership after relocating from Germany to Italy to train, Annika Hocke and Robert Kunkel continue to face obstacles to obtain the funding necessary to fulfil their potential.

Disappointment with their results in the 2021/2022 season prompted the Germans to move from their hometown of Berlin to Bergamo, Italy in June 2022. They also realised the training environment that they found themselves in was not going to help them reach the next level.

“We just want to be good and want to keep up with the best,” Hocke said. “I can just speak about Berlin as I don’t know about the rest of Germany and didn’t train in the other parts. We understood after that season that the whole ecosystem just doesn’t work anymore. That’s not how professional sport works in the world and it’s just a very old system. It starts with the quality of the ice, with the ice times, with taking the sport seriously, with the approach to going to practice. Of course, you also can’t just change the fact that now we train with some of the best in the world. It’s just such a huge difference because in the Olympic season, the Austrians (Miriam Ziegler and Severin Kiefer) went back to Austria, Minerva (Fabienne Hase) and Nolan (Seegert) went to Russia, the Dutch pair (Daria Danilova and Michel Tsiba) went back to Russia, I think in that time, because the ice quality was miserable.”

“In every situation you can imagine, we felt lonely because we had no coaches who could be there for us full time,” Kunkel continued. “We felt lonely because we had no professional skaters around us who have the same goal and approach as us.

“We felt lonely with as she said the ice quality and with the professional system on ice and off ice because it took half a year just to do a meeting about what’s wrong with the ice and it was horrible. It was the worst ice we ever skated on in terms of the ice quality. It was even dangerous sometimes because it was so bad and it has got worse now.

“We needed a professional team where we could go to because we had a lot of problems ourselves as well. We couldn’t solve all the other problems because we were in big trouble with our technique, with our conditioning, with all this stuff.”

Hocke and Kunkel decided to look for a new coaching team in Europe in order to minimise the costs of training and travel to fulfil their commitments to the Bundeswehr (German armed forces), their main sponsor. The idea of moving to Bergamo to work with Ondrej Hotarek at Ice Lab was suggested to them by their choreographers Anna Cappellini and Luca Lanotte.

“Honestly, it was Anna and Luca both that kind of pushed us into that direction,” Hocke said. “They always said, ‘Just come to Bergamo. We are here. Ondrej is here.’ And then we started to really think about it and had a talk with him. He was so motivated and ready and honoured and was fully committed to saying right away, ‘Sure come try out and we will figure something out.’

The Germans made the trip to Bergamo and the try out in the new training environment went well even if it was curtailed by illness.

“We planned three weeks of trials and we did three days, which were great,” Kunkel said. “After I got an infection of the lungs.”

For Hocke and Kunkel, the decision to move to Italy was an easy one and they are very happy with how it has worked out since they started training there in June 2022.

“Everybody told us, ‘Wow, that’s such a big life change and you’re very brave for doing this’,” Hocke said. “We didn’t really see it like that because we knew we didn’t have other chances. For us, this was our only chance so we didn’t really see it as a big change, which of course it was. It was just the right way to go and it was the best decision that we did. We are very happy there. We have a great team of coaches and a very supportive group of other sportsmen. We have great facilities. We didn’t know that we would feel so home in Italy. Even though we understand a lot of the language now, we can’t speak it fluently of course yet but we still feel very welcome.”

Ice Lab has been an ISU Centre of Excellence since 2019 and has rapidly become a magnet attracting and developing singles and pairs skating talent. Hocke and Kunkel believe the stimulation of training with some of their rivals has been hugely positive and they are enjoying the camaraderie of their fellow athletes.

“We’re really happy to train with all of them and it’s a great motivation and really makes a difference,” Hocke said. “When you go to a competition, like at Europeans for example, there were so many pairs from Ice Lab it felt almost like home because everybody was just there. That was really nice and I hope for more competitions like that because even when they were competing, they were still supporting you and it was really nice.”

Their first competition with their new coaching team was the Nebelhorn Trophy in Oberstdorf, Germany where they picked up a bronze medal. They followed that with victory at Finlandia Trophy in Espoo, Finland before Kunkel fell ill with COVID-19 hampering their preparations for their Grand Prix assignments. They did manage to make it to Grand Prix de France in Angers, France and won bronze which was their first ever Grand Prix medal. Unfortunately, prior to their departure to NHK Trophy in Sapporo, Japan, this time Hocke contracted COVID-19 forcing them to sit that competition out.

In early January 2023, Hocke and Kunkel captured their first national title at the German Championships in Oberstdorf and punched their ticket to the European Championships back in Espoo later that same month. Despite a nervy start in the short programme at Europeans where they both made errors on their side by side triple Salchows, they found themselves initially in second place. Hocke fell on a triple Salchow in the free skating and the pair slipped down to third place overall. It was their first European medal.

This year in March Hocke and Kunkel travelled to Saitama, Japan for the World Championships. Hocke had previously competed at the same venue when the championships were held there in 2019 and with the Japanese team of Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara as favourites for the title the atmosphere was electric.

“We were so happy to make it to Japan this time, not like at NHK Trophy,” she said. “We were really excited to finally go and also I’m pretty sure it was more crowded than at my last Worlds here.

“I was a little sad back then because not that many people watch the pairs but this time I felt it was much more full and the crowd was so amazing.”

“They were supportive,” Kunkel added.

The competition did not get off to the start the Germans wanted with a fall on an under-rotated triple Salchow costing dearly and putting them down in 15^th place after the short. However, they did rally in the free to produce their best performance of the season with a new personal best free score of 123.71 points and total of 184.60 points leaping up to ninth place overall in the final standings.

“After the short programme, we really tried to keep it together and we knew that there was still the long programme coming,” Hocke said. “We wanted to end it on a really good note, so we’re happy that we were able to do that.”

“We would have been happy about pulling up another place, but we are still happy that we go from fifteenth to top ten and are now the first German pair again. Overall, it’s good, but if you’re not first there’s every time you can be better.

Despite having their best season ever and winning a European bronze medal, narrowly missing out on placing top eight at Worlds has hurt them in their case for receiving government funding as athletes.

“There’s the rule that the highlight of the season, in all sports, mostly the World Championships is the one that counts,” Hocke explained. “Of course, maybe it plays a little role in the end that we got a medal at Europeans, but they will decide that if it helps us or not. We’ll see.”

“It’s a little hard to understand because we have the best season we ever had,” Kunkel said. “It’s the best season for German pair skating since Aljona (Savchenko) and Bruno (Massot) quit and the funding is almost zero. You act like a professional and you get treated like you’re doing it as a hobby. It’s not that nice. We can keep up our training with all the prize money we got for a few more months. But I hope that then somewhere we will get some funding because the Federation said to us everything until the Olympics is very tough. I’m pretty sure that a lot of German sports men and women will quit because of this reason.”

“It’s sad,” Hocke said. “Germany is not the biggest country in figure skating, but we are still kind of in the middle range. We’re not one of the super small figure skating countries.

“You still see that there’s almost no base. It’s difficult to keep going, because somehow something went really, really in the wrong direction with our federation. It’s tough to sort that out.”

“Last year we got competitions paid, but this year for challengers we get zero expenses paid and even for Grand Prixs we don’t get the coaches paid,” Kunkel said. “We will basically go without coaches to Grand Prixs.”

“It will be another test to sort out the competitions,” Hocke added. “Of course we want to do the best competitions for us, but also we have to do the competitions that are manageable. So we’ll have to figure that out.”

There has been no time to rest for the Germans following Worlds as they faced a compulsory training camp with their country’s armed forces as part of their contract before the new season begins.

“Every year the same army camp is just robbing you of your holiday and everything you could do in this four or five weeks,” Kunkel said. “We do the camp because otherwise we couldn’t continue figure skating.”

While many challenges await them on their journey to the Milano Cortina Olympics in less than three years, Hocke and Kunkel are looking ahead to next season and having a little more time to work on improving aspects of their skating.

“Looking back now, before the season, we didn’t expect the season to go as well because we came to Ondrej and we changed a lot and we trained a lot more than we ever did,” Hocke said. “There were a lot of things Ondrej would have liked to change that were just not in the timeframe we had. The season was more a preparation for the next year, even though it turned out better than we have hoped for. We are very excited to keep on going and change a lot of things that we weren’t able to change. For example, we just kept the lifts almost as we had last season because there was no time for doing new lifts. We also wanted to include the triple toe, which we said we never were able to show because we were just always sick during the competitions and so we had almost no time for it. Also, I always dreamed of trying, for example, throw triple Axel, but for that there’s just no time right now because we have to do new programmes and other things. It’s probably also not going to be the time for that for the next Olympic cycle. Maybe there will be time after that and I’m very excited for that.”

“We learned so much out of the season,” Kunkel said. “We know where we have to push. We know where we have to do a break. We know where we can easily do what we never thought before.

“We learned a lot from our coach, but I think our coaches learn also how they have to treat us because everybody’s a little different.

“We learned so many things. We did a lot of mistakes. We did a lot of things right. And I think we can just build up on the season.”

“We’re excited to do the Worlds that were supposed to happen in 2020,” Hocke said about next year’s championship in Montreal, Canada. “I think right now we have a lot of goals for next season and we really can’t wait to start going. It’s so much easier this year because we have everything in the coaching situation sorted out.

“It’s so much nicer to know you’re coming back to a training base that you already know and that you can really start going right away. Because we’re on a different level.”

Details for a fundraiser for Hocke and Kunkel’s training expenses can be found here.