By Hiro Yoshida
Since winning the World Junior title in 2016, Daniel Samohin’s career has been full of highs and lows. With his first major test of 2019 coming up at this week’s European Championships in Minsk, Belarus, he is looking to finally fulfil the promise he showed in the junior ranks. (more…)
By H.Olenina with Hiro Yoshida
2016 World Junior champion Daniel Samohin has come to the end of what can only be described as a roller coaster of a season. (more…)
By Hiro Yoshida
Daniel Samohin announced himself to the skating world when he cracked the top ten at his first European Championships in Stockholm, Sweden last year. He followed that up with a very impressive 8th place at the World Junior Championships in Tallinn, Estonia in March 2015 marking him out as the real deal. When I spoke to him at the Junior Grand Prix Final in Barcelona, Spain last month, the whole surreal nature of being an object of attention all of a sudden was still fresh in the mind of the 17 year old.
“Europeans was an amazing experience. It was crazy because I didn’t expect the placement or my skate to be that good. Not because I didn’t believe in myself, but because I was still on and off on my quad and my Axel was actually not very consistent. I got to the competition and for that week it was really consistent. Before that, all those months I was practicing I could not do Axel. I was stepping out or falling and every time I did it in the program it wasn’t consistent. So when I did the Axel in Europeans last year I got really excited and that’s why I stepped out of the Lutz! It was really great for me and really opened up a lot of doors mentally because I was able to push myself more. It motivated me to work even harder than I had been.”
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Here is where we take a quick look back at what happened in the world of skating over the course of the past week. (more…)
If you had told anybody five years ago that Spain would have a three times in a row European figure skating champion, most people would have asked you if you were feeling alright. Yet here we are in 2015 and Javier Fernandez has captured his third consecutive European title, a feat that skaters like Alexei Urmanov, Ilia Kulik, Alexei Yagudin, Evgeni Plushenko or Brian Joubert were not able to accomplish. In fact, the last time there was a threepeat in the men’s event the Soviet Union still existed as a country when Alexander Fadeev won in Birmingham in 1989. The similiarities between Fernandez and Fadeev’s streaks continue in that they began in a pre-Olympic season and neither skater was able to collect a medal at the Olympics themselves with both finishing up in 4th place. Fernandez still has the opportunity to change that.
europeonice.com 