2016 JGP Czech Skate Blog #5

Editor’s Note: The featured photo for this blog is one from Chloe & Logan’s off ice photo shoot in Lake Placid in July 2016.  Photo by Melanie Hoyt.

Hi!

Sorry this is late!  I lost my phone, which is what I’ve been writing on. It also has all of my pictures on it so sadly I can’t include them in this final blog. We have just boarded the plane back to Detroit and I’m already missing our team. It was seriously the most amazing group ever!

We had a great last day.  First of all, I slept in until 11:30, which was magical. After somehow managing to squeeze everything back into my suitcase, Logan and I went over to my mom’s hotel. We rented bikes and rode around Ostrava- through the streets, a park, and through the main part of the city. We had such a good time exploring and getting a little bit lost. Megan Wessenberg then competed her free skate as the only U.S. lady and finished 6th.

After biking, it was already pretty late and we were going to watch the men’s event soon, so when we got back to the hotel I grabbed some patriotic clothes and went to the rink. Kevin Shum skated last in the second to last group. He did SO well and had a really cool program with a lot of body movement. Fun fact we learned about Kevin is that he apparently unlaces after the 6 minute warm up and doesn’t re-lace until pretty much the last second. We were walking through the hall right before he went on and he was jumping around in his shoes!

After Kevin skated the last warm up group got on, in which Alex Krasnozhon skated last, finishing up the entire competition. The energy in the arena was awesome; Alex did incredibly well and got second. His program is really fun and you can’t help but smile if you watch it.  After waiting to congratulate Alex, we took some team pictures, and gave the team leader and team doctor our little gifts.

Finally, we all went back to the hotel and had dinner together. We always have so much fun and laugh constantly- I will miss this team like crazy! When dinner was over we weren’t sure what we would do so everyone finished up packing and then we all ended up just hanging out in one of our rooms. Not too eventful for a last night, but it was perfect!  The night ended with a shuttle ride to the airport at 1:40 am. Even at this hour when everyone else was trying to sleep, we couldn’t stop laughing.

Saying goodbye was really hard though… although this week didn’t go perfectly on the ice (to say the least), I know I can speak for both myself and Logan when I say that we had the BEST time off the ice. We’ve learned so much, left with a new motivation and desire, and left with many more memories and friends than we had before.

Thank you Ostrava for the beautiful week! Thank you US Figure Skating, our amazing team leader and doctor, the officials who travelled with us, and everyone who made it a great week. Finally, thank you ice-dance.com for inviting me to write a little about our experiences. Again, I’m sorry about the lack of pictures for this blog but hopefully when I get my phone back I can submit them separately. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my entries, I loved writing for you. 

Love,
Chloe