Juniors head to Sofia for World Junior Championships

by Melanie Hoyt | Photo by Robin Ritoss

This week, 28 teams from 21 countries will compete at the 2014 World Junior Championships in Sofia, Bulgaria. Sofia last hosted the ISU’s junior championship in 2009, when Americans Madison Chock & Greg Zuerlein and Maia Shibutani & Alex Shibutani went 1-2. They also hosted in 2008, when Emily Samuelson & Evan Bates won the title. Entries in the dance event are down this year, compared to last year, when 35 teams competed in Milan, Italy. Since this is a major ISU championship event, only the top 20 teams from the short dance will move on to the free dance. No past world junior medalists are returning this year, but the podium will still likely have an element of familiarity, as eight strong teams from the “big three” countries of Canada, Russia, and the United States are medal contenders.

With last week’s withdrawal of defending champions Alexandra Stepanova & Ivan Bukin, their Russian teammates Anna Yanovskaya & Sergei Mozgov are the favorites for this year’s title. They have not lost an international competition since December 2013, and are this season’s Junior Grand Prix Final champions. At the Final, they set a new personal best score of 152.48 and finished 13 points ahead of their closest competitors. As long as they continue to compete well, it seems that this title is theirs to lose. Fourth at Junior Worlds in 2012, Yanovskaya & Mozgov were left off the team last year after a third-place finish at the 2013 Russian Junior Championships. If they win gold in Sofia, they will be the fifth consecutive Russian team to win this title; the last non-Russian world junior champions were Chock & Zuerlein in 2009. Yanovskaya & Mozgov train in Moscow with Svetlana Alexeeva, Elena Kustarova, and Olga Riabinina.

Betina Popova & Yuri Vlasenko will also represent Russia this week. In their first year on the JGP circuit, they won silver in Minsk and gold at Czech Skate, where they also reached their ISU personal best of 135.16 points. They qualified for the Final in December, but were a few points off of their best score and finished fourth. Popova & Vlasenko earned their trip to Sofia with a bronze medal at the recent Russian Junior Championships, finishing ahead of the more experienced team of Evgenia Kosigina & Nikolai Moroshkin. Popova & Vlasenko train in Moscow with Ksenia Rumiantseva.

Kosigina & Moroshkin are among the most experienced Russian junior teams, but they were only added to the roster last week, when Stepanova & Bukin withdrew due to illness (Bukin). They have placed sixth at the World Junior Championships twice, in 2011 and 2013, and they also finished sixth at the Junior Grand Prix Final in both of those years. This season has been a step back for them, though. After a fourth-place finish at JGP Baltic Cup where they finished behind a younger Russian team, they were not given a second JGP assignment. Kosigina & Moroshkin only finished fourth at the Russian Junior Championships, down two places from last year. They have a great opportunity to redeem themselves in Sofia, but they will need to hit their elements. They train in Odintsovo and Togliatti with Oleg Sudakov and Alexei Gorshkov, and they have also spent time in Novi, Mich., with Igor Shpilband.

The American contingent is led by JGP Final silver medalists Kaitlin Hawayek & Jean-Luc Baker, who were thrilled to finish seventh at this event last year, their first season together. This year, though, they are aiming for a podium finish, and they have set themselves up well with an excellent season. Their personal best score of 144.84 was set at JGP Baltic Cup last fall, where they won the second of two JGP gold medals. The 2014 U.S. junior champions train at the Detroit Skating Club (DSC) in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., with Pasquale Camerlengo and Anjelika Krylova. The DSC is known for having a large contingent of international skaters, but Hawayek & Baker are the only DSC team at this championship.

Two teams from the Wheaton Ice Skating Academy (WISA) in Maryland will comprise the rest of Team USA in Sofia. Lorraine McNamara & Quinn Carpenter, in their second year on the JGP circuit, won a silver medal in Riga, Latvia, and a gold medal in Minsk, where they set a new ISU personal best score of 137.97. They went on to win the bronze medal at the JGP Final in December. If they are to stay on the podium this week, the key for them will likely be the components score. They excel at executing their technical elements with accuracy, but they are not as polished and refined as their older competitors. McNamara & Carpenter recently won their third consecutive U.S. championship medal at the junior level; they now have two bronzes and a silver. They finished ninth at the 2013 World Junior Championships.

Their training mates Rachel Parsons & Michael Parsons will join them in Sofia, back at Junior Worlds after missing the second half of last season due to injury. The Parsons siblings were 15th at this championships in 2012, but have made huge strides since then, most notably earning a place in this season’s JGP Final. Unfortunately, they finished sixth there and only scored 116.60 after a rough competition. Their much higher personal best was set at Czech Skate in the fall, where they earned 134.73 points and won the second of two silver medals on this year’s JGP series. They are not always consistent in the short dance, but if they hit their key points, they are capable of a big score in that segment of the competition. The Parsons siblings and McNamara & Carpenter are all coached by Alexei Kiliakov, Elena Novak, and Dmitri Ilin.

Canada did not send any teams to the Junior Grand Prix Final this year, but they are still sending two teams to the World Junior Championships that could challenge for medals. Madeline Edwards & ZhaoKai Pang were first alternates for this season’s Final, after winning silver and bronze on the JGP circuit. At both of their JGP assignments this fall, they were only about two points from the top step of the podium. While they earned a new free dance personal best of 80.56 points at Mexico Cup this season, they have been just a couple of points off of their best overall score of 135.01, set in fall 2012. If they hit their levels and skate cleanly, they should be able to surpass that score this week. Edwards missed a great deal of training and two competitions in November and December while she suffered from Achilles tendinitis, but the duo has had solid training since the Canadian Championships in January, where they made their senior-level début. They are coached by Megan Wing & Aaron Lowe in Burnaby, B.C., and they were 12th at this event last year after an unusually rough free dance.

Mackenzie Bent & Garrett MacKeen, the 2014 Canadian junior champions, were a strong fifth at this event last year and want to challenge for a medal this year. Like Edwards & Pang, Bent & MacKeen set their ISU personal best (129.16) in fall 2012. They won the first JGP event of the series this season, but dropped to seventh in their second event after uncharacteristic technical mistakes in their short dance.  Known for their accurate feet, they will probably need to set themselves up in Sofia with a strong short dance in order to contend, since the other podium challengers have been scoring over 130 this season. Bent & MacKeen train in Scarborough, Ont., with Carol Lane and Juris Razgulajevs. Two of their training mates, Carina Glastris & Nicholas Lettner (GRE) and Cortney Mansour & Michal Ceska (CZE) join them in Sofia.

Ukrainians Alexandra Nazarova & Maxim Nikitin (pictured, right) probably have the best shot at the podium outside of the “big three” teams. They were 11th at this event in 2013, and they have showed a lot of progress with new coaches Alexander Zhulin and Oleg Volkov, earning a pair of silver medals on the JGP circuit. Their personal best score of 135.22 was set at Baltic Cup, their first JGP event this year, and they came close to that mark at their second event, but they struggled at the Final, scoring only 123.17 and finishing fifth. Both skaters were born in Kharkov, Ukraine, but they now train in Moscow.

Another Moscow-trained team, Rebeka Kim & Kirill Minov, will be looking for their country’s best finish yet. Minov was born in Moscow, but they represent Kim’s birth country of South Korea. In only their second season together, they have placed fourth and fifth in this season’s JGP series. They were 20th at the 2013 World Junior Championships, but have great potential to move up this year. If the citizenship can be worked out, this is a team that is looking ahead to the next Winter Olympic Games in South Korea.

As always, dancers will be competing to earn spots for their country for next year’s championship. While Russia and the United States look likely to retain three spots, Canada will be looking for the magic number of 13 to pick up an additional spot for next year. Country rankings this week will also determine JGP spots for next season. In the past, the top three countries have earned two spots to each JGP event, while countries fourth through six earn one spot to each.

The short dance will open the competition on Wednesday afternoon, and the free dance is set for Friday evening.