HIGH ACHIEVERS: Gloucester Skating Club’s David Shteyngart wins national junior bronze, Reese Rose just misses podium

By Martin Cleary

Gloucester Skating Club’s David Shteyngart is all about skill development, working on element consistency and adding new jumps. Watch out for a triple Axel in the 2024-25 season.

But it’s not all serious business inside the arena boards. Sometimes there’s room for a little fun and levity. Like this season, when he was recruited to be an actor last month and needed to be an artist, of sorts, this week.

In December, Shteyngart was asked to help Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe promote the outdoor skating rink at City Hall in a social media video. Shteyngart was happy to volunteer to be a body-double for the mayor, who is known more as a distance runner.

This is how the video played out. Sutcliffe told his viewers he was going to take his first spin around the Rink of Dreams this season, but he was a little rusty.

As he pushed away from the boards, the camera quickly pulled back to show a distant skater smoothly covering the ice and then launching himself into a perfect double Axel jump. When the camera focused on Sutcliffe back at the boards, he said: “That was so much fun. Please come out and enjoy the Rink of Dreams.”

A second later, Shteyngart skates beside Sutcliffe and asks him: “Was that OK?” “Yeah, that was great,” said Sutcliffe as he looked straight ahead into the camera, but allowed his eyes to shift quickly towards his body-double.

On Wednesday night, Shteyngart learned he also had the talent to be a spur-of-the-moment, quick-change artist.

Competing in his second junior men’s singles competition at the Canadian Skating Championships in Calgary’s WinSport Arena, Shteyngart scored a total of 175.40 points to win the bronze medal on Wednesday. He finished sixth at the 2023 nationals.

In the junior women’s singles competition, Gloucester’s Reese Rose finished fourth overall with 147.87 points, while clubmate Lucille Yang was seventh at 140.05 points.

Rose had the identical overall point score as bronze-medallist Mely-Ann Gagner of Sherbrooke, PQ., and almost delivered a second third-place medal for the Gloucester club. The tie was broken by their free skate final mark. Gagner was third in the free skate at 99.53 points to earn the bronze, while Rose took fifth at 95.46 points for fourth place.

By winning a medal, Shteyngart needed to stay around for the podium ceremony, which unexpectedly was three hours later. That presented a scheduling concern as he needed to get to the Calgary airport for his return trip to Ottawa.

Immediately after the medal presentation, he put the plastic guards on his skate blades, left on his skating outfit and dashed to get his ride to the airport. As the car sped through the streets of Calgary, Shteyngart became a quick-change artist inside his four-wheeled dressing room to put on more comfortable travelling clothes.

“We didn’t expect the medal presentation would be three hours after the event,” Shteyngart said Thursday morning from the comfort of his home. “I had to run to the car in my skates and costume. I got changed in the car.”

At least, Shteyngart didn’t have to deal with being a body-double or a quick-change artist during his two days of competition this week at the national championships.

While he had a few moments where the jumps weren’t perfect and he felt he had underachieved immediately after the competition, he projected a different attitude 24 hours later, after a night’s sleep.

“I had a little interview after (the free skate on Wednesday) and I felt unsatisfied with it overall,” said Shteyngart, a Skate Canada NextGen team member who won the Skate Canada Challenge junior men’s competition in early December against a similar field. “I felt I could do much better and have done much better.

“But today (Thursday), I’m glad with what I got.”

Shteyngart, who won the Canadian men’s novice singles title in Calgary in 2022, opened his second junior nationals by placing third in the short program with 65.65 points. His free skate routine earned him 109.75 points and a fifth-place ranking. But his combined points gave him third place for the bronze medal.

When Shteyngart won the Skate Canada Challenge junior men’s singles title last month in Winnipeg, he scored three personal-best point totals, which were all higher than his marks at the national championships – 66.23 for the short program, 120.58 in the free program and 186.81 overall.

At nationals, he opened his short program with an impressive triple flip-triple toe-loop combination and basically had a clean skate, except for a slight deduction on an under-rotated triple toe jump. He was only two points out of first place.

“I gave everything I had,” he said.

In the free skate program, he completed four triple jumps, but fell on a pair of triple Lutz jumps.

“Those two jumps I usually do clean, but what I kind of did was I rushed one and was too slow and cautious entering the other,” he explained.

A year after finishing sixth in his junior men’s singles debut at nationals, Shteyngart credits his improvement to being stronger and more consistent on the ice.

“I’m much stronger,” he said. “I have focused a lot of time on my consistency of jumps.”

Meanwhile, Rose hinted at a medal from the start of the junior women’s singles competition by finishing fourth in the short program with 52.41 points. A fall on her triple Lutz tarnished an otherwise clean performance.

She landed five triple jumps in her free skate program as well as solid jump combinations, but also had another fall attempting the triple Lutz.

“I was really happy with what I put out there (on the ice),” Rose, 15, said in a phone interview, after returning home to Gananoque.

“I definitely think (the tie) was a little upsetting, knowing I was so close to a medal. But fourth is awesome and better than last year (sixth in her junior debut). I’ve improved technically. If I did one thing a little better, I would have got a medal. But I’m still amazed with my accomplishment.”

Yang placed sixth in the short program at 40.03 points and seventh in the free skate with 91.02 points for a seventh-place result at 140.05 points.