Any pre-Olympic performance means pressure, never mind having one wonder about injuries. This event was the final pre-Olympic test heading into Sochi.
Scott Moir felt that the duo performed poor and stated “We didn’t perform under that pressure as well as we’d like to.”
Moir and partner Tessa Virtue won the short dance at the Canadian figure skating championships, but overall the defending Olympic champions were not pleased with their performance, admitting to considerable pressure competing in front of a Canadian crowd.
This will likely be the last time they perform in Canada in front of a Canadian crowd of supporters.
With less than a month out from the Games, the pair is looking for perfection, which they felt never happened on this day.
“We’ve been training and practising kind of lights-out and Tessa and I, we’re really perfectionists and it felt like we had a couple moments today that just weren’t the way we’d been training,” Moir said. “That’s probably the emotion you see on our faces.”
They earned 76.16 points that saw them skate to the music by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, but lost marks for holding a rotational lift for too long.
In the lift in question, Virtue lies on her back across a spinning Moir’s shoulders and there were a few other small missteps as well.
“Just technical things,” Moir explained. “I felt like I was a battling a little with my knees today, wasn’t quite under the ice. . . maybe I was watching world junior (hockey) highlights or something.”
Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje of Waterloo were second with 72.68, while Alexandra Paul of Toronto and Mitchell Islam of Barrie were third with 67.67.
Canada, which will name its Olympic team Sunday, has three ice dancing berths at the Sochi Games.
Virtue admitted the two are being tougher on themselves with the Games so close.
“I’m sure a lot of people around will think ‘Oh don’t be so negative,”‘ Virtue said. “There are a lot of positives to take from (the program). It’s just the place we are in our season, it’s all about process, it’s all about trying to achieve the highest quality of performance possible, so we’re always trying to get that.”
Virtue, from London, Ont., and Moir, from Ilderton, Ont., have been living and training in a bubble of sorts the past few weeks in Canton, Mich., making a strategic decision to block out almost everything Olympic-related. They used the same approach leading into the 2010 Vancouver Games.
“It’s nice when we’re in the States because we don’t see anything, about anything Canadian,” Virtue said.
They’re not even watching their own show — the W Network’s “Tessa & Scott” — which is two episodes into the seven-episode series.
“It’s just too much us,” Moir said.
“It’s so close to the Games, we sort of lived it already, we don’t want to go back and feel the things we were feeling in August and September, especially just a few weeks short of the Olympics,” Virtue added. “We’re in such a great place now. . . it’s better for us to block everything out and focus on every day.”
