By Gina Capellazzi, Team FSO website administrator
Photos by Robin Ritoss
Two-time Canadian Champion Madeline Schizas is feeling confident and ready for the Canadian National Championships this week in Calgary.
“I think this is the most calm and the most prepared I feel like I have been coming into a National Championships,” Schizas told the media in a video conference call Jan. 4. “I’m hoping to show that to everybody.”
This is the 20-year-old from Oakville, Ontario’s third go-around at being the favorite to win the women’s event at the Canadian Championships. She said she knows what it takes to get ready.
“I’m more experienced now,” she said when elaborating on why she’s feeling calm. “I’m just hoping everything next week will just feel routine.”
Along with her previous Canadians experience, Schizas is heading into the event after obtaining her highest placements on the ISU Grand Prix Series this fall, with a fourth-place finish at Skate Canada International and a fifth-place finish at Cup of China. While she admits that her Grand Prix Series didn’t go exactly as she wanted it to, she said she learned things from her events. She also stated what is different than in previous years was that she had more time between her second Grand Prix event and Canadians as she did not have a competition in December like she had last season.
“I was able to come down and then rev back up again. So now I have put a good six weeks of training in and I think that is potentially the big difference from other years,” she explained.
Schizas said she was quite disappointed after Cup of China, noting that she felt she skated pretty well, but received some technical calls that she wasn’t expecting.
“So I kind of went and worked on all that stuff (during the break). I worked on the second half of the program, all the combo jumps and everything that I had gotten calls on in China, and I feel more prepared technically than I did for that (Cup of China),” she said.
In terms of changes to her programs, Schizas said all the technical content will be the same. During her competition break, she followed up with both sets of choregraphers, Madison Hubbell, Scott Moir and Adrián Díaz, who choreographed Schizas’s “Farrucas” short program, and Carol Lane and Juris Razgulajevs, who choreographed her free program to “Summertime.” She was in Scarborough every week since China.
“We have done a lot of work on the free program, especially just to give it a little more life, and so there are little changes to the choreography, but the tech content is all the same,” she explained.
Following Canadians, Schizas says she is looking forward to competing at the ISU Four Continents Championships, which will take place in Shanghai, China Jan. 30-Feb. 4. She’s also hoping to be named to the World team, which would be Schizas’ fourth World Championships. The 2024 World Championships in Montreal, Quebec would be Schizas’ first experience competing at a World Championships in her home country.
“I’m very excited because this will probably be my only chance of Worlds in Canada. I don’t know if there are plans to host again, but I’m realistically halfway through my senior career, very likely, and I don’t know how many more seasons past the Olympics I wanna do, so this may be my only chance at it, so I’m very excited and should I get to go, I’ll have a lot of family and friends there to watch,” she said, noting that her parents are from Montreal.
If named to the world team, Schizas says her goal is to finish in the top 10, something she’s strived for the past three seasons, but has fallen short of achieving.
“I feel like I have a very good chance at it to be top ten or better,” she said. “I just need to really buckle down and put in the work so I can put out good performances.”
