Anyone who enters the ice rink in Oberstdorf is confronted with the past in showcases after only a few meters: with pictures of Norbert Schramm on skates, with posters of the dance legends Torvill/Dean and the golden couple Savchenko/Massot, some pictures more, some less yellowed . It’s been a while since the glamor days of figure skating. Which does not mean that there are no contemporary witnesses. Nicole Schott, for example, who lives in Oberstdorf, remembers her first championships well when she competed against fifteen or even twenty opponents – not against three opponents like today. When was that? “I don’t really want to know,” she says and laughs: “I’m old.”
Nicole Schott is 26. In areas of life in which a triple Rittberger is not part of the job requirements, she would easily pass as a young hopper at that age. In figure skating, her profession, she won her seventh German championship title since 2012 at the weekend. Hardly anyone in the West has exhibited such a combination of consistency and blade art since Ellen Brockhöft danced to the championship seven times in the 1920s in a wide pleated skirt for the Berlin ice skating club. In order to catch up with the GDR luminaries, Katarina Witt (eight titles) and record champion Gabriele Seyfert (ten), Nicole Schott would have to add a few more years – but that’s not out of the question given the vitality she’s showing this winter lays.
At the weekend she kept her training colleague Kristina Isaev, five years younger, at a distance, although she did not exhaust her entire repertoire: Unlike at the Olympic Winter Games in February, she did not jump a triple triple combination. She and coach Michael Huth “built the German championship into their training this year,” she explains, the competition was just one stage on the way to the European championship, which begins in Espoo in just over two weeks. There, in Finland, Nicole Schott, who finished tenth at the World Championships last year, has good chances; and this despite the fact that she had been suffering from the after-effects of a corona infection for a long time in the summer.
The Berlin pair runners Hocke/Kunkel are now training in Bergamo
“Anything can happen,” she says now. “Now whoever has the best day can win.” Russia’s skaters have been banned from international competitions since February, when Kremlin ruler Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine. Thus, the athletes of the nation that had recently dominated this winter sport in almost all disciplines are missing – especially in the women’s tulle-and-toe-loop division, in which Russian children and teenagers drilled to top performance outclassed the older ones because of the physical advantage in the jumps . At the 2022 European Championships, the Russians had won all the medals around Kamila Valiyeva, who was later convicted of doping.
The ban on Russia has led to a fundamental change in figure skating that can almost be compared to a tectonic plate shift. It seems as if the competition between nations has been revived.
After a decade in international business, not only Nicole Schott feels that the once rigid hierarchy is breaking up. The pair skating colleagues are also highly motivated. In the autumn months, the German Ice Skating Union has already recorded remarkable results in its flagship discipline, because three couples at the Grand Prix competitions made it to the medal ranks with momentum. In Oberstdorf, Annika Hocke, 22, and Robert Kunkel, 23, have now become champions for the first time – they prevailed against their younger challengers Letizia Roscher, 18, and Luis Schuster, 21, from Chemnitz. Couple number three, Alisa Efimova and Ruben Blommaert from Oberstdorf, was ill.
Annika Hocke is concerned with the question of whether the sanctions against the Russians are correct, without having decided on an opinion. Her partner Robert Kunkel thinks “that politics shouldn’t influence sport”. “But you can also ask why should the Russians run at international events? The Ukrainians can’t run either because their ice rinks were bombed,” he says. He also reminds of the Valiewa doping case. “It’s a story that, even if the war were over, would have to be worked on again.”
Hocke/Kunkel had decided in the summer to move from Berlin to Bergamo in order to train with top European couples at a private ice skating center. An adventure that makes ambitions grow, also with regard to the European Championship. “We know that something is possible there. We have to do well in Espoo, otherwise there wouldn’t be a medal anyway,” explains Annika Hocke, who in Italy has her eyes on the competition on the ice or at the ballet barre every day. Incidentally, both think that “pair skating is a great sport”. They have taken on the task of “continuing the great tradition of pair skating in Germany,” as Hocke says.
Symmetrical: Jennifer Janse van Rensburg and Benjamin Steffan secure the second title with an imaginative freestyle.
(Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa)
In contrast to pair skating, the lines of tradition are somewhat blurred in the men’s individual competition. If you want to build on that, you must have had a quadruple jump in your program for a long time. No one less than the former two-time European champion Norbert Schramm, 62, who was among the spectators at the weekend, reminded of this in Oberstdorf. The new German champion, Nikita Starostin, 20, a native of Russia, who competes for the ERVC Westfalen, is still a long way off; as did Berlin’s Kai Jagoda, 22, who was in the lead after the short program. Both have only planned their quadruple premiere for the future.
In ice dancing, Jennifer Janse van Rensburg, 29, and Benjamin Steffan, 26, who defended their title, showed that a wonderful program still keeps people entertained. And who knows, maybe they can also slide into new dimensions with vigor and their imaginative freestyle “Age of Heroes”. A lot is possible this winter, when certainties are melting and the ice sheets are shifting.