This time they stayed completely to themselves. This time they didn’t dream of medals on the way up. This time, apart from one careless mistake, they were highly concentrated in their acclaimed performances during the highlight of the figure skating season: the World Championships in Montreal. Unlike at the European Championships in January in Kaunas, when Berlin’s Minerva-Fabienne Hase and her Russian partner Nikita Wolodin got tangled up in their expectations and made a mistake in the free skate, they remained at the height of their potential at the World Championships.
For this they were rewarded with the bronze medal on Friday night behind the celebrated Canadian winners Stellato-Dudek/Deschamps and the second-placed Japanese winners Miura/Kihara. It was the first championship medal for the German Ice Skating Union after the exhilarating Olympic victory for Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot in Pyeongchang 2018 and the subsequent first place at the World Championships in Milan.
Hase/Volodin are still a long way from achieving such masterpieces. The days in Montreal at the Bell Center at least revealed both the great potency of the new top pair and the knowledge gained from the defeat in Kaunas, where Hase/Volodin ended up only fifth – and remained far below their potential.
Discovered in a Russian ice show
“It’s about focusing on your own performance,” was the consistently maintained resolution of the runner, who was quite far away from medals with her former partner Nolan Seegert, with a great sense of style and a feeling for being able to make audience-friendly punchlines. Partner Volodin, whom the Russian head coach Dimitri Savin rediscovered in a Russian ice show and reactivated for the competitive sport of figure skating, approaches his next goals with a similar awareness of reality as his partner: “The important thing is to do your job on the ice. Thinking about points and medals at the same time doesn’t help.”
Realos that invite you to dream: This is how Hase/Volodin presented themselves in the Canadian city with over a million inhabitants. Even at the moment in which the Berliner slipped sideways in the free skate after a supposedly successful triple salchow. Unlike their misfortunes in Kaunas, this mishap did not cause panic, so the couple with perspective achieved their interim goal at the first joint World Championships and were appropriately rewarded with the bronze medal for two impressive performances in the short and long freestyle. Two places behind, Berlin’s 2023 European Championship third-place finishers Annika Hocke and Robert Kunkel also returned as the third-best Europeans among the world’s best couples.
The perfect ice cream partner
German successes that could have an inspiring effect. “This time we were also in really good shape mentally,” said Minerva-Fabienne Hase, looking back at a season finale that had particularly encouraged figure skaters with perseverance. Finally, Deanna Stellato-Dudek, the forty-year-old American alongside her 32-year-old Canadian partner Maxime Deschamps, was wildly celebrated as the oldest world champion in the history of figure skating. It may be that gold will be added at the Olympic competitions in Milan in two years’ time if Stellato-Dudek, moved to tears, is allowed to compete there as a Canadian under the Canadian flag, as required by the Olympic starting conditions.
Roland Zorn, Kaunas Published/Updated: Recommendations: 5 Katja Sturm Published/Updated: Recommendations: 2 Christoph Becker Published/Updated: Recommendations: 21
But that seems easier to imagine than the German naturalization of the Russian Volodin, who seems like the perfect ice partner for Minerva-Fabienne Hase, but who still has to learn the German language and, in these times of the Russian war against Ukraine, still has to convince the German authorities that that he can compete for Germany at the 2026 Winter Games.
