TFTI correspondent Reut Golinsky sat down with Kirsten Moore-Towers and Michael Marinaro after the short program at 2019 Nebelhorn Trophy.
Reut: I wanted to start our talk from looking at the previous season and then moving to this one. Last season was your first season as the leaders of Canadian pairs and I understood it was a bit too much pressure for you…
Kirsten: I think it was more of my personal mindset that wasn’t great, I was putting all the pressure on myself to “carry Canada” instead of just doing my job every day and letting the chips fall where they may. It took a few competitions in a few months to figure out our mindset and get back to just the two of us in our shining each day, and this definitely took some of the pressure off.
Kirsten Moore-Towers and Michael Marinaro after the pairs short program at 2019 Nebelhorn Trophy. Photo by Reut Golinsky.
Kirsten: No, nobody told me, it was in my own brain. I think it was the expectation that I put on myself and it was all wrong, it was the wrong approach, the wrong mindset, but I learned a lot for sure.
Michael: We were focusing on a lot of external factors and it took us a couple of competitions and about halfway through the season to be able to put that aside and focus on us and our job that we were doing, things we could control.
I wonder if that mindset came from the Worlds 2018 when you quite literally had all the pressure of all Canadian pairs on your shoulders… [Editor’s note: Of three Canadian pairs entered, Kirsten and Michael were the only to qualify for the free skate, and had to place no lower than tenth there in order to qualify Canada for two pairs’ spots for Worlds 2019.]
Kirsten: I think so. Also, because of retirements and with the splits, there were no veterans left. And so we took all the pressure for ourselves that we needed to get the spots and keep Canada’s reputation intact and to be the elite Canadian pair. And it was just a wrong approach.
Another thing that constantly happened to you last season was losing by a tenth of a point here and there, at every big competition. And it was on little things, so what was the work you did for that? Lessons learned?
Kirsten: We still try every day to leave no points on the table. It’s sometimes difficult to get away from focusing on only the big things—the twist and the throws, jumps and lifts—but our spins and death spirals do earn us a lot of points, so we try to focus each day on squeezing every little hundredth of a point that we can, because like many other skaters we know what it feels like to lose by a marginal amount.
Yes, at Four Continents it was 0.06!
Kirsten: Yes, and we didn’t expect to be close to the Chinese pair [Sui/Han] at all, so…
You can see this as a compliment.
Kirsten: Yes, absolutely, we were thrilled but also a little bummed that we were so close.
This summer you moved with your coach, Bruno Marcotte, to Oakville. Tell me more about your current team. In one of your recent interviews you mentioned Brian Shales. Is he your second coach?
Kirsten: I would say that Bruno and Ali [Alison Purkiss] are our head coaches and Brian would be next. We see him every day. He works mainly on jumps with us but also has a pairs’ background—I actually trained with Brian in 2009, we both worked with Kris Wirtz—so he has definite pair knowledge and he’s a great coach in general. And he has taken a role with us that we didn’t expect. When we moved we thought he would work with just the younger teams and we’ve really enjoyed having him on our team.
And I think that’s a testament to Bruno also. He is good at surrounding himself with good people. He’s really done that for us and he’s done that for his school and it is a testament to how great of a coach Bruno is.
It’s impressive that he built it so fast, just during one summer.
Kirsten: I think him and Meagan [Duhamel], they were looking for a place to move, to start their family, and they wanted a change, which we understood, and Oakville presented him with a good opportunity, so that’s the rink he picked. When we moved, he didn’t have many teams and very quickly another team came, and another team came and now we’re seven. It was really impressive.
Who are the other teams you’re training with?
Kirsten: We’re training with the Japanese team Riku Miura/Ryuichi Kihara. And they are amazing. I think you’ll be surprised at how good they quickly became. In our opinions, they’re better together than they’ve ever been with other partners. So they’re really nice to train with, they have a great twist and we really look to improve our own based on other people’s things in our rink. And then we have a senior Austrian team, Olivia Boys-Eddy/Livio Mayr. And we have four junior Canadian teams. They’ve all improved immensely since they moved. I have a lot of respect for Bruno and how he’s built this school.
Being the veteran team among younger teams must be a new experience for you because you’ve been in strong school with strong pair skaters. Back then it was almost like a competition during every practice, and now… is more like being an example and teaching others?
Kirsten: We definitely try to be leaders and we embrace the leadership role, we joke that we are mom and dad of the group. And we like it! I think what’s good about us now is that we’re so late in our career we don’t need to see our competition every day. We know what we need to do, we know what we need to work on and we’re very self-motivated. We know all these people will show up and be ready, so we don’t need to see them every day to work hard, which is something that I was concerned about at first, honestly. I was worried that not seeing some of the higher Canadian teams that were in Montreal would be a detriment to us but I don’t think that’s been the case.
Michael: We’re definitely very conscious of setting a positive role model for all the younger kids and being a positive influence for the school. We are aware of our actions at all times.
You mentioned in one of your recent interviews that although you actually love routine Bruno finds a way to make it interesting for you every day. I just wondered how hard daily work on pairs’ elements can be interesting every day.
Kirsten: In Montreal we skated at the same time every day for four years that we lived there. And in Oakville we have the ice all day, pretty much from 9 o’clock until 2 or 3 o’clock. We’ve been able to adjust and talk with our coaches and figure out what schedule is best for us, but we also have the luxury of changing it and of switching rinks, which has been great. We do pairs at our pairs’ rink and then often Brian will take us to the singles’ side and we’ll do singles’ [elements] with the single skaters. And it’s humbling for us because there’s a little 13 year old student doing triple-triples. So we can be around these good jumpers and change the scenery.
Michael: This keeps it fresh.
Kirsten: It’s such a big family in Oakville that have really embraced us and we enjoy floating around and changing it up.
Going back to your team I know that you also worked with Kaitlyn Weaver and Mitch Islam. Can you tell me more about these collaborations? Do they work mostly on polishing your choreography? Do they bring their own ideas?
Kirsten: Julie [Marcotte] is the mastermind behind our programs for sure but since we moved we’re not able to work with her as much as we used to, when in Montreal we used to see her twice a week. So we see Mitch once a week and he works on our footwork and our dance holds, dance lifts, stuff like that. Essentially he watches and he’s pretty hard on us for what he wants and what he doesn’t want, which we really like and we need. And Kaitlyn came just for a short time—she brought a fresh energy, she gave us new stroking exercises, added some head rolls and some arms, stuff like that.
Where did this idea of inviting her come from? Is she just good friends with Bruno?
Kirsten: Yes, and with Meagan, and with me. She’s really sought after now, a lot of people really wanted her to work with them. She was going to be in Toronto for that week and so somebody, Meagan or Bruno, asked her if she would come in and she agreed. We are really hoping that when she’s done [with] Battle of the Blades, when she’s not too busy, that she’ll come and help us more often. I’ve always said about Kaitlyn that she brings sunshine wherever she goes. She is very light and happy and she was very much that for us in our rink, which was very good.
I wonder if you’d want her or Mitch to choreograph a program, maybe an exhibition program.
Kirsten: We’re open to it, for sure. We’ve been really focusing on our competition programs right now but we would definitely be open. Mitch does some choreography and I’m sure Kaitlyn would be brilliant at that as well.
Moore-Towers and Marinaro compete in the pairs short program at 2019 Nebelhorn Trophy. Photo by Maria Jangbro.
Kirsten: Thank you, we like it too. In a way it was created as an accident, we were just playing around with his head on my chest and rolling and then we just ended up somehow in this position. Julie is really good at that, making something beautiful out of accidents.
Great program with a lot of interesting details. I wanted to ask about the music—it is jazzy and bluesy. Is this the kind of music you love? It is a bit slow and might look difficult to skate to.
Kirsten: We like it, we like the lyrics, and it has a bit of a sultry, sexy vibe that we find we can play off of each other well. We tried a few different styles last year with our Pink Floyd [2018-19 free skate], trying to start our quadrennial figuring out what we’re good at, what we like, what we don’t like. And we like this one. We think the transitions are still a little difficult for us, we’re still working on making them smoother. But we like the mood, we like to act in this program.
We’re yet [as of the interview] to see your free skate, but I checked the song, “Carry You,” and its lyrics. Isn’t it hard to skate every day to something like this? Isn’t it too depressing?
“I know it hurts
It’s hard to breathe sometimes
These nights are long
You’ve lost the will to fight…”
Kirsten: I find the opposite! We love it, we love it so much, and we love it every day since we heard it the first time. Julie found it at a time when she was very vulnerable, Julie and Bruno had just lost their dad and the lyrics really spoke to her. We were just coming back from Worlds where we had a disappointing experience and I think we were all a little emotional. And we loved it from the first minute we heard it.
We didn’t listen to it for a few weeks because we had World Team Trophy and we were on vacation. When we came back we wondered if that was the right music, we put it on and we heard five seconds of it and: “Yes, it is!” It’s a lovely build, it’s uplifting for us and heartbreaking sometimes. So we hope you’ll enjoy it, we truly love skating it. I think it’s both our favorite.
When someone feels like that, that “it’s hard to breathe,” would be your advice? When you feel like that what do you do?
Kirsten: We rely largely on each other. We have really since the beginning of our partnership but I personally feel like this move and trying to figure out if we were going to move brought us closer together, going through trying times and difficult decisions. So lean on someone you can count on, talk to somebody. Perspective is really a key for us too; at the end of a hard skating day we’re still doing what we love to do, we’re still healthy. These are things we try to think about when things are tough.
Moore-Towers and Marinaro compete in the pairs free skate at 2019 Nebelhorn Trophy. Photo by Maria Jangbro.
Kirsten: We skated with them at the camp, they were there, but they were very new still. We know they’re going to be great, they’re both great individually. When they started skating together they were training with us for a little, before we moved. We’ve always known that they would be a good competition, but we try to always focus on ourselves and we don’t count anybody else out either. Evelyn [Walsh] and Trennt [Michaud] look amazing this year and so the cards will fall where they may, but we are definitely pushing to be Canada’s number one.
Is it your first time here in Oberstdorf?
Michael: Yes, and we are loving it. We are definitely hoping that we’re going to be back in the future. It’s amazing, we love being able to walk to the rink, the mountains, the scenery, it’s probably one of our favorite competitions so far…
Kirsten: We’ve been telling our high performance director: “We’re going to come back next year, right?” We’ve done Salt Lake’s U.S. International Figure Skating Classic a few times and Salt Lake City is beautiful as well. The altitude is tough there and it’s a little earlier. But this is unlike anything we’ve seen, we loved it!
Even with the long flight to get here?
Kirsten: You know, and we didn’t find it was really that long—it is seven hours and honestly it takes almost six hours to get to British Columbia where we’ll go to Skate Canada. I didn’t find it a really big trouble and the jet lag for me has not been bad at all. We’re used to going to Asia more so than Europe, so this seems very easy.
Let’s talk a little bit about off ice. What about your school, are you studying? How did your move influence your studies?
Michael: I’m taking one class at the online university right now, so super slow pace but still at it. Right now I’m taking personal finance. I’m taking mostly business classes.
Kirsten: We both use Athabasca University, which is an online-only university out of Alberta in Canada. I’m doing a general undergrad because I don’t really know what it is I want to do yet and so I pick and choose courses that I like. I took quite a few French courses while I was in Montreal so I tried to become fluent in French. I really enjoyed it. I’ve taken a few psychology courses so I’m just trying things out and see what I enjoy so that when I’m done skating I head somewhere in that direction.
But you did mention that you see yourself continuing with skating even when you retire.
Kirsten: As my career comes closer to the end I realize it more and more, I don’t think I’ll ever leave skating fully, I love it, it’s my first and greatest love. Beside my dog (smiles). I think I would like to be around and to help in any way I can. I coach right now and I really love it. I don’t know if that’s something I want to do forever. I don’t know if choreography or commentating is what it is, but I will definitely insert myself somewhere. I really love this sport and I’d like to get involved in some capacity.
Michael: Me too, I definitely will be coaching or involved in skating in some capacity for my entire life, whether it’s for hobby or profession.
You’re training, you’re studying, do you even have time left for something else?
Both: No! (laugh)
Kirsten: We both coach also.
Do you coach together?
Kirsten: No, separately. We have coached together but in Oakville it will be separate.
I only just started this month so a couple of weeks ago was my first week. It’s been an interesting learning curve. I just started here but when I was in Montreal, I was teaching in a different rink so I was able to really leave our skating behind and go see my kids and enjoy their skating. But in Oakville it’s the same rink, so on a more trying practice day it’s a little bit harder for me to forget about it and to give all my energy to whoever I’m working with. That will be definitely a challenge for me moving forward, having everything in the same place. It’s such a great facility but I do miss that aspect of Montreal for sure.
Any other aspect of Montreal that you miss?
Kirsten: Oh, I loved Montreal! I lived downtown near the market and I really enjoyed that. We had a lot of friends in Montreal, a lot of the ice dancers we became very close with. And in Oakville we don’t have that as much. Like we said we’re considerably older so we don’t have as many friends around us, I miss that about Montreal too. We miss Richard [Gauthier] a lot.
Michael: Yeah, definitely, we miss Richard a lot. The city, the friends…
Kirsten: We know this was the right decision for us but it came at a cost for sure. It was difficult because it was the first place—for both of us—that either of us left and not because we were unhappy. I had only left places before because I wasn’t happy or I wasn’t growing as an athlete or a person. And that wasn’t the case with Montreal. It was definitely tough. When we go visit once a month to see Julie, we go to Richard’s rink and say “hi” and visit everybody. Like I said, good decision but a tough one.
With Worlds 2020 being at Montreal this will definitely be a home competition for you.
Kirsten: Absolutely.
Any “must-see” places you would recommend to fans to visit when they come for the competition?
Kirsten: I would go to Atwater Market, I would recommend to anybody. The Lachine Canal is really nice as well. There are lots of things down by that market area that is super nice, you can walk around, and there are lots of parks and open spaces. Mount Royal is nice, you can walk up there. You can’t really go wrong. And try the food, lots of food!
Michael: It’s pretty hard to go wrong anywhere in Montreal, the whole city is beautiful.