Their Story
Page 4
The two-time World Champions made a more permanent move immediately following the Worlds in Helsinki to Hackensack, New Jersey. Tamara had a contract to coach at the Ice House training facility until the 2002 Winter Olympics and her four pairs relocated with her to the New York suburb. In additional to a change of surroundings, Tamara also made changes to Elena and Anton's skating. The pair began practicing a throw quadruple salchow jump and also planned on adding a second set of side-by-side triple jumps to their long program. Neither of these technical elements would be ready when the season commenced.
The 1999/2000 season began early for Elena and Anton as they performed in a different city almost every weekend during the month of October. They began by helping team Russia defeat the United States at a team competition in Orlando, Florida on October 2nd. There, they debuted their new long program set to Tchaikovsky's ethereal Valse Sentimentale. The following two weekends were spent performing in a pair of StarSkates shows produced by Robin Cousins. As they had the previous year at Robin's Skaters' Tribute to Broadway, Elena and Anton kept new exhibition routines from these shows. They would perform You're The Boss and Te Vas several times during the season.
After a week off from performing, Elena and Anton headed to Colorado Springs, a city over a mile high in altitude, for the first important competition of the skating season. On paper, the field of competitors looked weak and there was little doubt that the two-time World Champions could pull off their second consecutive win at Skate America. Drawing first to skate in the short program, it was quickly apparent that there would not be a battle to win the gold, but merely to get on the podium. Elena's fall on the double axel and subsequent marred throw triple salchow left the pair in fourth place after the short. A mistake-filled long program managed to barely move the pair up in the standings to win the bronze medal. After these performances, poor practices, and even a fall during their exhibition routine, the pair gladly left Colorado to compete at Skate Canada the following week.
Saint John, New Brunswick is barely above sea level and if altitude was to blame for Elena and Anton's poor skating at Skate America, then certainly they would produce a better showing at Skate Canada. But, again, their Radetzky March short program was a disaster. Elena again fell on the triple toe loop and they made additional mistakes on the overhead lift and pair combination spin. In an unusual event with no clean performances, this pair, with technical marks as low as 4.3, managed to lead the field heading into the long program.
1999 Skate Canada
photo © Charles E. Covell
Television cameras showed the Elena and Anton arguing backstage following their short program performance and after Elena didn't appear at practice the following morning, Anton tried to explain their problems. "It's like a big snowball and it's going down the hill and now we don't have enough power to stop it," he told CTV. Various problems arising from their adjustment to living in the United States and lack of time to sufficiently prepare their routines for competitions so early in the season were taking their toll.
Skating last and barely on speaking terms, Elena and Anton tentatively began their long program. After successfully completing their opening triple toe loops, triple twist lift, and double axels, the performance was already superior to the skate in Colorado less than a week earlier. One by one, they completed nearly every element to perfection with the exception of a touchdown on the landing of the throw triple salchow.
"They got into it and more and more they started to communicate," CTV commentator Debbi Wilkes stated. "They started to feel the need of each other and what was required to make these amazing elements happen."
At the conclusion of the near-flawless routine, Anton remained kneeling on the ice and hugged Elena with relief. There was no question who won this competition as every judge placed them first. In an addition victory for coach Tamara Moskvina, Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman, who had many problems a week earlier at Skate America as well, won the silver medal.
Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze had originally planned to skate at the Trophée Lalique competition in France several weeks after Skate Canada, but after the ISU switched their assignment to the Cup of Russia, they decided not to compete. Instead, they considered changing the short program which had brought them nothing but problems thus far in the season. However, after Anton suffered an eye injury and missed two weeks of practice in November, there was no time to choreograph a new routine.
After disappearing from competition for one month, Elena and Anton reemerged at the Canadian Open in early December competing against only two other pair teams. The short program finally worked in their favor as they delivered a flawless and convincing routine. Their interpretive free skate to Te Vas was marred by Elena's fall on a double axel, but they skated with more speed and emotion than the other teams and were the clear winners of the event.
At the Russian Nationals later in the month, the Radetzky March short program continued to bring problems. Jump errors left the pair unanimously in third place, but once again they came back and proved their champion form in the long program. They made one obvious error on a lift, but were given first place ordinals by all nine Russian judges, easily winning their second National title.
The Grand Prix Final was held in mid-January of 2000 and featured a unique competition format. In the first phase of the event, all five pairs performed a long program. Elena and Anton skated familiar choreography mostly from their current Valse Sentimentale long program to new music, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The routine was very rough and the performance contained many small errors in addition to one fall. When the other four pairs skated relatively cleanly, Elena and Anton found themselves in an unfamiliar position: last.
The following day, all the pairs skated a short program but only the top four would then advance to the final free skate. Needing to pull up from fifth place to avoid being eliminated from the competition, Elena and Anton performed a strong short program to finish in second place and fourth overall. The final long program, which was required to be different than the first, was held just hours later and featured two battles. The teams in first and second would compete exclusively against each other for the gold and silver medals while the pairs in third and fourth would compete for the bronze. No matter how well they skated, Elena and Anton could finish no higher than third and they were pitted against the pair currently in third place, Maria Petrova and Aleksei Tikhonov.
Performing the more familiar Valse Sentimentale program, the performance level and confidence was clearly far greater than they had shown earlier in the season and despite a clumsy fall on a throw that sent both skaters tumbling to the ice, they were placed ahead of a cleaner but less spectacular Petrova and Tikhonov. Elena and Anton completed their set of Grand Prix Final medals with a bronze.
The 2000 European Championships were held in Vienna, Austria in early February. There, Elena and Anton would attempt to regain the European title they were denied in 1999 when Elena's flu forced the pair to withdraw. They placed in second in the short program which was marred only by a slight touchdown by Elena on her triple toe loop. In the long program, the pair skated last, directly after a strong performance by the current leaders, Petrova and Tikhonov. After Elena doubled her triple toe loop, Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze fought for every remaining element. As they ended the near-flawless routine, their best of the season, they displayed great relief and the judges awarded them 13 marks of 5.9 as well as unanimous first place votes. It was the cleanest pair of routines they had delivered in over a year and Elena and Anton had regained their European title for the moment.
With momentum building from their win in Vienna and a solid month of practice without distractions, Elena and Anton were expecting to finish their wildly inconsistent season on top of the world for the third year in a row. Following their practice session at the World Championships in Nice, France on the afternoon of Sunday, March 26, Anton told reporters, "We aren't having any more stupid problems. Now we are at a good level. "
However, only one hour later, they received the devastating news that Elena's drug test from the Europeans over a month earlier tested positive and the Russian Federation withdrew them from the World Championships. The stimulant found in her sample was from medicine she had taken to treat bronchitis. The pair was humiliated and devastated. "We were skating really well," Elena told Blades On Ice. "It was the first competition of the year that we felt ready. At the time, it was very difficult for us."
In a meeting on April 2nd, the International Skating Union ruled that Berezhnaya would be banned from competition for three months and that the pair would be stripped of their European title and placement. The ban, which was retroactive to the date that the sample was given on February 9, did not include exhibition performances so Elena and Anton were able to skate in the Champions On Ice tour through the United States in April and May.
On tour, they performed to Santana's Smooth, a new routine choreographed by Aleksandr Zhulin which they had planned to debut at the World Championships. With high energy and lots of personality, this routine was quite a departure for classical pair and Elena and Anton were able to end their rocky season on a high note.
"When everything is nice, it's easy to compete," Tamara Moskvina said in a Globe and Mail article. "At the Olympics, there will be many circumstances and problems. If you defeat the situations, then you will start to respect yourself." If these words that she told Elena and Anton at Skate Canada are true, then this season gave them plenty of experience in overcoming obstacles they would face on their road to the Salt Lake City Olympics.
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