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Olympic champion Eric Radford gives back to young skaters in Lethbridge

Oct 16, 2018 | 3:39 PM

LETHBRIDGE – Being an Olympic athlete takes dedication, years of practice, and hours of time spent in the gym or on the ice.

Athletes usually start at a young age, like those at the Southern Alberta Skating Academy, and on Tuesday, Oct. 16, the skaters had a special guest on hand working with them.

Eric Radford, a two-time world champion with partner Meagan Duhamel in pairs skating and a 2018 Olympic gold medalist for Canada, took some time to work with the young skaters on all of the important aspects of figure skating, including edge work and choreography.

Radford is in Lethbridge as a member of the Thank You Canada Tour that will be performing at the ENMAX Centre on Wednesday, Oct. 17.

“It’s really fun. It’s been great being on this Thank You Canada Tour to kind of see these places in Canada that I would’ve never been able to visit. Then to have the opportunity to come to Lethbridge and work with some of the younger skaters, if I wasn’t on this tour I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it here.”

Radford says it’s great to be able to give back after everything he’s been through in his career.

“I feel lucky to be able to take my experience and pass on that knowledge to the younger skaters,” he added.

This opportunity for the Southern Alberta Skating Academy athletes and Radford to work together for a day came together because of a connection between Radford and SASA co-founder and figure skating coach Travis Hillier.

“I don’t know if you guys know, but Travis’ old coach was my old coach back when I was 14. But I don’t remember skating with him, I think he left right before I got there,” Radford said with a laugh.

Radford is one of many big names in the skating world in Lethbridge for the show, including Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir, and Patrick Chan among others.

They’ve done five dates so far, in Abbotsford, Kelowna, Grande Prairie, Prince George and Dawson Creek.

According to Radford, this tour is really special because they planned to bring skating as entertainment to a whole new level.

“There’re some new acts in the show that have never really been done before in a skating show, and the audience response has been incredible,” he continued. “It’s probably one of the most fun skating shows I’ve had the opportunity to perform in from the choreography, to the music, to the audience involvement.”

The group of people performing are like a tight-knit family through interactions in their competitive careers, and Radford says to enjoy this aspect of that life it has been really nice.

The Thank You Canada Tour is travelling to a number of different corners of the country, skipping larger centres like Calgary and Edmonton, and that’s by design.

“We’ve always wanted to bring skating to more of Canada. There are other tours that play the major cities, and everybody has to travel to them. I think with the success of the Canadian team after the Olympics we just felt like it was the right time to seize the opportunity, to go to the smaller venues and let people see skating live that they’ve only been able to see on TV,” Radford stated.

At the 2018 Winter Olympics, the 33-year-old won a gold medal as part of the figure skating team event, becoming one of the oldest Olympic champions in figure skating.

Three days later, Radford and his partner Duhamel became the first team to complete a quadruple throw jump at any Winter Olympic competition during the individual pairs free skate when she landed their throw quadruple Salchow.

“We’d been working on it since 2015 and it’s something no pair team has ever done consistently. Meagan and I, it was always kind of our thing to push the technical boundary, we did it with our side-by-side jumps. To land it at the Olympics and be the first ones, I have a feeling it’s not going to happen again for a long time and it feels cool to make history like that,” Radford explained.

This past April, Radford and Duhamel announced their retirement from competition.

So, what’s next for the Olympic medalist?

“In the immediate future it’s just finishing this tour, and I think it’s going to be mostly kind of professional skating and shows for a while,” Radford continued. “My other passion is music, I’ve been looking forward to having the time to kind of pursue that more.”

He also stated an interest in doing much of the same work that took place at the Labor Club Arena.

“I am very interested in doing seminars, coaching, and doing choreography for skating. I think as my professional career winds down my music and that coaching aspect will wind up, and then I’ll be off to a whole new part of my life.”