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TSN Figure Skating Analyst

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The Canadian World figure skating team is looking to bring home medals in three of the four disciplines at the World Championships in Boston.

Canadian champion Patrick Chan returns to the competition in one of the strongest fields ever in men's skating, where three World champions will go head-to-head. 

The defending Olympic champion and 2014 World champion Yuzuru Hanyu is the favorite, as this year he has broken and set each scoring title twice and has the highest scores across the board.  Also in the podium mix is the defending world champion and three-time European champion, Javier Fernandez of Spain, who showed us his ability at last year's Worlds to step up in the big events. 

When Chan won his first of three World titles back in 2011, he was the only man to consistently weave complex choreography and quads together in a competitive program and it was that combination of artistry and athleticism that was the secret to his success. 

When Chan stepped out of competition after the 2014 Olympics, a couple of other skaters took a page from his playbook and forged ahead.  In the 18 months since Chan stepped out, both Hanyu and Fernandez have answered back with more quads and constantly improving edge work and artistry.  

Hanyu has blended the quads, layered with detailed choreography, so sublimely that he has driven the sport to a new level and one wonders just how far he, Fernandez and Chan will take it. As they challenge and push the sport and each other they are also being pressed by the newcomers, including China's Boyang Jiin. Boyang is without their artistic proficiency, but has such a high technical content - and by that I mean quads - that he is steadily forcing their hand to deliver.  His six quads in two programs, including the quad lutz which he does in each program, commands a huge technical score which makes up for his dearth of artistic marks and allows him to be just on the fringe of making the podium mix.  

Chan's comeback has not been seamless but that was not unexpected.  He has shown his magic in the free skate this season, building to a personal best at the recent Four Continents Championship.  It is his short program that has not been up to par internationally and in this field he needs to hope he's saved his best for last and that he is able to lay down a clean short in Boston.  A field like this one makes that mandatory.

Another deep field in Boston is in the Ice Dance competition and Canadian champions Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje have a clear shot at winning the title.  They have come so close in past seasons.  They were second in 2014, missing first by .02 - literally the narrowest of margins.  Last year, they were undefeated all season until the World Championships. There they dropped to third  in another close contest that saw the French team of Papadakis and Cizeron rise up with a brilliant free dance to win and then Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates won the silver when Kaitlyn and Andrew received a one-point deduction for an extended lift.  

The dance competition is again excruciatingly tight with numerous teams capable of being on the podium. Heading into the Worlds, the momentum is with the French team after their stellar win at Europeans. The American brother and sister team of Maia and Alex Shibutani, who have a crowd-pleasing Free Dance that brought them their first title at U.S. Nationals and the tile at Four Continents Championships where Weaver and Poje finished third as also podium potential.  

While the French and American teams carry the momentum (and the Shibutanis will definitely have the crowd on their side in Boston), you can never count out Weaver and Poje. They have shown to be relentless in their ability to redefine themselves late in a season, which often has them surprising the field at Worlds with their technical improvements and artistic freshness. They have the uncanny knack of being able to breathe new life into material that we have seen all year.  It is what they have done year after year but what they weren't able to achieve at Worlds last year.  So this season, after their loss at Four Continents they enlisted the help of choreographer Lori Nicol to achieve that goal. Word is, their new improved look is fantastic.  May this year be their year?

Canadian Pair champions Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford are the defending World champions but they do not see themselves as favourites heading into Boston.  Unlike last year when they went undefeated, this season has been an up and down kind of year.  Their trademark technical weapon, their side-by-side triple lutzes, have not been as automatic as they were and their programs have not received the same enthusiastic response as they did last year. On top of that, in Boston we will see the return of two Russian pairs; Olympic champions Volosozhar and Trankov and Olympic silver medalists Stolbova and Klimov to World competition. So the field is tougher and Duhamel and Radford thus see themselves in the role of underdog.  They have reworked their programs for maximum impact since their last competition and they have the groundbreaking technical arsenal with which they have stood above the rest in terms of actually being able to execute.  Meagan has said this season, under the weight of the expectations a World title brings, that she has struggled to feel normal.  We'll see if the self-declared title of underdog puts them in the comfort zone that brings back their magic.