Last year’s silver medalists have withdrawn due to a concussion, but they hope to recover in time to compete at the World Championships.
The Canadian Figure Skating Championships got underway Monday with Novice and Junior events. Senior events start Friday. So far, the competition hasn’t suffered as much from withdrawals as the Nationals going on down south. However, Wednesday sadly saw a high-profile eleventh-hour withdrawal. Last week might have been the more unlucky one for pairs, but we got bad news from one team this week too.
Julianne Séguin & Charlie Bilodeau had a breakthrough season last year, winning silver at Canadian Nationals. But that was their last competition of the season. Séguin suffered what was supposed to be a minor injury right afterwards, which ultimately took them out of both the Four Continents and World Championships. They continued the rise this year, winning their first Grand Prix event and making the Finale. But they suffered setbacks too, disappointing at both their second event and the Finale itself.
Now Séguin’s injured again. Late last month, she suffered a concussion. How long a concussion is going to cause trouble is notoriously difficult to predict. Skate Canada’s Chief Medical Advisor may say she’s recovering well, but they probably waited to withdraw so long in the hope she’d recover quicker than she has.
If the federation has any sense, they’ll send them to Worlds anyway, and even Four Continents, if they want to do the latter. In Canada, it’s undisputed that they’re second only to the current World Champions, Meagan Duhamel & Eric Radford. If Duhamel & Radford have any trouble at Worlds, the results of Séguin & Bilodeau could even make the difference between two and three berths for Canadian pairs at the 2018 Olympics. This, of course, would assume this injury of Séguin’s doesn’t take much longer to heal than last year’s.
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One hopes it doesn’t, but is instead a distant memory by the time Séguin & Bilodeau arrive in Finland. It would be depressing indeed if they had to miss two World Championships in a row.