Top British Team Out for Season

Penney Coomes & Nicolas Buckland choose to forgo rest of season after more trouble with her knee; they still hope to return for the Olympics.

Britain may no longer be the ice dancing powerhouse it was in the first decades of the discipline’s history, but they do have one major team. Penny Coomes & Nicolas Buckland have been the country’s most successful skaters in any discipline since 2011. Their laurels include one Grand Prix medal, and one medal won at the European Championships. They’ve had two top ten finishes at the World Championships, including 7th last year.

But last June, a fall in practice broke Coomes’ kneecap into eight pieces. She had to go in for surgery, and was off the ice until November. The two of them pulled out of their Grand Prix events and she focused on rehab. Their goal was to return to the European championships, with more solid hopes of being back in time to compete at the World Championships.

Now, neither are to be. On Tuesday Coomes tweeted bad news and worse news:

This isn’t the first season where this team lost both Europeans and Worlds. Different illnesses took them out of both competitions in 2015. But at least then they’d competed during the fall. Also, it wasn’t the season just before the Olympics. It won’t be easy for Coomes & Buckland to be in top shape for the Games.

They do not have to worry about beating anyone in their own country out for an Olympic berth. No other team in Britain comes close to them, and none even are likely to even when they’re not at their absolute best. But the flip side of that is that there may be just one berth. This news might just be even more devastating to the other British dance teams who had been hoping to go to the Olympics with them. Had they made Worlds, there’s a good chance they would’ve earned the country two berths. Britain has no chance of that now. They’re highly unlikely to qualify any at all in Helsinki.

If Coomes & Buckland can’t recover in time for the Nebelhorn Trophy in October, it’s not impossible one of the other teams could earn Britain a spot there. But they can only be certain about being able to go to Pyeongchang at all if they themselves can make it to Obertsdorf to do it.

Next: Upstarts and Drama at U.S. Nationals

That assume, of course, that this injury isn’t career ending. Its getting worse again can’t help but cause alarm. We can only hope taking the wires out does the trick.