European Championship silver for Hase/Volodin: Chain reaction on runners

EThere are evenings when the magic of a program unfolds and the runners seem to float across the surface. And there are days when pair skaters feel the irons on their feet, when the audience also recognizes the effort of a four-minute freestyle. Figure skating at its best is magic; other times it’s a tough job, “hard work”, as Minerva Hase said on Thursday night in the Arena in Sheffield. The fact that she and her partner Nikita Volodin still achieved second place at the European Championships speaks for the duo’s art. But it was close.

Three weeks before the start of the Olympic Games, last year’s European champions lost their title to Georgia’s Anastasia Metelkina/Luka Berulawa. In Great Britain, the freestyle performance hardly met their demands for perfect skid technique and dance harmony. “It wasn’t the performance we were hoping for,” said Minerva Hase. There is a lot of room for improvement before the Winter Games. However, in view of the recently overheated public expectations of the Berlin duo, it may have been a timely cold shock that should cool the excitement before the Winter Games to bearable temperatures.

Minerva Hase from Berlin and Nikita Volodin, trained in St. Petersburg, had astonished the experts in the first two years of their alliance because they rushed from victory to victory in the Grand Prix series as if they had been running hand in hand all their lives. In March 2025, the highlight of their collaboration so far, they won the World Cup silver medal. This winter, their third, fine scratches are becoming visible in the track record, which until then seemed as smooth as a freshly polished ice surface. At Skate Canada in late October, they came second behind Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps of Canada. In the Grand Prix final in Nagoya in December, the triple Salchow failed in the short program, but thanks to a brilliant free skate – there it was again, the magic – the defending champions took third place behind the world champions Riku Miura/Ryuichi Kihara from Japan and the Italians Sara Conti/Niccolo Macii. Now the series continued in Sheffield.

After the short program, a tango, they were in second place, again because of a little uncertainty in Hase’s individual jump, the Salchow. However, the gap to the two-time junior world champions Metelkina/Berulawa, who train in Russia, was only one point. The freestyle showed that in the flow of a choreography one mishap can lead to the next, like a chain reaction on runners. In the jump combination, Volodin initially lost his footing slightly when landing the triple toe loop, unusual for the otherwise solid athlete. Hase then fell, which is also rare, while doing the Throw Rittberger, which requires a triple rotation in the air. “So,” she said, “the flow in the program was gone.” Falls rob you of strength and gnaw at your concentration. At the end, when Volodin whirled his partner through the air, balancing on a runner that was only a few millimeters wide, there was no energy: they had to stop the lift. This is a rare mistake, but one so obvious that even viewers who don’t immediately distinguish between a forward-inward death spiral and a forward-outward death spiral will recognize it.

“This won’t happen to us again,” said Minerva Hase when the judges awarded 203.87 points for the short program and free skate. She had scraped her skin when she fell; nothing serious, she said. They stayed ahead of the Hungarians Maria Pavlova/Alexei Sviatchenko. But the gap to the young Georgians, who also did not run flawlessly, grew to 11.89 points: Metelkina/Berulawa danced with momentum into the circle of Olympic favorites, which also includes the Italians Conti/Macii, who were missing in Sheffield due to an injury.

Annika Hocke and Robert Kunkel came fourth in Sheffield

It was also clear to Minerva Hase, 26, and her partner of the same age that the almost somnambulistic security of the caprioles on black ice could not last forever. For the first time this season, they have introduced a new, complicated triple throw, the flip. “That made us a bit nervous,” said Nikita Volodin in the January issue of the trade magazine Pirouette said. He recently had problems with his ice skates, and the free skate is also more complex than before: “In the end you have to skate very hard if you can’t do it anymore.” Paradoxically, he saw a further threat to stability in the brilliant performances of the past two years: Anyone who always runs well is relaxed, he said: “But if you make difficult coordination elements a little relaxed, something can happen.”

And finally, they chose an artistically demanding, elegiac freestyle music by the composer Max Richter, which does not drive a couple through the program with percussions, but only unfolds its full magic when it is flawless.

It’s a risk others avoid during the Olympic season. The second German couple, Annika Hocke and Robert Kunkel, chose the rocking route. They skated their short routine to Lady Gaga (“Hold my Hand”), the long routine to Meat Loaf (“I’d Do Anything For Love”) and celebrated their most impressive performance in years in Sheffield as fourth at the European Championships with 188.27 points. In the summer, the 2023 European Championship third-place finishers, who are training not in Berlin but in Bergamo, had to fear for the continuation of their careers: Hocke’s razor-sharp ice skate blade had slashed his partner and friend’s hand in an ice accident. A skin transplant was necessary. On Thursday they fell on the necks of their coach, the former figure skater Ondrej Hotarek, in relief. “It was highly emotional for us on the ice,” said Hocke. “The audience was overwhelming” – it supported her.

The German Ice Skating Union will send two top duos to Milan when the hot dance for the pair skating medals begins on February 15th. They still have a good three weeks of work before the Olympics. “I hope we can then show our full potential,” said Minerva Hase. The potential and the magic that goes with it.