The correlation with each Winter Olympic year seems self-evident.
The largest Stars on Ice crowd at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre since 2010, which was held in the wake of the Vancouver Winter Games, greeted the skaters Tuesday night for the 2014 show, held in the aftermath of the three Canadian figure-skating silver medals from the Sochi Games.
Canada has been well served by figure skating at the Winter Olympics and people can’t seem to get enough of it every four years.
“You can really feel the audiences on the ice [in this year’s tour],” said Patrick Chan, as the 12-city Canadian tour prepared to come to the penultimate stop in Victoria.
“It definitely lifts you and makes you feel lighter.”
Victoria did not disappoint as 5,373 spectators were on hand. They were treated to a Canadian figure-skating panoply of Olympic and world championship medallists: The past was represented by Joannie Rochette, Jeffrey Buttle, Kurt Browning; the present by Chan, Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir, Meaghan Duhamel, Eric Radford, Kaitlyn Weaver, Andrew Poje; and the future by Kaetlyn Osmond.
“All the skaters enjoy coming to Victoria,” said Chan.
First-half highlights of the fluidly-paced show included Buttle skating to OneRepublic’s Counting Stars, Chan to Michael Buble’s The Best of Me and Virtue and Moir to Van Morrison’s haunting Into the Mystic. Browning, meanwhile, proved he’s still got the chops at 47 with some muscular skating.
The 18-year-old future hope Osmond fell skating to Jewel’s rendition of Somewhere over the Rainbow. But if that’s her only tumble on the road to the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, fans across the nation will be well satisfied. After all, she’s got a Canadian skating tradition to help uphold.
