Virtue Moir Lindt Master Class Talk 1 (uploaded youtube August 2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8dX2xEjAlQ
Tessa and Scott’s Journey (Crank up volume or use headphones. They started skating together when she was 7 and he was 9)
Tessa and Scott are in the front of a room sitting on a table
S – that we were 7 and 9 and skating at a little skating club called the Ilderton Skating Club, and my aunt coached both of us and decided that, I think it was just so we would skate together, they thought it was cute. We weren’t very good, we didn’t like to hold hands, we didn’t talk.
S – So, we had no idea that we were going to be Olympic ice dancers when we were 7 and 9
T – we always say that the sport chose us because we never consciously made that decision, but, we started skating together sort of just doing a few dances together and we had fun, we really liked it, and maybe after about 10 months or so we actually started talking too so that (muffled can’t understand), but every year our parents would sit us down and (she sees someone and says) do you need a chair? (gets up and says) we have extra ones here
S – (Scott also gets up and says) there’s chairs (they give out chairs), do you want a chair chair so you don’t have to roll around? (motioning to someone off camera, they say no) Oh you like rolling around. How about you guys back there? (motions to someone in the back of the room), you sure? OK, I’ll use it for my feet then (sits back on the table and puts his feet on the chair)
T – (sits back down on the table) save your legs (unintelligible), um, so our parents would sit us down every year and ask if we wanted to commit to skating one more season together and we were never allowed to quit in the middle of a season but every year we said yes, we were enjoying it, and we had success pretty early, we won the juvenile nationals when we were I don’t know about this tall (indicating with her hand how small they were), we were the smallest and youngest team, not sure we could even see over the boards
T – but uh that was a first kind of taste of standing on the podium and receiving a medal and we realized OK we want to just continue to get better and better so set our sights on pre-Novice, Novice, and just sort of continue that way
S – once we got up to Novice we started competing at a pretty serious level then um our parents would drive from, we live in London Ontario, and we were training in Waterloo so our parents would have to wake up at 4:30 in the morning and drive us to Kitchener/Waterloo so we could train for 3 hours and then drive us all the way back for school. We weren’t able to get the hours that we wanted to um so when we were 13 and 15, Tessa skipped 8th grade and we went to Waterloo to live there permanently, away from our parents
T – yes so we were quite young to move away from home at just 13 and 15, but uh we lived with families there and we were training every day and training with teams that were pushing us to be better and we would skate 3 hours in the morning, we would go to school, and then come back to the rink or return to the rink and do ballet and workout and um dancing, things like that and often then we would go home and do some homework, have dinner, and really be in bed before 8 or around 8 PM. So that wasn’t normal for high students I don’t think, we didn’t really do any semi-formals, no parties or movies, no sleepovers, we kind of missed out because we were so focused on training
S – and we were away from our families so it was really odd but we had a great coaching staff there, we billeted with some fantastic families and uh one coach in particular, ah Suzanne Killing [Sp.], our choreographer, um she would sit us down every week and we’d talk about goals, talk about what our goal was for us every day, what our goal was for the week, what our goal was for the month, and the season and so on. And what we also talked about is how each other are feeling, and more specifically how our actions made each other feel, and um started to really communicate. We would challenge each other, she challenged us to watch other teams on the ice (pause) fighting, yelling at each other, she’d ask “what are they getting accomplished, like how are they going to do when it comes time to compete?”, and that was a big start to our relationship where we had to communicate and we also had to have this level of respect that we kept through our whole career. We never told each other to shut up, we don’t raise our voices at each other, our biggest fight goes something like this (he looks down and stops talking), we’re very very sensitive people and what we found is that just not talking to each other is hurtful, we had to make sure that we didn’t hurt each other because we needed each other to be at our best, so I think ever since that those meetings, we are each other’s biggest fans
T – hm, we sorta cultivated our code of respect and set boundaries for um, you know we never name called, we don’t blame one another, and those are things that were just never crossed those lines, so even still 18 years later we have that understanding and that trust, that took a long time to work on, but ah
T – ya we did well in Waterloo but when we were 15 and 17 we needed to make another change, um Waterloo we were sort of the top team in the rink, and we were still just in Junior, we needed to be around, we needed to skate with more senior teams, people who were better than us, world champions, and people who we were aspiring to skate with, so we moved to Michigan. Um and that was another big shift, because I still couldn’t drive and Scott had to drive me everywhere to get groceries, or to the rink, or to the gym, or everything, we were each other’s family, we relied on one another, but was also a big shift in our coaching staff because in Waterloo they were like our family members, and they were warm and they were encouraging, supportive and in Michigan we switched to some Russian coaches and the dynamic was entirely different, it was quite intimidating, and quite an aggressive style of coaching that we weren’t used to, and a lot of new things, we couldn’t go to regular high school, we couldn’t live with families, um we had to grow up pretty quickly
S – and um I can remember when we were driving across the border (garbled speech) and 15 and was something we would do together which was dangerous in itself (garbled speech), um we’d get to the border and they would think that we were eloping, and I was stealing Tessa from her parents, so we used to have to have a letter from her parents, a letter from my parents, a letter from Skate Canada, to cross the border every day, um but we grew really close in this time, because like Tessa said, we live with older skaters and we needed to be there for each other, and so here we are with these really intimidating Russian coaches, we’re both so scared out of mind, but our skating starts to get better, the (something) stuff that they taught us just kinda passed on to you today, ah you know their coaching style was magnificent (something garbled) teams and we love the product that they’re giving us. So we started to kind of get better and better and better. And um it was around 2005 that we moved there and 2006 when had our first shot at the Olympic Games. So we went to the National Championships knowing that we needed to be the top 2, and then we had a very we thought, we had trained all year, we were ready to go to the Olympics, so we ended up 3rd in the a compulsory dance segment, and then we were 2nd in the original dance and 2nd in the free dance, but ended up 3rd overall by .02 (Tessa gives a wry smile), so we thought that Skate Canada was going to send us to the games because we were young, and we wanted to win Vancouver, so they thought that they would see the future and that we needed to go to a Games, but, we were wrong. They didn’t send us to the Olympics and we were crushed.
T – I remember just feeling like everything was crumbling down, and everything we had worked for was, was um absolutely devastating I’ve never cried harder probably and still to this day I just thought, you know, we missed our chance and that was just devastating. They had even sent us we have all of the sort of destination Torino gear, so we had t-shirts, baseball hats (unintelligible)
S – our Olympic accreditation
T – yes, we had everything, we were at home watching the Olympics from our couches, and it was then that we made a decision, you know, 4 years from now, we’re not going to leave anything to chance, we have to be there and we have to be the best position as possible to win. Um, so we sort of retrained it and decided, OK, we can’t go to the Olympics, but we have Junior Worlds this year, we ended up going and winning, um we were motivated, we wanted to prove a point to everyone and to make a statement, and uh, so that was really successful but it was then that we sort of started on this 4 year plan to the Vancouver Games. And things were going along nicely. Our first year Senior we were 6th at Worlds, and our second year we won the free dance at our 2nd Worlds. That was a big leap and we thought OK, in 2008 this is great, we’ll be 2nd, we planned to win in 2009 Worlds and then we just go and win the Olympics. And that just seemed easy
S – easy (they say it at the same time)
T – we just had it figured out. So, in order to do that, um, in 2008, we decided we needed to work as hard as humanly possible, so we started skating or training 13/14 hour days, at the rink, um because we thought that working longer meant working smarter or working harder, and little did we know at the time that that was probably the worst thing that we could have done because surprise surprise I ended up with an overuse injury. So I had pain in my shins, uh basically my muscles were being strangulated ‘cause I could skate for 20 or 30 seconds at a time ‘til I had to stop when there was numbness and cramping and
T – ya it was a really hard thing to explain and no one could diagnose it ‘cause it’s not a common injury so, eventually I mean we were sitting in our team doctor’s office and she said well “you have compartment syndrome and it’s a chronic thing, there is a surgery so we could try the surgery which may or may not work, or you know the alternative is just to stop skating, and to stop competing”. We’re a year and a half out of the Olympics so that wasn’t a choice a question for me, um I ended up getting the surgery and I spent my time rehabbing and doing physio in London Ontario when after the surgery, and Scott was training…
Virtue Moir Lindt Master Class Talk 2 (uploaded youtube August 2015)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWY_PgHbK8g&t=610s
T – I think I was reluctant to tell him about the pain I was experiencing and I felt like I was disappointing him or somehow letting the team down, and I just couldn’t bear to get myself to deliver that disappointing news every day
S – and I felt like uh I was training really well and hard, I was skating with a sand bag and a hockey stick, just like trying to do anything so when Tessa came back I was ready, um and I didn’t want to remind her that I was just waiting there ready to go every single day, and I was training hard and I was in great shape, I kinda felt guilty about that too, so our relationship really struggled really suffered (garbled), now coming back with this injury not only does Tessa have to get over the fact that she just learned kind of how to re-walk again with her legs ‘cause remember her injury was on both legs, um that’s quite a process, so, also the one of the hardest parts was the we just didn’t communicate with each other during this time, and we had this weird, didn’t know how to look at each other, we didn’t know how to talk to each other, and that was probably one of the weirdest times in our partnership
T – it was really strange, we sort of pushed through we had Nationals, Four Continents, and Worlds in that winter championship series, and we would, guys you can appreciate this, we would step on the ice, and because I was still in pain we couldn’t train the way we were used to, so we would get on the ice for a competition without ever having done a full run through of our program, or maybe having done one at home
S – this is like World Championship stuff
T – so we would start, and we would just sort of cross our fingers and hope to make it to the end and hope that adrenaline carried us through, um, that’s the worst feeling, unprepared, and not ready, that was a big struggle, and on top of that to not have that trust and loyalty in the safety net that you know we came to rely on in our partnership, so that was challenging and we thought that once that season was done we ended up 3rd at Worlds which was it was respectable, no team had ever won the Olympics without first having won Worlds, so it seemed an impossible task to prepare for the Vancouver Olympics and think that we would win, and yet, we still decided that that was our goal
S – so we’re one year out of the Olympics, and remember we talked about the little relationship problem between the two of us so we decided to make it, we both knew that we needed to find a way to come together and stronger so did start taking a bit of counseling which was kinda like marriage counseling, uh the guy that we went to was a marriage counselor and a sports psychologist, so we used him for both but then again we started talking about our feelings, and how each other were feeling, um that was huge for us, we still actually worked on it up to the Games and it wasn’t easy, it’s not like we sat down once and we just it’s like OK everything is perfect, water under the bridge, we had to work on the whole season and uh what a lot of people don’t know as well with the Vancouver Games, Tessa was still very hurt, the pain in her shins had gone away uh a little bit but not not for very long and we adapted kind of the (metro?) (a little aside to Tessa, speaking low can’t understand), but since we couldn’t train like everyone else we needed to make sure that we were trained but we needed to train in our own way. And uh going into the Vancouver Olympics, Tessa was even more hurt, she was doing about 6 or 7 hours of physio a day, but we were very trained, we were very ready for the Olympic Games.
T – and there’s something about the energy in the building at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver that I just felt right, just felt like it was it was our building and we took the ice and I just remember sort of the magnitude of the situation, it was larger than life because judges, and the media watched our every move and and criticized um we were sort of in a horrible position with this we were in the hunt for a medal, and yet, with all of that attention I think our focus narrowed and it was really just the two of us, our little world was all that we saw and that was all that mattered. We took the ice in this little bubble and started forgetting that there were 30 million people watching or you know caring and invested in this, and we skated really well, we had 3 strong performances, um
S – couldn’t hear our music for some of them
S – the crowd was so loud
T – it was amazing and it’s really an athlete’s dream come true to represent your country at a home Olympic Games, so standing on the podium and singing Oh Canada with 12,000 people in that building was absolutely incredible and a bit of a whirlwind, it was amazing
T – absolutely and shortly after that actually we had the World Championships, we won our first world title 3 weeks after that, and I think we were just exhausted
S – in Torino Italy, so destination Torino, we had those shirts, we might not have gone to the Olympics, but we got to win a World Championship
T – (at the same time) we redeemed ourselves
S – I remember being in the final position and watching the tape afterwards and just seeing our faces, we just look exhausted
T – ya we just relieved to have that season done, um, but it didn’t take long for us to decide that we wanted to continue, we felt we still had more to give and more potential to explore, we wanted to sort of push ourselves and push the envelope in skating and in ice dance, and um see what else we could do, so we worked with different Cirque du Soleil acrobats on our lifts, we brought in various choreographers, and off-ice dancers, we sort of made that our mission to change up the sport a little bit, um or at least change our dynamic on the ice, uh but I needed another surgery ‘cause the pain moved not only in just my shins but I got it in my calves as well, um a few months after the Vancouver Games I got a 2nd more aggressive surgery on my legs, but the recovery process went smoother because we kept in touch and we were supportive and learned our lesson (Scott nods approval), so, sort of battled that for a couple of years, actually I considered a 3rd surgery believe it or not, the exact same surgery, um before Sochi Olympics ‘cause I still had that pain, um and I remember my surgeon just joking that he liked to see new patients every now and then (laughter in the room), but it was then that I was put in touch with a sport scientist physiotherapist and they call him movement whisperer, and he looked at my mechanics and how I moved and how I skated and said well no wonder your calves are so sore, you’re expecting them to do all the work for you. So I wasn’t using my glutes and my bigger muscles, you know what we talked about on the ice today, that squat position and I wasn’t doing any of that
S – and evidently we were watching tapes, either was I really, um we would watch he’d be pointing out things like saying Tessa look at your hip position here, she used to skate with her hips really forward and not coming back at all, and then I’d look over to me and I was doing the exact well not quite the exact same thing because obviously I didn’t have any pain but there was a lot of room for me to improve as well so it took this advantage that we found through this injury and then made it our style
S – a lot of our exercises and stuff that you guys saw today
T – ya we took a lot of video work and it was a way more intellectual and sophisticated way to train because we realized why we were doing what we were doing so we understood why our warmup was important, exactly what muscles we needed to work through for certain things, it was tedious, like learning to write with the other hand, and he would even, this guy would film us doing our cooldown walk, we do this walk when we get off the ice or our session, he’d video that and he’d correct every single step that I made, so that was kind of interesting and just extended it to every exercise that we were doing
S – a couple of you weren’t very happy with me when I was (bending in today?) imagine walking to the end of the hallway and back and me being like nope that was wrong, try it again (laughter from the room), just you walking
T – so that was a challenge that I actually was able to skate without pain and that was incredible, we changed a lot of our on-ice training and preparation for competition became more integral work and it was harder that we had ever done before but I was not in pain, so it was amazing leading into the Sochi Olympics, um because I was present and I wasn’t getting 7 hours of physio every day as I was in Vancouver, and we were 4 years older and think we were approaching it as if it was our last Games, so it was a totally different experience. We just embraced every part of it, we embraced the (?), we loved chatting with the athletes in the cafeteria, in our workouts, and standing on the podium, they’ve got an outdoor ceremony and we just wanted to be present and to take it all in, and um we knew that 17 years of work sort of led us to that point. So we had our best performances at Sochi Olympics. We couldn’t have skated any better and in fact we sort of lucked out. (Scott says something and laughs, but it’s too low to hear). Um in fact I think we felt better about our skates when we got off the ice in Sochi than we did in Vancouver, and we got Silver medals in Sochi, so a lot of people saw that as a failure or as a disappointment, um and (typically?) it wasn’t what we wanted
T – we wanted to win, but we were so genuinely satisfied with our skates, our performances that we realized that the colour of the medal didn’t define us, didn’t identify us, you know it didn’t matter what those 9 or 11 people thought about us on the panel, it was really, how do we feel about ourselves, how do we feel about what we’ve accomplished, and that was put to the test
S – we got our moment, it was really neat because in 2010 we said to each other we’ve done the work so no matter what happens we’re so proud of each other, let’s go out there and have our skate, we’re focused (the video cuts to him saying) the colour of the medal that made the moment special after all was more so what we had together, the 18 years that go into it, mastering our craft, mastering every step of every program, we felt that we did the best that we could
T – so, after that we decided that we needed a bit of a
T – break (laughs), um we took a year to sort of step away from competing but we challenged ourselves in new ways on the ice, we were performing come around the world, doing tours, we worked with different choreographers, and it was a clean slate because we could create programs without rules, (something about appeasing judges), technical requirements, things like that, so it’s been a really thrilling year for us, we tried to say yes to everything, things that scared us, tried new things
S – work with different choreographers, (something) opportunities outside of the sport, now we have to decide if we want to try for 1 more Olympics, figure out if we, we have to make sure if it’s right, we would love to go to another Olympics, but I think with our 2 experiences, um with Sochi and Vancouver, we are always going to want to be at the Olympics, we’re 75 where we want to be representing Canada in ice dance, it’s just not the reality, so we hope that we have 1 more run in this, but we never know.
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