Chapter Text
IFSMagazine.com | Grand Prix Preview: Men's Singles
ANGERS, France — Reigning champion Park Seo-jin (KOR) is looking to add a third victory in the men’s singles…but facing new competition from recent U.S. champion Niko Orlov (USA)
Park, 27, arrives in Angers after a winning streak that stretches back to last season’s World Championship in Montpellier, where his free skate earned the current world record. His reliability has become its own kind of spectacle. "I don’t think he even considers making a mistake," said former Olympic bronze medalist Philippe Candeloro in a recent interview with L'Équipe. "He’s ridiculously consistent."
But perhaps Orlov, 25, can dethrone him. The Southern California native has added a fiendishly difficult set of jumps to his program, including a five-quad free skate that gives the highest technical element score of any competitor this season. But even his sky-high jumps can’t distract from his tendency to cause controversy. His free skate hip-hop medley drew scrutiny at Skate America where commentators debated if a rap program belonged at the international level where more decorous classical music reigns. Orlov’s response, posted to his 1.2 million TikTok followers, was characteristically blunt: "I'm not here to preserve figure skating. I'm here to make people watch it.”
The top six skaters from the Grand Prix Series will advance to the Final, December 5–8. Full details at IFSMagazine.com/gpfinal.
***
The video took her six hours.
Maren hadn’t planned on six hours, unfortunately. She had estimated three to four, depending on how fast she worked with the music blasting, because she already knew what it wanted to say and she’d made hundreds of videos like this before. Her process worked. First, record a dry run of her voiceover so that all the awkward parts were worked out. Next, cut the clips to match her points, then layer in the slow-motion breakdowns and graphics. A better voiceover now, to better emphasize the quick cuts, then review and export. Maybe four-and-a-half hours if the audio was a problem.
But it wasn’t really her fault. She’d gotten stuck working on Niko Orlov’s France free skate. Worse, she’d gotten angry, and her voice kept breaking a bit on the voiceover. Her attempt at fixing it by ad libbing ended up being worse because she couldn’t help interjecting her own opinion. That was the real problem. @thesecondmark didn't do opinion. That had always been her rule, and she knew that’s what everyone expected now. When you watched her channel, she broke it all down, showed what was happening and why it was scored. If you finished a video and came away disliking a program or a skater, that was your choice.
The voiceover wasn’t working at all. It was supposed to be a technical comparison between two free skates performed at the Grand Prix, with attention to connecting content, musical interpretation, and whether each performance matched the judging criteria for the scores they had given.
The Seo-jin section was easy, and Maren probably could have done it in half an hour if that’s all it was. She had been watching Park Seo-jin skate for three years, since she was a heartbroken twenty-three and unable to sleep, flipping through late-night cable tv channels to distract herself from breaking up with Freddy. He had been skating to Debussy and she’d tuned in to see him mid-flight through a quad axel, flying through the final rotations as if he had wings. She had paused, something in the way he moved through the music making her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with idiot ex-boyfriends. She’d gone to YouTube next, watched the recordings four more times. Then she’d found the forums.
Three years later, she was a figure skating savant. Not bad, for someone who could barely skate more than a few wobbly turns around a rink in her rental skates. The Chopin free skate from this event was a current favorite from this year’s circuit, and she’d already made one video about it which was purely appreciation for the artistry in it. This one was meant to be a heads-up comparison about form, and she had been careful to not let her preference for it show too much.
To do that, she put real time into showing how Seo-jin kept movement alive between elements, carefully narrated the edge changes and turns he used to enter jumps without telegraphing them. A few graphics here and there highlighted how his arm position shifted with every beat of the music’s second theme, a delicate series of adjustments that kept his weight balanced and still managed his characteristic grace. She also reluctantly pointed out his quad salchow had been slightly under-rotated, which was where he’d lost grade of execution points.
But she eventually had to get to the other half of the argument. She pulled Niko Orlov’s free skate into the video editing timeline and began isolating his entry work, watching the clips carefully as she did so. There wasn’t that much to watch, frankly. Oh, his jumps were spectacular, and even she could admit his quad Lutz was amazing, with huge air and clean rotation. She even admitted it in the voiceover. But between those big jumps, the program felt empty. The choreography felt like an excuse to get him into position rather than an element on its own, and so did the music. She said that too.
What she was leading up to, what made her angry, was that somehow Orlov’s score had been nearly as high as Seo-jin’s. And this was a betrayal of the fundamental movements that made up ice skating. There was no place for someone who made it to the podium simply by grinding out difficult jumps. Orlov had even almost touched the ground on one jump and barely received any points off for it. It made her furious. Orlov skated like someone told him art was optional.
“And apparently the judges agreed,” she muttered to her laptop, belatedly realizing it was still recording. She scrubbed the comment, turned to making her argument with footage instead. The two skaters in split screen, jumps synchronized, points flashed beneath the screen while she pointed out the technical difference. Seo-jin’s triple axel and his quad toe, then Orlov’s. An overlay of where they moved the same, and where they moved differently. And yet, the scant difference in points. She didn’t say which one deserved it more.
At two in the morning, her voice long since gone hoarse, she realized she had the final cut. It ran six and a half minutes, which meant it probably would lose a bunch of viewers, but she didn’t have the heart to cut even one looping turn, any additional second of Seo-jin’s work. She put it in the YouTube queue under the somewhat uninspired title of GPF Preview: Analyzing the TES/PCS Split in Men's Singles. She could always fiddle with it later based on the hit count. It’d been a long day.
She was asleep within ten minutes. When her alarm dragged her awake for work, she reached for her phone out of habit and saw the notification count climbing past four hundred thousand views.
The next thing she saw was Yu’s text. girl.
Then another: have you looked at your notifications
Then: do NOT look at your notifications until you've had coffee
Then: actually maybe look because TSL just shared it
Then, twenty minutes later: ok I have clinic at 8 but CALL ME after
Maren opened her laptop again and saw that the video had picked up steam and was moving fast. Four hundred and twelve thousand with more tuning in even as she stared. And the reposts! A sports journalist at The Athletic had clipped a segment and remembered to tag it back to her. Golden Skates had linked it in their Grand Prix roundup, and that was driving most of the hits. To her surprise, clips were already making the rounds on TikTok, especially the part at the end where the two skaters were in side-by-side frames. She flipped through the reposts and stitches and duets, seeing her work put together with new captions, amplifying arguments she hadn’t made.
And the haters were starting to come out, comments already filling up with Orlov stans. She flopped back in her bed, hands on her face as she scrubbed her eyes. She didn’t dare log onto the forum.
She called Yu on her lunch break to find that Yu had somehow been tracking the spread all morning between dental patients. She filled Maren in: TSL had reposted a clip with the comment Finally someone said it with receipts. The Seo-jin fans were treating the popularity of the video as proof he had been robbed in the scoring. Maren privately agreed but hadn’t expected to convince everyone else with only six minutes of footage. The forum had a now ten-page thread alternatively calling for scoring reform, reassuring everyone the old system was fine, and proposing that only skating fans could truly understand a skate performance and should be the judges.
"You're getting quoted as ‘the definitive takedown of the American scoring advantage,’” Yu said. "Which, for the record, is not what your video says."
Maren was in the coffee shop across from the office, in line for a cappuccino. She could hear someone crying in the background of the call and hoped it wasn’t Yu’s next patient. She huffed a sigh. "I know it's not what my video says."
"I know you know. I'm telling you what's happening to it out in the wild." A pause. "The Orlov fans are less happy."
Maren rolled her eyes, narrowly dodging a stroller as she retrieved her coffee. "I was fair to him."
"You were.” Did that pause mean sarcasm? Maren wasn’t sure. “Did you remember to submit the creator program application? It was due today.”
She snorted. “Did you?” She had sent it in last week, trying to clear her schedule to watch France.
“Of course. Look, it’ll all blow over. Gotta run — I have a root canal at one and a seven-year-old who's scared of the drill. Text me tonight."
Maren went to work. She spent the afternoon in meetings about quarterly enrollment data and tried not to check her phone under the table, then did it anyway to find she had broken six hundred thousand views. Absolutely insane for a tiny little skate channel. She put the phone away, tried not to think about it.
By dinnertime Niko Orlov’s fans had clearly organized and were trying to reclaim the narrative. The forum thread had settled down to debating scoring reform more seriously. Seo-jin’s team famously eschewed most social media, so no comment was expected. Her phone was still buzzing with YouTube notifications. She’d muted X, Discord and the group chat. But she needed to get back to the charity drive vendor who wanted confirmation. The translation Yu sent three days ago was waiting for her final review. She answered what she could, did her best to ignore the commentary waiting for her online.
Ominously, Niko Orlov had said nothing.