Bring On The World

Patrick Chan can't wait to take on the best in the world.
Question is, is the world ready to handle the new and improved Chan?
The 18-year-old from Toronto left a lot of tongues wagging in Saskatoon after the remarkable show he put on during the 2009 BMO Canadian figure skating championships. That Chan would retain his national crown was never in doubt — he was up 17 points on Calgary's Vaughn Chipeur after the short program and widened the margin to 48.52 by the end.
Consider, instead, the 254.82-point overall total Chan hung on the board. Only two skaters in history (Japan's Daisuke Takahashi, 264.41, and former Olympic and world champ Evgeny Plushenko of Russia, 258.33), have ever recorded a higher total since the current judging system was introduced five seasons ago.
While Chan was willing to concede his marks were "inflated" by 5-10 points by home country judges, even a reduced total puts him in the same ballpark as the 245.17 recorded by fellow Canadian Jeffrey Buttle in winning the world title a year ago in Gothenburg, Sweden.
No wonder, then, that Chan is now dreaming bigger than ever.
"This is a good example of what I should be doing every time I’m at a competition," he said. "If I perform two good programs like that (at the upcoming 2009 worlds in Los Angeles), I’m pretty sure I’ll get the same result Jeff did at least year’s worlds."
He quickly backtracked — if only a bit — on what seemed to be a rather loud suggestion he'll bring home a gold medal in March.
"I’m not going to predict a gold, I’m going to predict a medal," he said. "It doesn’t matter which colour."
One thing in particular that has Chan riding so high: He seems to have conquered the triple Axel, the jump that his been his bugaboo this season and led to his downfall at the Grand Prix final in December. Chan went 3-for-3 with the jump over the course of two programs at the Credit Union Centre this week, every one of them landed with ease and supreme confidence. And each one accompanied by a huge ovation.
"It was like they were in my subconscious," said a grateful Chan. "They knew what I was going through. Every time I landed the Axel, the cheer was louder, especially after that second Axel (tonight). I knew everybody was hoping for me to land it."
While the free skate seemed like nothing more than a Chan coronation going in, he did his best to stay away from that kind of thinking.
"A lot of people said to me ‘good luck, but you don’t need it’ the whole time before my long program," he said. "I was like ‘don’t say that.’ I still had the mindset that I’ve got Americans and Japanese and Russians competing after me. So basically I had that mindset and it helped, it really helped."
Now he's ready to go to war with them all. But are they ready for him?
Let's just say he's given his rivals a world of thinking to do.