21. Adrian
I was buzzing after Québec. For the first time in a long time, I felt the thrill of challenge.
I had been the best skater in every rink I'd ever trained in.
That wasn't arrogance—it was simple math.
At Coach Allen's facility in Vancouver I'd been the clear top of the food chain from the time I was sixteen.
The other skaters were good. Some were very good.
None of them were me, and everyone including Coach Allen had understood that without it needing to be said.
Renaud's rink was different.
Renaud's rink had Nicky.
We shared morning ice three days a week. Renaud staggered our sessions on the other days, probably to maintain some illusion of individual attention, but Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we were on the same sheet of ice at the same time and it was—
Instructive.
Nicky approached a quad toe loop completely differently than I did.
He set it up with a long, clean back crossover, building speed gradually, his posture so upright it looked like he was being pulled from above by a string attached to the crown of his head.
The entry was textbook. The takeoff was textbook.
The rotation was tight and fast and perfectly centred and when he landed, his free leg extended behind him in a line so clean it looked like calligraphy.
The blade barely whispered against the ice.
No scrape. No skid. No evidence of effort whatsoever.
It was infuriating.
My quad toe loop started fast from the start.
Faster than the textbook recommended, faster than Coach Allen had ever been comfortable with, fast enough that the entry had a quality of controlled recklessness that made purists nervous.
My posture was lower—more athletic, more coiled, centre of gravity dropped into my hips like a sprinter loading before a start.
The takeoff was explosive rather than elegant.
I didn't build into the rotation—I attacked it, snapping into the air with enough force that my jumps consistently topped the height charts at any event I entered.
And the landing was loud. My blade hit the ice with finality.
You could hear it from the boards. You could hear it from the stands.
It was not quiet and it was not subtle and it was not calligraphy.
It was a statement.
Nicky's skating said look how easy this is. Mine said look what I can do. Both were lies, in their own way—nothing about what either of us did was easy—but the lies told different stories to judges and audiences and they had shaped our entire careers accordingly.
The component scores reflected it. Nicky's presentation marks were consistently a full point above mine, sometimes more.
The judges rewarded his particular brand of beauty—the extended lines, the lyrical quality, the impression of effortlessness that read as artistry.
My presentation marks were good but not great, held back by what the protocols described as unconventional stylistic choices and what I understood to mean we don't know what to do with you.
My technical scores, on the other hand, were a weapon.
Nicky's jumps were clean but mine were bigger—higher, with more rotational speed, the kind of jumps that showed up on slow motion replay as defying the laws of physics.
My step sequences were denser, more complex, crammed with intricate footwork delivered at a speed that dared the technical panel to keep up.
Where he glided, I attacked. Where he floated, I drove.
Where his choreography breathed, mine punched.
We were, on paper, almost perfectly matched. His strengths were my weaknesses and vice versa, and the total package—technical and components, short program and free skate—put us within a few points of each other at virtually every competition we'd both entered.
The press treated it like a rivalry. But a rivalry implied we were doing the same thing differently, and the longer I shared ice with Nicky the more I understood that we weren't doing the same thing at all.
He was performing. I was fighting. He made skating look like poetry and I made it look like a battle someone had set to music, and somehow both worked.
The difference showed in everything. Not just the jumps—in the way we warmed up, the way we recovered, the way we existed on the ice when we thought no one was watching.
Nicky warmed up like a ritual. The same sequence every time—two laps at moderate speed, forward crossovers, backward crossovers, a series of edges tracing the same pattern he'd probably been tracing since he was a kid. Everything measured. Everything intentional.
He wore the same black training gear like it was a uniform. His water bottle was in the same spot on the boards. His guards were placed blade side up on the mat in the same orientation. I had watched him do this enough times to know it was borderline compulsion.
He never deviated.
Sometimes I moved his water bottle three inches to the left just to see what would happen.
He'd skate over, reach for it without looking, and his hand would close on air.
Then he'd frown at the steel bottle like it had grown feet and walked itself to a new location.
He'd pick it up, take a sip, and place it down again with the handle facing the same direction it always faced.
It shouldn't have been as entertaining as it was. But what else was there to do in Toronto?
I warmed up by skating wherever my feet decided to take me.
Some mornings consisted of lazy loops and long edges.
Some mornings I started throwing combination jumps in the first five minutes because my legs were restless and I needed to burn something off.
My water bottle was wherever I'd last set it down.
My training gear was whatever was laying on top of the laundry basket.
After Québec, something had shifted. Not in me—I'd given myself permission to watch Nicky a long time ago.
Pretence was a waste of energy I could be spending on skating.
I watched his Ina Bauer from across the rink and let myself appreciate the architecture of it—the impossible backbend, the line from his fingertips to his blade, the way his throat moved when he swallowed afterward.
I watched his spins and noted the axis, the speed, the way his body found centre like it was magnetized.
The shift was in him. Nicky was the one avoiding me now.
Before Québec, we'd had a rhythm—antagonistic, sure, but at least he'd looked at me.
Snapped back when I needled him. Held his ground.
Now he treated me like I was furniture. He'd adjust his warm up route to avoid my half of the rink.
He'd time his water breaks so they didn't overlap with mine. If we ended up at the boards at the same time, he immediately skated off even if he hadn’t taken a sip of water yet.
It was driving me crazy.
I gave myself permission to needle him. Small things. Moving the water bottle. Skating too close during his warm up, close enough that he'd have to alter his pattern to avoid me. Complimenting his Lutz within earshot of other skaters just to watch the back of his neck flush.
“Beautiful entry on that quad, Nicky,” I called across the ice after he landed one clean.
He didn't look at me. But his next element came out a fraction too sharp, too aggressive—the telltale sign that I'd landed exactly where I intended.
And sometimes—on the rare occasion when a quad didn't land clean or a step sequence fell apart or Renaud said something that made his jaw tighten—I watched the mask slip. Just for a second. Just enough to see the person underneath. The one who was constantly holding his tongue.
That was the Nicky I was after.
Not Prince Nicky with his perfect hair and his immaculate quads and his practised smile.
The other one. The one who'd told me to put a shirt on with fire in his eyes.
The one who was standing on the same ice as me right now, pretending he wasn't aware of every single thing I did from the moment I stepped onto it.
I threw a quad Lutz—high, loud, landed with enough force to send ice shavings across half the rink—and didn't look to see if he flinched.
I didn't need to. I could feel it from here.