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Audrey Shin, Balazs Nagy forge unique pairs’ figure skating partnership

Over the three seasons after what seemed like a breakthrough bronze medal performance at Skate America in 2020, Audrey Shin had slowly lost both her confidence in the skills needed to be successful in singles and her motivation to keep doing it.

At the end of last season, his first in what seemed a promising partnership with Chelsea Liu, veteran pairs’ skater Balázs Nagy lost Liu when she announced on Instagram in late March she had ended the partnership to prioritize her mental health.

Because of those losses, Shin and Nagy found each other and a new career path in the sport.

Shin, 20, who had often been told her size (just 5 feet tall) would make her perfect for pairs, decided the moment had come to give it a try. She let U.S. Figure Skating know of her interest after finishing ninth in singles at the U.S. Championships last winter.

At about the same time, Nagy, 26, who had finished fourth at the 2024 nationals with the equally experienced Liu, let the federation know he was looking for a new partner. A USFS staffer mentioned Shin, who had begun practicing pairs skills in anticipation of a tryout.

By late May, Shin and Nagy were a team.

They chose Canadian Bruno Marcotte as their coach after initial sessions with Jenni Meno and Brandon Frazier in California, where Nagy had been training with Liu. (“It was more a tryout for Audrey and me,” Nagy said.) They arrived at Marcotte’s Toronto training base in early June.

Bing. Bang. Boom.

Now they hope things can keep progressing at that pace to have a chance at making the 2026 U.S. Olympic team.

For a couple with a rookie pairs’ skater whose appearance at the Prevagen U.S. Championships in Wichita from Jan. 23-26 will be just her third competition in that discipline, such a goal seems implausible.

Is the 2026 Olympic team realistic? I asked Nagy, a native Hungarian whose name is pronounced “Bah-lahdge Nahdge.”

“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. “Seeing Audrey’s progress throughout the season, I’m really impressed with how far we’ve come.”

Yet both Shin and Nagy are keenly aware of Marcotte’s insistence about not getting ahead of themselves.

That isn’t only because Shin is trying pairs for the first time after more than 10 years as a solid competitive singles skater.

“I’m one of the coaches who believes you can start pairs at any age,” Marcotte said. “For a boy, the ideal age is 16 to 20. For a girl, I don’t think there is an age limit.”

Marcotte noted that even for a new team with two skaters who each has had significant pairs’ experience, any immediate success is likely to be transitory without the proper grounding.

“The first year, you’ve got to learn to skate together and become a pair,” said Marcotte, who also coaches 2023 World champions Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara of Japan. “It’s about giving the glue time to solidify.

“If you rush, the pair can get out of the gate pretty fast, pretty good. But year two, three, four, they look the same.

“Because the Olympics is the goal, everything is geared to them being their best at nationals next year. It’s a lot easier to press the gas in year two if you create a strong foundation in year one.”

audrey-shin-balazs-nagy.jpg

Audrey Shin/Balazs Nagy

The plan is complicated by matters technical and logistical.

First, Shin had to not only learn to skate next to (and in synch with) someone else but also learn pairs’ elements — twists, throw jumps, lifts, death spirals.

Her advanced jumping skills — particularly compared to those of Nagy, who says, “I was an awful singles skater” — would no longer be needed. Her triple Lutzes, flips and loops would be set aside, as Nagy never had done them, even in a brief singles career than ended in 2014.

“Audrey looked up one of my old singles programs on YouTube, and so she decided not to push the subject,” Nagy said, laughing.

Shin, on the other hand, admitted to being “terrified” the first times she tried throw jumps. But she persisted.

“She caught onto the lifts and the twist pretty easy, but the throws and death spirals took more time,” said Meagan Duhamel, the two-time pairs’ world champion and Olympic bronze medalist who helps coach Shin and Nagy with Marcotte, her husband. “Overall, I find her transition (to pairs) to be quite impressive.”

That transition has required extra patience (and some tongue-biting) from Nagy, who said he can be “very blunt.”

“For me, the truth was more important than your feelings,” he said. “Bruno helps me be less abrasive.”

One of Marcotte’s rules is that after a program run-through, a pair should skate a lap or two without saying anything.

“The first thing that comes out of your mouth when you are tired and emotional might not come across the way you want,” Marcotte said. “To go a step further: You can tell your partner, ‘You’re going too fast,’ or you could say, ‘Can you go a bit slower?’ That way you communicate what you want instead of what you don’t like.”

Shin is Nagy’s fourth pairs’ partner at the senior level. (Multiple partners in a long career is not unusual; Duhamel, for example, had three as a senior.) He might still be with his second partner, Maria Pavlova, but for Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The Hungarian skating federation asked Nagy to skate with Pavlova, a native Russian who switched to Hungary. She and Nagy competed together in the 2021-22 season, when they split training between Budapest and (mainly) Sochi, Russia.

He found it untenable and uncomfortable to keep going to Russia and returned to the United States. Nagy has spent more than half his life in the United States after first moving with his family at age 2.

(Pavlova has gone on to skate for Hungary with another native Russian, Aleksei Sviatchenko. They finished fourth at last season’s World Championships.)

Training in another country has become a different issue for Nagy now. He needs a job to pay for skating, and he can’t currently get a Canadian work permit.

That means he and Shin bounce back and forth between Toronto and Colorado Springs, Shin’s old training base, where they work with Drew Meekins.

Marcotte agreed to that arrangement with two conditions: they do a Zoom lesson every day with him, and they spend at least two weeks immediately before a competition with him in Toronto.

The hope is for Shin and Nagy to show enough potential at the upcoming national championships and an international competition (possibly Four Continents) after that so they will qualify for USFS funding in the Olympic season, allowing them to spend nearly all of it in Canada, especially this spring and summer.

They finished third at their only international competition so far, December’s Golden Spin of Zagreb, where they skated not long after Shin hurt her right knee falling on a throw in practice. She was restricted from throws and jumps for nearly three weeks in November.

Given that, they skated respectably, even with some significant mistakes.

U.S. champions Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea eye rare international success for a U.S. pairs’ team.

“She was taking hard falls on throws (in practice), and then she was like, ‘OK, let’s do it again,’’’ Nagy said. “I could tell she was scared, but she would commit every time. Seeing how she works is unlike anything I’ve ever had in a partnership. So I have faith in her and faith in myself.”

The Shin and Nagy score from Golden Skate ranks fifth this season on a U.S. pairs’ list that lacks depth. Duhamel thinks they have a shot at the nationals podium, especially since they plan to increase the difficulty of their twist (double to triple) and the short program throw (triple Salchow to triple loop).

Of the top two teams this season, only defending champions Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea currently have Olympic eligibility, for which citizenship is required. At this point, it seems unlikely Alisa Efimova will get U.S. citizenship in time for her and partner Misha Mitrofanov to be eligible for the 2026 Winter Games, at which Team USA probably will have two pairs’ spots.

“If Audrey and Balázs skate to their potential at nationals,” Duhamel said, “there will be a lot of excitement around them. I think that coming into the Olympic season, they can be fighting for the top spot in the States.”

If not then, perhaps later. Nagy said their plan is to keep skating together beyond the Olympic season.

Shin is the most successful senior U.S. singles skater to concentrate on pairs since five-time national champion Kyoko Ina in the mid-1990s (although Ina had skated both pairs and singles for several seasons before dropping singles.) Shin insists starting from scratch in pairs has not been frustrating.

“I know how difficult the pairs’ elements are, and I didn’t think I would get it right away,” she said. “I just wanted to give it a go.”

And Nagy didn’t want to stop.

He has pushed on despite five surgeries in five years on injuries that cost him the second half of the 2020-21 season and all of 2022-23. There were repairs of labral tears in both shoulders and, just after his tryout with Shin, repair of a torn pelvic joint.

All that to keep skating for a guy who had figured he was going to concentrate on college once he gave up on singles.

And now he finds himself with another skater who no longer wanted to go it alone.

“I think it’s a good adventure,” Shin said. “We’re both determined, and we have a good mindset together, and we have the same goals.”

The biggest one is barely more than a year away.

Philip Hersh is a special contributor to NBCSports.com. He has covered figure skating at the last 12 Winter Olympics.

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