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| | Monday, February 14 First the quad, now the quint | ||||||
| CLEVELAND--Carol Heiss Jenkins' mother never understood all the fuss about triple jumps. Take a double, throw in one more itsy-bitsy turn and voila! It's now a triple.
So when Heiss Jenkins and Timothy Goebel daydream about turning one of his quadruple jumps into a quintuple, the coach reminds him of her mother's words. "`It's just one more turn in the air,"' Heiss Jenkins said.
"That's the difference." Well, yeah, that and a whole lot of scientific gobbledygook best understood by NASA engineers. Let the average Joe try flinging himself into the air and turning five times before coming back to earth to get an idea of how big a feat a quintuple jump would be.Now try landing it on a blade that's as thick as a strand of spaghetti. On a sheet of ice. "I think it's something that will have to be worked out very cautiously," Goebel said. "No one's ever tried it before, and the harder the jump the more dangerous it is."It was only a few years ago that a quadruple jump was so rare it drew oohs and aahs and overshadowed just about everything else in a program. Only a handful of skaters could boast of landing one, and maybe a skater or two would try one in competition. But just as the triple axel went from being a novelty to a staple of men's figure skating, the quad is all the rage these days. Everyone who's anyone in international competition has at least one, and now they're doing them in combination, tossing in a triple or a double - sometimes even both - to finish it off. Goebel, the first American to land a quad in competition, is so audacious he does three quads in his free skate. Yes, that's right, three quadruple jumps.Beginning just his second year in senior competition after a stellar junior career, Goebel will be a favorite to unseat Michael Weiss at this week's U.S. Figure Skating Championships. "In skating, you can't defend the castle, you have to attack it," Goebel said. "Being cautious is very dangerous." And how better to push the envelope - no, make that explode the envelope, than by trying a quint. "I think Tim can do it. If anybody can do it, he can. I have no hesitation saying that whatsoever," Heiss Jenkins said. "Once somebody does it, once Tim does it, than everyone will do it." Don't get Goebel or Heiss Jenkins wrong. He's not training for the quint - he's never even tried one - and they don't have any grand plan to get him one. But once skaters master a skill, they're always looking for something more, something else to set them apart. For Goebel, that's always been his jumps. He was the first American in the Quad Squad, and he landed the first-ever quadruple salchow at the ISU Junior Grand Prix final in 1998.He's such a powerful jumper he's already overrotating his quadruple salchow, Heiss Jenkins said. So maybe, just maybe, at the end of the season or sometime this summer, he'll try a quint. "It's something I've wanted to work on," Goebel said. "It's something I'll work on just to do rather than to put in a program." But trying it doesn't mean it will happen, Heiss Jenkins cautioned. "You don't know what kind of stress it will put on the blade and on the boot," she said. "We're finding that in doing three or four quads, we're having to sharpen the blade every two to three weeks and change the blades and the boots every three to four months. That's unheard of." Even if Goebel doesn't ever try a quint or land one, he's certain someone will do it someday.
"Anything is possible," he said. "No one 15 years ago thought a quad would be possible because people were really not doing triple axels. The sport is changing real fast. I don't think anyone knows how far it can go."
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