Caroline Zhang

[mikeyy]

Nascuta pe data de 20 mai 1993, Caroline Zhang este in acest moment una dintre surprizele anului 2007. Inspirata de Michelle Kwan, micuta Zhang a reusit ca la varsta de 14 ani sa fie campioana mondiala de juniori, detinatoarea primului loc la finala de Grand-prix pentru juniori si este de asemenea vice-campioana nationala la juniori.
Sezonul 2007-2008 reprezinta debutului ei in randul seniorilor, un debut cu succes tinand cont de cele doua clasari pe podium la cupele de grand-prix ( locul 3 la Skate America si locul 2 la Cupa Chinei), astfel asigurandu-si locul in finala de Grand-prix.
Este deja cunoscuta pentru modul in care isi realizeaza sariturile, pentru o mobilitate exceptionala si pentru pirueta pe care ea a numit-o “The Pearl”(=Perla).
Pentru sezonul 2007-2008 are ca ancompaniament muzical “Spanish Gypsy” de Ray de Tone pentru programul scurt si “Ave Maria de Schubert pentru programul lung. Programul pentru gala este sustinut de melodia “Born to Try” a cantaretei autraliene Delta Goodrem.
Ii are ca antrenori pe Ming Zhu Li si Sondra Holmes iar ca si coregrafi pe Lori Nichol, Tom Dickson si pe sora mai mare a lui Michelle Kwan – Karen Kwan.

Personal Best Scores:
Short program: 59.17
Free Program: 110.08
Total: 169.25

[mikeyy]

http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/1271/thumb1173036054wi9.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/4561/zhang001jb9.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/3936/zhangmedalet4.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/7877/pearlys3.jpg (http://imageshack.us) Aceasta este pirueta The pearl

[Cristinush]

Si cand te gandesti ca are doar 14 ani...e tare copila!:)
Nu stiam ca si`a denumit pirueta "the pearl"...Thx pt articol, Mikeyy!

[whisper]

Multumim Mikeyy! Imi place Caroline :) Si merita un thread :)

[mikeyy]

Pirueta ce poarta semnatura Caroline Zhang:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Caroline_Zhang_combo_spin.JPG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBNIFavPgdY

[ricochet4]

Nu-mi plac cei care transforma un spectacol sau altul intr-un circ. Chinezii sint recunoscuti pentru mobilitate. Noile miscari si pozitii nu ar trebui sa influenteze notele prin mobilitatea specifica a unuia sau altuia. E periculos pentru sport. De ex. vine un contorsionist, isi incolaceste piciorul de doua ori in jurul capului si denumeste pozitia "atacul sarpelui". Arbitrii in loc sa vada ca e kitch, emotionati pana la lacrimi ii dau 20 de puncte pentru pozitie. Atunci respectivul "freak of nature" va avea locul 1 asigurat sau ceilalti isi vor rupe spatele incercand sa-l copieze.

[mikeyy]

Nu neaparat .....in general patinatoarele din SUA dau dovada de o mobilitate f buna: Sasha Cohen si tinerele patinatoare: Bebe Liang, Ashley Wagner, Rachel Flatt etc.
Daca vrei, Alin, sa vezi mobilitate iesita din comun..iti recomand gimnastica ritmica :D Caroline Zhang e o patinatoare talentata si daca are mobilitate nu vad de ce sa nu o foloseasca...pirueta ei este extraordinara, pe langa faptul ca e foarte greu de realizat sa te uiti cat de bine e centratata pe gheata.
Din patinatoarele junioare, ea este preferata mea :)

[ricochet4]

E un motiv pentru care s-a si interzis participarea sportivelor prea tinere. Ele nu sint lasate, pentru a nu strica frumusetea sportului, a da o sansa egala si celor mai in varsta si pentru a nu se accidenta, ca de putut, pot. Asa si aici. E o caracteristica a unora doar (mobilitatea), un "unfair advantage". Adica cea in exces ma refer.

[mikeyy]

In niciun caz Caroline Zhang nu strica frumusetea acestui sport.....vad ca esti pus tot pe contre :(

[ricochet4]

si tu incepi acum ? vrei sa spun ca tine, esti copil mic ? nu putem avea puncte de vedere divergente ? trebuie sa gandim toti la fel ?

[rocs_a]

grozava mobilitate.
pentru un sport de performanta si pentru un loc fruntas nu e nevoie numai de munca, ci si de talent. ca si in muzica, ca si in pictura etc. si daca ai si talent si stii sa ti-l fructifici, f bine .
va fi grozava junioara asta peste cativa ani.
park e serpisor :)

[mikeyy]

Programele ei din sezonul 2007-2008:

programul scurt:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXKyrLih5ek&feature=related
programul lung:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMkN-b5zO4I
programul pt gala: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EkSeyX1QY8

[Iulya]

Brea's Zhang vaults into U.S. figure skating elite
Fifteen-year-old finishes third at national championship.

By SCOTT M. REID
The Orange County Register
Comments 0 | Recommend 1


VANCOUVER, B.C. The biggest night of Caroline Zhang's life was turning into one of the longest.

The clock in her room at the Hyatt Hotel read 3 a.m. Zhang stared blankly at the screen of her laptop computer. She was too tired to do any more homework, too wired on chocolate milk to sleep. She could, however, still dream.

With the 2010 Olympic Games one year and one week away, the Brea 15-year-old had come to the Games' host city determined to show she could hold her own against the world's top figure skaters. A little more than five hours earlier she had done just that, placing fourth at the Four Continents against an Olympic- and world championships-caliber field, delivering a breakthrough performance the sport and U.S. figure skating, in particular, had been waiting for, gliding through the program's closing moments with a beaming smile that just might steal America's heart in the coming year.

"I sort of thought I knew what I was going to see tonight, but she brought something else to the table," said four-time world champion Kurt Browning, now a television analyst. "I'm very impressed."

In four minutes on the same ice that will crown next year's Olympic champion, Zhang emerged from a pack of U.S. teenage wannabes as a legitimate Olympic medal contender, America's next ice princess.

"Caroline's the future of U.S. skating," said Irvine's Naomi Nari Nam, the 1999 U.S. runner-up. "Really the future of world skating."

Zhang's newfound status was confirmed when after more than an hour – and several chocolate milks – she finally emerged from drug testing at Four Continents to find a crowd of fans still waiting on a cold, wet British Columbia night to get her autograph.

"Are you kidding?" a surprised Zhang said.

"It's very weird," she said later shaking her head, still coming to terms with her po****rity.

And the spotlight promises to only grow brighter in the coming months.

American figure skating is a sport in desperate search of a star. Michelle Kwan, the most po****r skater of her generation, has moved on. After winning five world titles, Kwan was recruited as a goodwill ambassador for the State Department. Orange County's Sasha Cohen, the 2006 Olympic silver medalist, has spent the past three years away from competitive skating, dabbling in acting and focusing on television skating specials. While Cohen has hinted at making one more run at the gold medal, many in the sport question whether she has the stomach for a comeback.

With Kwan saving the world and Cohen gone Hollywood, U.S. women's skating has been left with a void on both international medal stands and American television sets. The U.S. women have failed to win a medal at the past two world championships, the first time Team USA has been kept off the podium since 1995. Zhang (pronounced Jang) stepped into that void this month, undaunted by what Canadian skater Joannie Rochette described as the "definite Olympic feeling" of a competition organizers billed as a dry run for the 2010 Games.

"She came to play," Browning said.

Zhang's rise to international prominence, however, has not been without missteps, pain, controversy and sacrifice. She will not compete in next month's ISU World Championships at Staples Center after finishing third at the recent U.S. championships. Zhang's scores and exclusion from the U.S. worlds roster have touched off controversies within American skating, calling into question how she is judged at U.S. competitions and U.S. Figure Skating's selection process.

"It's been said that she often gets better marks with overseas judges than she does here," said John Nicks, a coach on the past 12 U.S. Olympic teams.

"I really don't understand why (U.S. judges) give her the marks they do," Nam said.

Equally baffling to some in both U.S. and international skating circles is the decision leave Zhang off the world championships squad. Instead Alissa Czisny and Rachael Flatt were selected based on their first- and second-place finishes at the U.S. championships after what U.S. Figure Skating officials described as a "long and difficult" decision. The poor performances of the Czisny (ninth) and Flatt (seventh) in Vancouver have only further fueled the controversy.

"I'm not sure we're sending our two best ladies to worlds," Nicks said.

Zhang, who will compete in the World Junior Championships (Feb. 23-March 1) as a consolation prize, has stayed out of the controversy, choosing instead to use the snub as motivation for Four Continents and beyond.

"She proved it beyond any doubt that she really is the best in the U.S.," Nam said of the Four Continents performance.

The world championships exclusion is but the latest setback Zhang has had to overcome in the past year. After winning the 2007 World Junior title, Zhang was plagued through most of 2008 by an ankle injury that significantly limited her training. She competed at the 2008 World Juniors with a ruptured bursa sac, yet still managed to finish second to Flatt. Zhang has also had to deal with two of the most dreaded words in women's skating: growth spurt. In the past year she has grown from 4-foot-11 to 5-3.

"Five-three and a half," Zhang corrected.

"My goal is to grow longer legs; it's not working though," she continued, turning her face into a pouting frown.

The growth spurt does have an upside, Zhang said. "I get to buy new clothes."

While similar growth has robbed young skaters of seasons or even careers, Zhang has lost none of her rare grace and almost freakish flexibility. In one of her trademark moves, she leans forward, extending one leg toward the heavens, her legs forming an almost exact straight line.

"Perhaps she is really just made of rubber," one rival coach said.

"She's like a beautiful little fairy," Browning said, "so soft, so supple."

But behind the spirals and spins there is also plenty of steel.

"Caroline is very determined," her coach, Ming Zhu Li, said.

Zhang, the second daughter of Chinese-born parents, was born in Boston while her father attended Harvard. The family moved to Orange County in 1996 and Zhang began skating at age 4, following a friend to a rink across the street from the Costa Mesa dance studio where she took ballet lessons. These days Zhang trains at least five days a week at the East West Ice Palace in Artesia, opened in 2005 by an investment group that included Kwan. Zhang regularly trains with Kwan, picking the icon's brain on everything from skating programs to clothes.

Most weekdays she is up by 6:30 a.m. stretching and doing other off-ice exercises. By 8 a.m. she is on the ice in Artesia, training until 3:20.

"Then I go home, homework, dinner, sleep," she said.

She's been so busy that she still hasn't unpacked since the family moved from Irvine to Brea. Three years ago. Zhang went to public schools through eighth grade but now attends high school online because of scheduling conflicts.

"It was a hard decision because I always wanted to be just normal and go to a regular school," Zhang said. "But I was having problems with my teachers because they didn't understand that you couldn't just skip a competition to do this. You can't just say 'Oh, I'll postpone this competition by a week and take this test and then go.'"

After drug testing in Vancouver she returned to her hotel room past midnight, switched on her laptop to see her score on a physical science quiz.

"Ninety-eight," she said. "It's OK. I missed a stupid one."

She then began working on a poetry project. Despite the demands of her schedule she has retained some semblance of teenage normalcy. Zhang spent much of last year begging her parents for a dog and is now the proud owner of Toffee, a Pomeranian. She is a talented musician, nailing down the first-chair violin spot in her junior high orchestra, and an obsessive reader. During her sixth-grade parent-teacher conference, Zhang's teacher told her mother, Shuguang Zhao, that if she ever wanted to punish her daughter she should take her books away.

When her face is not in a book, Zhang exudes a playful charm, wide-eyed and self-deprecating. She admits using two performance enhancing substances: chocolate milk and Dasani water. "Otherwise I would be in (drug testing) until the middle of next week," she said.

She is unashamedly messy, much to the aggravation of her mother.

"Can you tell that it's kind of messy," Zhang said laughing as she opened her cluttered purse that is a smaller version of her bedroom.

"It's organized. It's just messily organized," she insisted, adding the universal teenage rationalization. "I know where everything is."

She is also something of a legend as a videogame demon in the local skating rink arcades.

"Every time somebody scores higher than her Caroline has to go back and get the top score," Zhao said. "She always has to have her name on top."

Zhang realizes there is a lot of work to be done to reach scores that will land on top of the Olympic medal podium in 2010. "We have to see more power," Browning said. "Power and height on her jumps."

But as the youngest of the Olympic medal contenders, Nicks said, Zhang also has an advantage over some of her rivals – room to improve.

"Her best skating is still to come," Nicks said, "and I'm not sure the same can be said of the girls in front of her."

It was in reaching for that promise that Zhang, on a night when the Olympics seemed so much closer than a year away, scaled new heights.

"It will help my confidence knowing that I can hold my own against the top skaters," Zhang said. "I'm more confident now, and I'm more experienced, so I think I'm in a better place."

That realization that seemed to come to her in the closing moments of her long program in Vancouver, the difficult jumps behind her, a smile of unrestrained joy took over her face as the final bars of music carried her across an icy canvas, her sense of belonging reinforced by the crowd as it began to rise to its feet. Zhang, gliding ever closer to 2010, extended one leg straight back and then gracefully leaned forward and extended her arms wide to return the embrace.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/zhang-skating-world-2308907-one-olympic

[IleK]

Caroline e superba si nu credeam ca va reusi cineva sa o intreaca pe sasha la mobilitate si piruete. Dar am avut surprize foarte frumoase din partea patinatoareleor din SUA. Am multe favorite printre ele. In afara de Caroline, Alissa Cizny care cred ca si ea ar merita un thread, Ashley Wagner si Mirai Nagasu. Rachel Flatt e din alta categorie chiar daca a avut rezultate bune. Imi aduce aminte de gimnastele americance, greoaie si fara gratie.

[IleK]

Felicitari pt bronzul de la 4CC!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOkkpgnKCb
Prin felul de a patina imi aduce aminte de Sasha. Piruete, spirale superbe dar sarituri cu probleme. Sper sa isi poata rezolva problemele de la sarituri, avand doar 16 ani.
Nu a avut un sezon prea bun, se pare ca se confrunta si ea cu problema cresterii in inaltime. La nationale a fost doar pe 11, nu stiu cum de a fost desemnata sa participe la 4CC. Probabil ca s-au bazat pe talentul ei si pana la urma nu au gresit. Imi pare rau ca nu mai face pirueta ei celebra. Probabil ca tot din cauza cresterii in inaltime.

[andreeas]

http://web.icenetwork.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20101114&content_id=16098356&vkey=ice_news

[mikeyy]

Caroline Zhang va fi colega de antrenament cu Yu-na Kim.
Noul ei antrenor este Peter Oppegard!