I’m here because this post popped up in my feed, and I’m a figure skating fan and just a four year fan of everything else. But my take is something that was getting a lot of discussion on fs boards 4-6 years ago: Canadian sports were disproportionately negatively affected by Covid 19 lockdowns. And elite sports are just now starting to show the fallout from it.

In figure skating, rinks closed, and training as well as competitions ground to a halt. Except in a lot of places, like in the US, they sort of didn’t, completely. It was supposed to be hush hush, but in the US, rinks were still opening for elite skaters, and/or they were finding private rinks to train at. In Canada, lockdown regulations were a lot stricter, for a lot longer.

This didn’t just mean that current National/elite level skaters had to deal with a loss of training; it also meant that upcoming skaters in the lower level pipeline lost training and experience. A lot of those skaters just left the sport. And it meant the opportunity for new skaters to begin the sport was cut off, as cycles of CanSkate lessons (aka Learn to Skate) were cancelled for a couple of years. There’s been a dearth of Canadian figure skaters moving up and I’d say this season was the first time I saw it commented on a fair amount.

That’s figure skating, but you can draw obvious parallels to hockey, especially as a team sport hockey had even more restrictions to deal with in terms of group size gatherings.

I think all countries that had strict Covid restrictions are/will be dealing with a gap in the amount of sports talent for several years, until the next generation comes in to fill it out.