Belbin and Agosto Like Skating Again

In the same vein as the last article, here is an article from the Washington Herald that details the ups and downs U.S. Champion Ice Dancers Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto have gone through in the past year.

The major sign was when Belbin and Agosto failed to medal at last season's world championships.

"I think we'd been feeling slightly dissatisfied with our skating leading up to that point," Agosto said by telephone last week. "And we weren't really sure what it was."

Belbin's fall in Sweden and the duo's subsequent fourth-place finish were "definitely a slap in the face," he said. "That was a wakeup call. We had to stop and look at what was going on, and then decide what to do."

And they decided to make changes.

First, they ended their working relationship with coach Igor Shpilband and choreographer Marina Zoueva, with whom they had trained in Detroit for 10 years. Their new coaches are Natalia Linichuk and Gennadi Karponosov, the gold medalists in ice dancing at the 1980 Olympics, and a married couple who live and coach in the Philadelphia area, where Belbin and Agosto now live.

The article states that the pair took some time to relearn the basics, that will hopefully set them up with a good foundation for working towards Vancouver 2010. Again, we shall see....