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GoldenSkate.com Forum | Thread: thesecondmark transition series — anyone else binged this? page 4
bladerunner_99: ok so part 3 just dropped and i have thoughts. she's comparing triple axels of the top six AND to the archival footage of yuzuru's and it's... another attack on Orlov.
spiralqueen: she's just showing the footage. stop reading into it.
iceshard_fans: this is the thing about second mark though. she never actually says anyone is bad. she just puts the clips next to each other and lets you feel stupid for not seeing it before.
quattuor: wish she’d stop showing so much seo-jin stuff. you’d think there wasn’t any other skater around doing good work.
sk8philosopher: that's because he gives her the most to work with. that's not bias that's material.
spiralqueen: sure jan
iceshard_fans: I mean she's not wrong? orlov has the best quad lutz in the world but the SKATING between the quads is...eh. seo-jin's is art.
quattuor: just saying that for someone that claims to be so objective she absolutely draws little hearts on seo-jin’s pics
bladerunner_99: anyway the point is the transition literacy series is genuinely the best fs nerd content on youtube right now and if you're not watching it you're choosing to be dumber about skating
sk8philosopher: bold words from someone who thought a bracket turn was a rocker six months ago
bladerunner_99: I HAVE GROWN
***
Niko hadn’t heard of thesecondmark until the channel’s commentary about his transitions had gone wildly viral. Then, unfortunately, he had to catch up fast.
He was currently rewatching the one that had gotten the hits, obviously. Figure skating social media was notorious for dragging all the well-known skaters in turn, and he had thought he was doing pretty good at not letting anything under his skin. The video had proven him wrong. He watched it now on his phone in bed, still wired from the flight back from Vancouver, and told himself he was doing reconnaissance in advance of their stupid bet.
He still wasn’t sure why he had gone up to her deliberately, then made the bet. Maybe it was the self-righteous expression on her face when she had argued with him at the gala reception, just the two of them by the empty boards. But the little tells had given her away: Maren Cross understood figure skating from the outside and had never put in the work. She didn’t understand what it took to launch yourself into the air backwards and hit that perfect sweet spot of rotation, trust your foot to slam perfectly into the ice at the end, let your body accept the force of landing. She had never fallen and let the ice catch her skate.
He remembered her flustered expression and felt a deep sense of satisfaction. Once she tried, and failed, she wouldn’t dare criticize a minor difference in PCS.
Then he opened her channel page on YouTube and saw three years of neatly organized content, playlists with titles like Blade Architecture and Edges: A Visual Guide and What the Broadcast Doesn't Show You. He told himself that it was worth skimming a few, to see what she actually valued in a skater, to understand what he was dealing with.
By the third night, he had worked through most of her archive. She posted on X and Instagram and TikTok too but seemed to prefer the longform content on YouTube. When he had first watched the viral video, he thought she was just another armchair amateur judging him for power over finesse.
An old complaint, and one he was used to. Most of the people that complained about it were the competitors who knew they couldn’t land a quad consistently, or their coach.
Annoyingly, Cross was better than he had expected. She had gotten a few things wrong when she talked to him, but her video footage and crosscuts were surprisingly on-point. There was no sloppy analysis, or obvious fan bias. She never said this is bad. She said watch this and showed you, and somehow the conclusion you reached felt like your own idea.
Niko was used to being the smartest person in the room about his own sport. It was deeply irritating to discover someone who didn’t skate might come close.
The next discovery was that thesecondmark preferred Park Seo-jin.
It had taken him a few days to figure it out. Cross covered every top skater in the field, and some of the juniors as well, and technically her analysis was even-handed. But once you’d binged so many of them in a row—and Niko was uncomfortably reminded that he’d spent perhaps too much time already—the parts that covered Seo-jin had a different quality. She slowed the footage more, lingered on the replays. When she broke down his step sequences her recap of the movements was lyrical, almost reverent. When she broke down Niko’s there was a distinct sense that the design could be improved.
It shouldn’t have mattered. Figure skating was a small world; he knew Seo-jin and all the rest of them well, went drinking with them and danced with them and hugged one another in the kiss-and-cry when things were bad or when they were very good. Niko and Seo-jin were competitors, yes, but they weren’t competing for the same audience. Fans cried over Seo-jin’s skates and screamed about Niko’s. Niko would always jump higher and better; Seo-jin would always be the judges’ darling. But they were different markets, as Dani had explained to him in detail several times, the last time using her PR sponsorship pitch slides.
“Niko, you’re RedBull, and he’s…Dior,” she’d said with a laugh, and he’d gone on to argue the point to no avail. Dani had shaken her head. “Would you rather be the Djokovic or the Federer of figure skating?”
He’d had to look up Federer, which had proven Dani’s point. But it still stung that she’d made him the gangly but powerful player instead of the one who looked good in a suit. That Djokovic had outplayed Federer was slim consolation.
But Cross wasn’t crying or screaming from her channel. She was measuring. And by her standards, Niko was coming up short in ways he hadn’t taken seriously before.
Maybe you should think about it more, she had dared him at the gala, dark eyes blazing.
He had long ago accepted that how he approached skating was too different for the judges to appreciate, that all they saw was the power of his jumps and overlooked all the other work he had put into his programs. Tommy had never disagreed.
Maybe they were all wrong.
The travel fatigue was gone, but Niko Orlov was finding it difficult to sleep.
***
Niko had trained in Tommy’s rink in Burbank since he was fifteen, and the smell of the rubber mats, the well-worn boards, and the bite of his skates into the ice were all more familiar to him than his condo.
He landed the quad salchow on his first try after the triples, with clean rotation and a landing so solid he could hear the blade ring against the ice. Tommy, leaning against the boards with a large thermos of coffee and his stopwatch, gave the smallest possible nod.
“Again.”
Niko circled back. This time, before the jump, he tried what he’d been thinking about over the past week. The plan had been to practice the timing on the mohawk into the salchow, but he added an inside spread eagle and a three-turn before the mohawk. The change in timing threw the angle of his edge, and he ended up a rotation short, landing hard on his left hip and skidding just short of the boards.
Tommy said nothing until Niko got to his feet, brushing down his pants more to avoid looking at his coach than due to any other pressing need. Then he picked up his coffee in his battered, stainless steel mug, and took a slow sip.
"Fancy entry," Tommy said, and Niko winced at the sarcasm in his tone.
"Yeah."
"You haven't run that entry since we tested it in August.” Another sip, and now his bushy eyebrows knit. “You hated it when we tried it then.”
Niko shrugged, aware of how it was going to sound but said it anyway. "I changed my mind."
The look Tommy gave him next was one he knew well. There was a lecture coming, and he probably wasn’t going to enjoy it.
"Your quad salchow-triple axel combo is worth eighteen points in base value," Tommy said. "The entry is worth whatever the judges feel like giving you, and right now they feel like giving you less than they feel like giving Seo-jin. You know that."
"I know that."
"A fancy entry on the salchow isn't going to close that gap."
Niko took a deep breath. No time like the present. "What if we rethink all the entries?”
Tommy looked at the ice, then back at Niko, eyebrows so high they nearly disappeared under his hairline. "You want to rebuild your entries six weeks before Nationals?"
Said out loud like that, it put a hard stop to what had been running through his mind for the past week. The programs had been set for months, Niko and Tommy making the final adjustments. He’d moved through the routine enough times that it felt comfortable, good. Now they were just practicing repeatedly, perfecting each combination.
He looked Tommy in the eye as steadily as he could. “I want to raise my scores without adding jumps. I want to talk about what we can change in the program to do that.”
A funny expression crossed Tommy’s face. When he had rehearsed saying this the night before, Tommy had always accepted his brilliance. This wasn’t approval, but it also wasn’t the look Tommy saved for when he went for something stupid, the one that said When you fell, you deserved it.
"That's the first time you’ve admitted something needs fixing," Tommy said. Then, before Niko could respond to that: "Do the salchow again. Your entry. Let’s see it again.”
Niko circled back. The second attempt was better. Not clean, but closer. Tommy watched with his arms crossed, his coffee cooling somewhere out of sight, the clipboard vanished beside it.
Somehow that motivated Niko to run through the practice with more focus than he’d brought to a training session in months. It had been hard to articulate what was wrong with this season’s programs, but he thought he had his finger on it now.
He slipped in a few more practice transitions, which might have even been on time with the music. Not everything landed, and he fell more than usual, too. And Tommy let him, which was also different. Usually he corrected immediately, made him run through it a few times to prove the point. Today he just watched, and when Niko fell on the second attempt at a triple axel entry, Tommy said only, "Left shoulder. You know.”
And Niko did know.
At the end, as he was slipping on his guards, Tommy came over, still looking thoughtful. “What would you do next?”
Niko wasn’t used to making these calls himself, but he had already sketched out the plan in his head. “I want to record a full run-through tomorrow,” he said, and braced himself for the next part. “And then, I want to call Katya.”
Tommy’s good mood evaporated instantly. “Anyone but her.”
Niko crossed his arms. He’d been expecting this. “I know you haven’t wanted to work with her before—”
“—because you’re not some 100-pound Russian girl,” Tommy warned, brows beetling. “There’s a reason why we never used her choreography.”
“I want her to take a look,” Niko said, holding his ground. “We don’t have to go with it. She’ll offer her opinion.”
Tommy’s grimace eloquently described what he thought of that. “Let’s video the run-through tomorrow. And go from there.”
After practice, alone in the locker room, Niko sat on the bench with his phone and watched the NBC broadcast of his GPF free skate for the first time since Vancouver. Just the raw broadcast footage, although, to his irritation, he could hear Cross’s voice in his head as he watched.
Get into position. Jump. Get into position. Jump. Get into position. Jump.
Impulsively, he switched over to @thesecondmark on Instagram and opened a DM box.
signed up for skate lessons yet? send proof
He closed the app, not waiting to see if she responded.
The next day, Dani called when he was at the gym. He saw her face pop up on his phone mid-set and made a face, but he called her back when the barbell was safely racked.
“Helloooooo to my favorite figure skater,” she said.
“I’m your only figure skater,” he said back, rolling his shoulders to get the tension out before he switched to the dumbbells.
“True,” she replied. “And you’ve been dark on all social media for at least four days. What’s happening?”
"Nothing's happening. I'm training."
"You're always training. You also usually post about it. I've got RedBull asking about the December content package. They want some good clips for the Nationals buildup. Some good jumps, a little sweat, maybe a backflip. You know the drill.”
He made another face at the mirror. "I'll do it."
"When?"
"Soon."
He heard her take a breath, could sense her judging exactly how much honesty should be deployed. Dani was thirty-two, looked like a fresh-faced sorority girl, and had the inner sensibilities of a piranha. She was, however, very good at her job.
"Niko. I'm going to ask you something and I need you to not give me your robot voice. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Robot voice."
"Dani,” he warned.
"You haven't posted in four days. You haven't responded to two brand emails I forwarded. I saw you haven’t even emoji’d some of the replies. And Tommy called me."
He paused, digesting this. "Tommy called you?"
"Yes. Your coach, who communicates exclusively through grunts and clipboard notations, picked up a telephone and called me. He said you're trying to rebuild your jump entries before Nationals and he wanted to know if something happened in Vancouver."
The idea that Tommy would discuss this with Dani was disturbing. "What did you tell him?"
“I told him I don’t know anything.” A verbal shrug. “He’s not worried about you wanting to change the program, by the way. He’s worried because it’s not like you to want to change something so close to a major competition. Was it that video that went viral around the GPF?”
“No,” he said quickly. “I watched my own free skate and realized that this was the only way I could catch up to Seo-jin. I don’t want second place.”
That seemed to reassure her. “That I can work with.”
"I'll do the RedBull content," he said. "Give me a couple days."
"Okay." Her voice softened. "And Niko? Whatever's going on -- just make sure you're doing it for you. Not for the internet. Not for anyone else."
"I'm doing it for me."
"Good." A beat. "Also, your last Instagram story was from six days ago and it was a picture of a smoothie. This is a crisis."
"A crisis is a video of me doing coke bumps in the bathroom, Dani,” he said dryly.
“Just confiscate all the phones before you do them,” she responded. “And don’t tell Tommy I said that!” She laughed and hung up.
He finished the set, headed off to the steam room to loosen up tight muscles. Afterwards, over a carefully optimized dinner, he opened @thesecondmark's YouTube channel.
She'd posted a new video that morning, and there was a clip of his triple axel entry in it mixed in with those of five other people. That careful technical voice marking entries and blades and rotational angles didn’t treat him any different from the others. And yet, somehow, his always came off as less technique than the others, even if the voiceover didn’t say it explicitly.
He watched the whole video anyway, because he wasn’t a coward.
Later that night, a response to his DM arrived: a photograph, shot looking down. In it he could see black rubber matting, two feet in battered white rental figure skates. The laces were tied too loose, and he could tell just from how she leaned on the mat that the leather was too soft around the ankles to support her.
The only words: i’m here
He wrote back almost immediately: you’re not even on the ice. and you’re going to need to buy a pair of real skates before you twist your ankle.
It was offensive that she’d even tried on those worn-out rental skates, frankly. He'd already warned her. He hoped her instructor had also told her off for wearing them.
On the other hand, maybe it would make her appreciate what professional figure skaters did more. And she had, at least, not chickened out on the ice. He waited to feel smug about it.
He didn't.
He thought instead about Tommy saying that's the first time you’ve admitted something needs fixing, and Dani saying make sure you're doing it for you..
He was, he thought.
His phone pinged, and for a moment he thought it was Maren Cross responding. But it was a response from Katya, saying she was willing to look at the video of his program, and reminding him about her fees.
Niko hesitated, then sent her the link to the video.