Figure skatingGrand Prix Preview: Who's the next great pair?

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The ascendant Russian team of Tatiana Volosozhar, left, and Maxim Trankov won the silver medal at the world championships last season. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)

With a new season of the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating series opening later this month, the skaters are hard at work tweaking the programs they'll use for this season.

In the pairs event we can make the assumption that all of the top teams have great "tricks." But what do the skaters have to do to become memorable?

There's no substitute for time together, so national bronze medallists Paige Lawrence and Rudi Swiegers, who have been a team for seven years, have an edge despite being the youngest of Canada's top pairs.

The other notable Canadian partnerships - including national champions Kirsten Moore-Towers and Dylan Moscovitch, silver medallists Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford, and the new pairing of 2008 world pairs bronze medallist Jessica Dube and two-time national junior silver medallist Sebastien Wolfe - are still experimenting with styles and refining technique. But this isn't to say that Canadian pairs aren't in the mix for international medals.

More than romance

Louis Stong, coach of the 1984 world pairs champions Barbara Underhill and Paul Martini, maintains that what makes pairs skating special is the connection between the skaters.

"What I would be looking for this year is the couple or couples who manage their connection, and that we understand the purpose of the choreography in the piece they are skating," Stong says. "You have to have the feeling that they care for each other.

"It's not necessarily romance. If they're young, then I want to feel a sense of joy from the skaters, and not just big tricks. Pairs skating is more than that. The skaters who can convey this are the ones who should be on the top of the podium."

That indefinable "it" quality is the thing that separates legendary pairs from mere champions. Pairs like Canada's Underhill and Martini, and Jamie Sale and David Pelletier; China's Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao; and Russia's Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov, immediately spring to my mind as modern-day examples.

Who's next?

So who are the potential legends in waiting? In the wings are new partnerships like Americans Caydee Denney and John Coughlin, who were both national champions with former partners and got together in the spring of this year. Seeing them at the Liberty competition in July for the first time, I was impressed by their connection, their elements, their speed and their take-no-prisoners attitude.

A little later in the summer, I was at a Toronto-area rink watching 2006 Olympic silver medallists Dan Zhang and Hao Zhang of China at work with top choreographer Lori Nichol. Zhang and Zhang were sidelined last season after a catastrophic injury to Hao Zhang's finger required surgery and months of physiotherapy, preventing him from skating until mid-March and lifting his partner until mid-April.

Working on segments from their short program to Transylvanian Lullaby, Nichol yelled up to me to ask if I knew what they were trying to convey through the choreography.

"He's devouring her!" I yelled down. Talk about a transformation: from formulaic to sophisticated and layered.

Lover of the Russian team

There are other pairs to whom we were introduced last season, like the Russian team of Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov, both of whom had been successful with other partners and came together a little over a year ago. In an impressive debut season, Volosozhar and Trankov not only took the Russian national title but the world silver medal as well. They represent to me the very best of classical Russian pairs skating: dramatic, strong, confident and technically outstanding.

Another outstanding team that entered the senior ranks last year is China's Wenjing Sui and Cong Han, who are already the two-time ISU world junior champions. They've got outstanding tricks in their arsenal like a quad throw Salchow, and they perform with an exuberance and youthful joy that leaves a lasting impression to say the least.

What this means to me is that two-time and current world champions Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy of Germany, and two-time former world champions Qing Pang and Jian Tong of China, have their work cut out for them. Same for veteran Russian competitors Yuko Kavaguti and Alexander Smirnov. These teams are experienced, technically strong and very smart when it comes to maximizing their points technically, but they can be inconsistent in terms of delivering programs that captivate our interest from a performance point of view.

As Stong puts it, "We expect good skating. We expect good tricks. That being accomplished, we want more. We want to see the pairs event step up like ice dance has in the past couple of years. We need to see more and I hope we do. I love the discipline of pairs and when someone puts it all together, you go 'Oh, wow!'"

As someone who watches a lot of skating, the "Oh, wows!" are what I live for.

This is the second  in a series of season previews by CBC Sports figure skating analyst Pj Kwong. Read her ladies' preview, and look for her stories on the  men's and ice dance disciplines over the coming weeks. You can email Pj here and follow her on Twitter @skatingpj.

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