Like many teams, Audrey Lu and Misha Mitrofanov attribute their building success to shared skating techniques.
They're known for consistently landing side-by-side jumps, one of the trickiest elements in pair skating. In the first half of the 2021-22 season, they placed fifth at NHK Trophy, fourth at Rostelecom Cup and won Golden Spin of Zagreb last weekend.
But according to Lu and Mitrofanov, they couldn't be more dissimilar, and they think their contrasting personalities have made them a stronger and closer team throughout their careers.
"We're total opposites," Lu, 19, said with a laugh. "He helps me go with the flow, so I'm calmer at competitions."
"She is very organized, especially when it comes to schedules and travel details," Mitrofanov, 24, said. "My friends always ask me, 'When are you leaving for your competition?' And I say, 'Hang on, I have to call Audrey.'"
When the two met in 2016, both athletes were training in Dallas with the same coach, and Mitrofanov was excited that their technical timing matched almost instantly — but Lu had just switched from freestyle to pairs. It took time to adjust to throws and rely on another person to perform jumps, spins and eventually lifts.
"It was bumpy in the beginning," she said. "I was so shy and barely spoke at practices."
Slowly but surely, the pair clicked. And time together has been another one of the team's weapons, according to Mitrofanov.
"When you spend so much time with your partner, love them or hate them, you're going to get to know one another," he said while teasing his partner. "Watching skaters like Meryl Davis and Charlie White or the Shibutanis, we noticed over time those athletes moved more and more like one team, instead of two people. The longer we've skated together, the easier training has become."
Lu and Mitrofanov have learned to laugh at their differences — especially when competitions don't go to plan.
For instance, Mitrofanov usually wears a feathered black shirt to match their free skate music to "Ancient Lands" by Ronan Hardiman. At NHK Trophy, they had just completed warm-up when Mitrofanov took off his jacket — and Lu's face immediately dropped.
"Everyone's nervous before competition, and when I got dressed, I guess I didn't look in the mirror," he said. "When I unzipped my jacket after warm-up, I realized I wore my gala costume for our free skate."
The blip didn't phase the pair. The performance earned Lu and Mitrofanov their personal best free skate score (which they broke again at Golden Spin).
The team's momentum has been ramping up for years. They placed sixth at the 2019 and 2020 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, but broke into the top four last year. With the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 approaching, however, they want to treat this season like any other.
"Some of our first performances of the season opened our eyes to how much pressure we were putting on ourselves," Mitrofanov said. "We need to focus on our training and performance, rather than the result."
Part of that focus has been dedicated to developing strong characters for their programs. In the past, Lu and Mitrofanov have skated to everything from Moulin Rogue!, Cats and a Charlie Chaplain medley.
"Every year, we try to do something completely different," Lu said. "We have our own style, and we've gotten really good feedback from making character-styled programs our own."
Their short program — set to a haunting remix of "Toxic" and "Survivor" — is subtly zombie-themed. In the first 40 seconds of the program, Mitrofanov throws Lu into a triple twist on a break in the music. It's almost like they left space for the audience to gasp.
"We like to get the judge's and audience's attention," Mitrofanov said of their intentional choreography. "We don't want them to be able to look away from the second the music starts."
"We can feel the energy while we're skating, especially after a year of empty arenas," Lu said. "We both love competing in front of an audience, regardless if we're having a good or bad competition day."
The team — who now trains out of the Skating Club in Boston with Aleksey Letov, Olga Ganicheva and Evgeni Nemirovskii — undoubtedly has the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 in the back of its mind. Before the time comes, Lu and Mitrofanov have decided to keep doing what they do best: performing, working hard and laughing along the way.
"We're going to be fighting for the top two spots at the U.S. Championships next month. We'd love to go to the Olympics," Lu said. "But for now, we just want to put out two solid performances before mentally moving on to the next competition. Everything else is out of our hands."
