Fishing for Better Jumps:  Get Your Jumps Faster and Safer by Chris Conte The Professional Skater Magazine - January / February 2007 3 pages, 863 KB, PDF file

Harnessing a Star
Hughes works on jumpswhile held by strings
Thursday, October 25, 2001

By John Jeansonne, STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Colorado Springs, Colo. — Think of Pinocchio. As the Olympic figure-skating season commences tonight with an international field in the annual Skate America event here, Sarah Hughes has evolved into a real, live medal contender for February’s Salt Lake City Winter Games.

Sarah Hughes trains under direction of Nick Perna, whose fishing pole and harness keeps the Olympic medal contender from getting hurt.

But it was just a few months ago that she was rigged up in a harness with strings extended from a fishingpole- like gizmo being controlled by a skating coach who appeared to be guiding her around the ice. That was in late June, with Hughes in the midst of offseason training that included a session with Virginia-based coach Nick Perna.

At the time, Hughes, a 16-year-old high school junior from Great Neck North who lives in Kings Point, was diverting from her normal routine to work on a new jump, the triple axel.

Hughes’ coach, Robin Wagner, had arranged for Perna to spend the day at Hughes’ training rink, Ice House in Hackensack. The idea was to allow Hughes to “let go” on the jump without fear of a heavy fall that could cause injury.

The project was just another of the countless unseen details in the development of an elite skater. Ballet sessions, weight training, choreography. Settling on the right music and finding the best outfits. Lining up skating judges to “monitor” an occasional practice to get feedback on what does and doesn’t impress about a routine. Doing photo shoots so that the US Figure Skating Association would have pictures of Hughes, the bronze medalist at the March world championships, to be used for event publicity and so on.

Not to mention the drilling, drilling, drilling.

In the big picture of preparation, Hughes’ day working with Perna was mostly allegory: She was a puppet on strings. Her Geppetto, Perna, is a former pairs skater who has carved out a niche in the sport with his unique training device — which has earned him the moniker, “The Fishing Pole Guy” — with two-time men’s national champion Michael Weiss among the users of his harness.

"Kids that wear it say they feel like a fish, a dog or a puppet,” Perna said. “I’ve been doing it for 15 years. I used to grab the backs of little kids’ sweatshirts and pull it over their heads when they’d do their axels — holding them by the scruff of their necks, so to speak. But with that, they couldn’t really skate into jumps.”

In the process of designing a “handheld suitcase gadget” in his basement, Perna stumbled onto an ad in a skating magazine for the Pro Motion Hand-Held Harness — the “fishing pole” — invented by a Canadian named Jan Glerup and priced at $500. “I was his first customer,” Perna said. “It fit exactly what I was trying to do.”

Sasha Cohen, 17, a Californian who hopes to contend along with Hughes for one of the three Olympic berths for US women, also has been a Perna puppet. And though the fishing pole thing-a-ma-jig hardly is the silver bullet for churning out skating champions, it does represent another small step along the way.

“I hadn’t been on it in about a year,” Hughes said. With Perna following her around the ice, not more than a couple of paces away, as she sailed into her jumps, Hughes found herself doing double takes on her first few tries. “I’m like: Wait, there’s someone who’s skating with me,” she said.

It reminded her a bit of when she was a small child “and I used to run away all the time, so at Disney World, my mom attached something to my wrist. So I’ve been on a leash.”

The fact is that training for this big season has kept her on a short leash almost constantly. Some mornings she puts in a brief appearance at school; every morning she rides with Wagner, at least an hour each way, to her training rink. There are tutoring sessions, occasional television tapings, interviews and the endless search for the Great Secret of appealing to judges’ tastes.

Wagner said she spends countless hours at a record store, yet for Hughes’ new short program being debuted tonight, Wagner chose Gounod’s “Ave Maria” after hearing the piece wafting from her husband’s study at home. The entire four-minute program was to be set to Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” but “the ending is so dark,” Wagner said, that she spliced in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the finish.

Also, Hughes “has new duds but they might not be the final duds,” Wagner said. She will show off a white, one-shoulder-uncovered number that Wagner calls “her Greek Goddess outfit” in the short program, and a “purple-blue, beaded, sparkly” dress in the long.

“We’ll use this first event as a barometer,” Wagner said. “And a springboard. We wanted programs that will present Sarah’s strengths: Her power, fluidity, lines — her ‘longness.’ She has a gentleness with underlying power. With the long program, we hope this will mesmerize the audience. From beginning to end, we want them to hold their breaths, then go, ‘Wow.’ ” Hughes, after the long training season, is more than ready to get on with it. “Finally!” she said.

There are no strings on her.

© 2001 Newsday, Inc. Reprinted with permission and www.newsday.com