Tarah Kayne and Danny O'Shea are not your typical pairs skaters. They came to pairs skating a bit later than usual, Kayne at 18 and O'Shea at 17, after both working hard at their singles careers. While O'Shea was skating pairs as a sideline to singles, Kayne was skating solo until she tried pairs and decided it was the skating discipline for her.
"I didn't compete well by myself and I didn't enjoy it," Kayne explained. "Then I tried pairs, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I really like this.'"
They teamed up in spring 2012, and worked well together, winning silver in their international debut, the 2013 International Challenge Cup. What happened next was a roller coaster ride of triumphs and challenges – they were assigned to the 2014 Four Continents team, where they won silver after impressive placements in international and domestic competitions. But the following season, Kayne underwent surgery to repair a labral tear in her right hip, causing the team to withdraw from their Grand Prix assignments. They rallied later in the season to win bronze at the 2014 Golden Spin of Zagreb and U.S. Championships.
Despite Kayne's right knee injury at the beginning of the 2015-2016 season, they won bronze again at the Golden Spin of Zagreb and, most impressively, securing the 2016 U.S. pairs title. But 2017 was a difficult year for the pair, with Kayne suffering a concussion and the team having to miss the U.S. Championships, along with Kayne suffering increased pain from right knee tendonitis, a result of the 2015 injury, and undergoing an operation to receive a new tendon in February. This required her to refrain from walking and training for seven weeks and she was notable to resume until the summer of that year. The 2017-2018 season included another international bronze medal, and the U.S. silver medal which allowed them to be first alternates in the 2018 Olympic Winter Games, as well as securing spots on the Four Continents and World team. They went on to win Four Continents, but a stress fracture in Kayne's knee caused them to miss the World Championships.
After training in Ellenton, Florida, the team decided to relocate to Colorado Springs after Champs Camp in summer 2018 to work with Dalilah Sappenfield.
Last season was challenging for the team, but they are working hard to prevent that from happening again.
"I think that there were pieces of last season that were great, but I feel like we failed to put out what we were practicing at home and that's always a rough feeling. It leaves you wanting more," said O'Shea.
"I wish I could press rewind so many times. We were training so well and made such great strides and became so much more consistent as skaters, but as Danny said, we failed to put out what we had been training," agreed Kayne.
With Sappenfield, they are working towards improving their overall skating quality.
"One of our goals is to show consistent improvement from competition to competition, we have been training really hard," said Kayne.
"One thing we talk about with Dalilah and the rest of our coaches here at the rink is consistently working on the details, on polish, and trying to get a little bit better in our overall skating, just Improving across the board." "We want to make sure elements get better, (and) one of our main focuses for a while has been improving our look on the ice as well."
They are currently preparing for Cup of China, their first Grand Prix event of the season, November 8-10 in Chongqing, China. The team finished in fourth place at the U.S. International Classic in September and look forward to presenting their new short program to "Sweet Dreams" from the
A Wrinkle In Time movie soundtrack, and their free skate to a medley from
Les Miserables.
Their short program is a new style for them, and the music was suggested by their coach.
"Dalilah brought this piece and it was the first one that we all kind of got behind and the more we listened to it, I feel the more we became passionate about it and the more we really enjoyed skating to it," said O'Shea.
They also appreciated working with choreographer Charlie White for the first time.
"He brought a very fresh perspective to the program, it was just a little bit different for us being dark and a little more contemporary and in the end of a lot of fun to skate," said O'Shea.
They feel their dramatic free skate, to music from
Les Miserables is evocative enough that they can fully express the storyline.
"We skate to it very naturally...we skate to
I Dreamed a Dream, and I think is a piece of music that I in particular really enjoy skating to because I can kind of find Fantine's struggle and try to embody that," said Kayne. "(
Les Miserables) has such a strong storyline, that's something you really want to show."
"I feel like there's also a strong relationship in that movie and it's easy for us to skate together when we have music that has a relational value to it," added O'Shea.
Indeed, the team feels their greatest strength as a team is their ability to perform and connect to each other and the audience.
"'We've always considered one of our biggest strengths to be our relationship on the ice and being able to tell a story," said Kayne.
"I think that those are things that we accomplished very well as a team, that we can bring a story to the audience and move through the difficult elements while still capturing their attention," agreed O'Shea.
They are always aspiring to be better, looking to the best skaters in the world for inspiration.
"When we were self-evaluating at the end of the season, we try to compare ourselves to the best in the world. Things that we see the best in the world doing that we don't always have are sometimes amplitude like the volume of the height of throws, the distance, the speed across the ice those types of things and then just quality of in between movements and skating. So we've been working very hard on that," explained O'Shea. "It's those little intangibles that create the difference between the middle of the pack and top of the pack at the World Championships and we are starting to implement things that are more similar to the top of the pack."
When they aren't training for several hours daily on and off ice, Kayne and O'Shea are both pursuing their educations, Kayne a business degree and O'Shea a degree in mechanical engineering. O'Shea also researches real estate, studying to be a real estate agent, while Kayne enjoys reading and cooking. But their primary objective now is to skate as they know they can.
"We want to perform a little bit better and actually make the Olympic team after being the first alternate and we want to keep improving as the world keeps improving and be just that little bit closer," said O'Shea. At the same time, we want to enjoy training these next four years; staying healthy is also our goal."
Kayne feels the enjoyment of the sport is her primary motivation.
"I want to find enjoyment in and be happy while skating, because if I finish my career and I didn't enjoy what I was doing, then I didn't reach my goal."
Don't miss the second of the action at Cup of China! Tune in live and on-demand on the
Figure Skating Pass on NBC Sports Gold.
