When asked what she was up to during the offseason, Audrey Lu shyly replied, "I was just chilling."
The modest pairs figure skater neglected to mention that she recently graduated high school (with a Team USA logo atop her cap of course), earned her driver's license and turned 18. Her academic success led to Lu being Spring Creek Academy's salutatorian, to boot.
"I feel like I have a little bit more freedom," Lu said of having a driver's license. "It's nice because now I can drive myself places, and I don't have to keep asking for rides."
Lu also spent some of her downtime cooking with her mother and learning her recipes.
Not to be outdone, Lu's skating partner Misha Mitrofanov, 23, completed his spring semester courses at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he is a junior on a pre-med track, and rebuilt a formerly totaled car with his father, Gennadiy, to "kill time."
"It's special because it's the hardtop convertible and they didn't make many of those," Mitrofanov said, beaming like a proud parent of the 2008 Mazda Miata he named Blackbird.
The Plano, Texas, based team spent nearly three months off the ice during the global pandemic until their rink reopened in late May.
Making do with what they had, Audrey Lu and Misha Mitrofanov moved their off-ice training to a nearby track – going twice a day for runs and to practice lifts and split twists – and had daily Zoom stretching classes with the other skaters who train under coaches, Olga Ganicheva and Aleksey Letov.
While their training has since returned to normal, Lu and Mitrofanov are still warming up to what the 2020-21 season will look like. Theirs will kick off with the virtual International Selection Pool (ISP) Points Challenge, which features some of the top U.S. athletes competing for prize money, advancement to the 2021 Toyota U.S. Figure Skating Championships and international assignments. Skaters submit videos of both their short program and free skate, which are proctored to ensure the integrity of the video.
The first senior-level Points Challenge will be available on U.S. Figure Skating Fan Zone on Sept. 22 and the second on Oct. 6. Lu and Mitrofanov are participating in both.
"We're definitely very grateful and happy for the competitions that are coming up where it's going to be recorded and then sent in," Mitrofanov said. "We think that's very cool and it'll be great to see how everyone's doing. Usually that's how we see other teams and how we're all doing – at competitions – so this will give us a boost to see which teams are doing well and where we can improve."
They are also aiming for a spot at Skate America®, which will be held Oct. 23-25 in Las Vegas.
"We hope that Skate America goes well. We're trying to get into Skate America," Mitrofanov said. "If we don't, we still hope it goes well because it's one of the few competitions that will still be around."
The ultimate goal for Lu and Mitrofanov this season is to reach the podium at the U.S. Championships in January, they admitted. After teaming up in May 2016, which marked Lu's first foray into pairs, they won the junior title at their first U.S. Championships together in 2018. They have since finished sixth at the senior level the past two seasons.
Silent-film comedian Charlie Chaplin could be the game-changer Lu and Mitrofanov need to make that leap.
After skating to serious, dramatic music in the past such as "Notre-Dame de Paris," "Once Upon a December" and "The Music of the Night," performing to Chaplin's music for this season's free skate, which was choreographed by Ganicheva and Evgeni Nemirovskii, will mark a drastic change for the team.
"It's very playful," Lu said. "The middle has a slow part to show the emotional connection, but otherwise it's funny."
"We always have been skating to the same style, more of a sad type of music," Mitrofanov said. "This is outside of our box and we're definitely interested in seeing how people react – whether they like it or not. We definitely are trying to work on our facial expression. We definitely are trying to show it off and sell the program."
Fans will see a return of the short program Lu and Mitrofanov performed at the 2020 U.S. Championships to "The Show Must Go On" from
Moulin Rouge!, this time with harder transitions and more speed.
"We switched it a week before U.S. Championships and we're going to keep it," Lu said. "It fits us well because it's more powerful."
Four years after becoming a pairs skater, Lu is finally beginning to feel more comfortable with the discipline. She said she has overcome many of her fears, though some still remain.
Mitrofanov had never competed with a partner for more than one season before Lu, and has now experienced the upsides to a longtime partner.
"A big factor in pairs is having a partner to skate with for many seasons," Mitrofanov said. "It is very difficult to find the right partner, but we found each other and I'm very fortunate. It makes life a lot easier. We're able to progress season after season and there's no restart button. It's about where we can improve. We know each other better so things click a lot faster and it just seems to grow smoother."
