After meteoric rise in US, Denney and Barrett setting sights on rest of the pairs world

Fast track takes Denney-Barrett to Vancouver Games

SPOKANE, Wash. — That Caydee Denney had a countdown to the Vancouver Olympics on a calendar in her bedroom doesn’t sound so unusual.

Except that she and pairs partner Jeremy Barrett had just started skating together again.

And they hadn’t even been to their first national championships.

“I knew it was going to happen eventually, but I wasn’t sure whether it was this cycle or next,” coach Jim Peterson said. “But I knew when they came together they were going to be something big.”

Less than two years after they resumed skating together, Denney and Barrett are heading to the Vancouver Games as the top U.S. pairs team. The Americans haven’t won a medal since the last time the Olympics were in Canada, and Denney and Barrett are a long shot — a big one — to end that streak.

Considering what these two have managed to accomplish in such a short span, though, nothing would be a surprise.

Creating a champion pairs team is a tricky science, one the Americans have yet to really master. Not only do skaters have to be able to, you know, skate, they have to look good together doing it. They need similar shapes and body lines, to give the illusion of unison even when it might not be there. They have to be fearless, able to do scary tricks without a second thought.

Most of all, they have to have the same ambitions and the same drive — not so easy to find in a sport where one year of training alone costs thousands and thousands of dollars.

“Finding people with the same goals, people that are motivated enough to get to the top level is pretty tough,” Barrett said.

Barrett and his previous partner had just split when Peterson suggested he skate with Denney in the summer of 2006. He was 22 at the time and she was just 12, but she’d been on skates since before she was 2. Roller skates, actually, but many of the same principles apply, particularly with jumps.

By the end of their first session together, it was clear this was a partnership that would work.

“Things came pretty easily for us when we started, as far as the big tricks,” Barrett said. “It didn’t really take us too long to get all the elements, the throws and the twists and the lifts. Which is what usually takes most teams the longest to get.”

Four months after they started skating together, though, Denney decided she wanted to concentrate on singles.

She and her younger sister, Haven, and her mom, DeeDee, moved to Colorado Springs, Colo., while her dad, Bryan, a sales manager at Toyota, stayed behind in Florida to sell their house. It wouldn’t take long, they figured, and Bryan Denney could visit each weekend.

But the housing market tanked and airfares climbed. The weekly visits became every other week and then once a month and then even rarer than that.

“It was so difficult. We’ve been married for 18 years, and it’s probably the most difficult thing we’ve ever been through,” DeeDee Denney said. “Financially it was very stressful on the family and emotionally on the girls, being away from their dad.”

Barrett, meanwhile, hadn’t found another partner. But he hadn’t stopped training, either, and was working every odd job possible at the rink — coaching, manning the snack bar, driving the Zamboni — to pay for it.

“It’s so difficult to find a girl that can match that level. That was honestly what Caydee had,” Peterson said. “I really felt eventually (she) would come back and the team would be put together again.”

In May 2008, DeeDee and the girls returned to Florida for a family graduation. Wanting to keep up with their training, Caydee and Haven stopped by their old rink in Ellenton.

“We messed around a little bit on one session,” Denney said of Barrett, “and we just picked it up from there.”

The United States hasn’t won a pairs medal since Jill Watson and Peter Oppegard’s bronze in 1988 — five years before Denney was born. There have been only two world medals in the last 10 years, both coming against watered-down, post-Olympic fields.

Those statistics make Peterson — a former pairs skater — cringe. (Peterson also coaches the other Olympic pair team, Amanda Evora — who is also Barrett’s longtime girlfriend — and Mark Ladwig.)

But in Denney and Barrett, the Americans might finally have a team that can change that.

Denney and Barrett already can hold their own technically against the Chinese, Germans and Russians. They’re one of the few teams that does the throw triple flip, so challenging because it’s hard to get the hang time necessary to make it look cool. In those mere four months together in 2006, Denney and Barrett already were playing around with throw triple axels and throw quadruple salchows.

The longer they skate together, the better their component scores — the old artistic mark — will be.

With the retirements that always come after an Olympics, it’s not a stretch to think Denney and Barrett could be on the early “Ones to Watch” list for Sochi.

“We’ll still next year just focus on ourselves,” Barrett said. “But I feel like, with how we’re skating now, we can definitely be competitive with everybody else, whether they retire or not.”

Of course, it wasn’t long ago that people had similar high expectations for another upstart pair, Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker. Unbeatable their first three seasons, McLaughlin and Brubaker didn’t even make the Olympic team after a dismal fifth-place finish at nationals.

Spend any time around Denney and Barrett, though, and it’s clear they have that relentless drive that separates star athletes from everybody else.

Barrett didn’t log all those hours on the Zamboni and in the snack bar to call it quits just as they’re starting to make their mark. Denney only sounds like the 16-year-old she is when she talks about the “Twilight” series or her driver’s license (which, to her great annoyance, she hasn’t had time to get yet).

“When I’m off the ice, I live the life of a normal 16-year-old, and I have a very close group of family and friends that keep me grounded and keep me who I am,” she said. “But when I’m in the rink, we’re all on the same level.”

Besides, they’ve imagined themselves here for years — even before Denney put up that calendar.

Denney was 4 when Tara Lipinski, another former roller skater, won gold at the Nagano Olympics, and she’d stand on the couch and beg her parents to hang a medal around her neck.

“She’d say, ‘Mommy, mommy, put the medal on me.’ She’d act like she was Tara,” DeeDee Denney said.

As for Barrett, he’s had his eye on another prize.

“I’ve always said if I get (a tattoo), it’ll be the Olympic rings,” he said. “So now I can finally get it.”