2023-11-18 12:58:45
Make no mistake, if Belgium lacks ice rinks, it does not lack talented skaters. After the confirmation of Loena Hendrickx, a young rising star of Belgian figure skating revealed herself to the general public in 2023 for her first season “among the big ones”, it is regarding Nina Pinzarrone. The Brussels native who this year achieved a superb fifth place at the European Championships, and a no less impressive eleventh position at the Worlds. Christophe Reculez met her in Deurne as part of the Belgian figure skating championship.
The one who will celebrate her 17th birthday on November 24 has been skating for thirteen long years, she has been sliding since she was very young. It clicked at the age of three, when her big sister Lily, also a skater, took up the discipline following watching the European Championships on television. “She started while I wasn’t interested at first. Then I saw that she was having fun and so I wanted to do the same thing. And since then, I haven’t stopped.”
In the Pinzarrone family, it was the youngest, Nina, who was spotted from a very young age when she started lessons at the Poseidon ice rink in Brussels: “My sister and I trained thirty minutes a week to learn how to walk on ice. Then the coach said that she mightn’t really help me develop anymore and sent me to Louvain to find a coach who might better supervise me. So we went to Louvain and that’s where I met Ans Bocklandt. And we have been working together ever since.“
Ans Bocklandt, also interviewed by Christophe Reculez, is necessarily complimentary of her protégé, even if she wants to avoid putting too much pressure on him for the future: “She has a lot of qualities. But above all her technical level, she is very strong and very stable in her pirouettes. But also her way of working, she is always very regular, she does not experience ups and downs and it pays off.“
Her coach is supported in supervising Nina: “I’m the head coach. I do a little bit of everything, the technique, its program, the work on the ground. But she also has a choreographer who comes from France. He does his choreography then corrects his little mistakes, the little details to improve. […] It is very important to repeat every day so as not to forget.“
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