Phebe Bekker and James Hernandez have known their goal since the start of the season: to qualify for the Olympics.
The ice dance team debuted their 2024/25 programs at the British domestic competition, August Qualifiers. “I really enjoy this competition,” Bekker said. “I feel like there’s no pressure. It’s just showing what we’ve been working on all summer. Obviously, with the mistake in the free, it’s a little bit of a downer, but it’s set our sights for what works, what doesn’t, and what we need to work on for the future.”
“We love both of our programs, we really wanted to show that to the audience and judges,” Hernandez added. “These programs are very different to last year and we feel like they’re steady vehicles for us and that we suit both programs and it’s rare that we get that. We’ve got a very British theme and we genuinely can’t wait to keep on working on them.”
“It’s our British year,” she joked.
For the Rhythm Dance theme of ‘Social Dances of the 50s, 60s, and 70s’ they opted for a medley of songs from The Beatles.
“We went through so much music. There’s thirty years of music and so many different styles,” Bekker explained.
“We’ve always touted with the idea [of The Beatles.] No one’s done it a lot, and there’s a reason for that and we found out it’s really hard to make a program with their music sound circular in a program,” Hernandez described. “We found a few versions of these songs (Get Back, Twist and Shout, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) by chance and we knew what we wanted to do with them. We started off with one tune we really liked and messed about with the steps to it, then added more. The program was basically made in sections and came together.”
“When we were looking, I — and I feel like everyone — went straight to disco. I thought ‘I really want to skate to ABBA’, we love ABBA so much and Mamma Mia is one of my favourite movies,” Bekker said, “But then the more we listened, it got more difficult – the music is so fast and there’s not really a style to it and it’s a bit difficult to connect to it. Then we had second thoughts about disco and thought everyone else would be doing the same, so we feel quite lucky that we picked something different as we went for Prince last year and everyone else did Prince!”
The team tried out different dance styles to find what worked best. “I could pull up about twenty videos of styles we played around with, but this is the one that stuck.”
For the second season in a row, they started out with another costume vs the mail mishap. While Hernandez went to visit Mathieu Caron in Montreal for his fitting, Bekker did a virtual fitting but they never received her information. Her pale yellow dress came from a last-minute trip to Zara but complimented Hernandez’ maroon two-piece.
Bekker used the yellow dress for several competitions, switching to the Caron designed flowery-sequined dress in December.
For their free dance, they were inspired by the 2021 James Bond movie No Time to Die, both loving the track Final Ascent composed by Hans Zimmer.
“I remember watching it in the cinema thinking [Final Ascent] would be so special to skate to,” Hernandez said. “We were going through free dance ideas for this year, we agreed before anything what the concept we wanted for this year — we wanted to play to our strengths.
“Last year was very contemporary and modern but we struggled throughout the year to find what our story was in that program, so we wanted this year to have a clearer story. We agreed on that before agreeing on music. We both said we loved this one song, we don’t know how we can turn it into a program. So we went away and paired it with Billie Eilish (the title theme – No Time to Die), then we wanted a bit more James Bond in there but not a huge amount because we really wanted it to be Final Ascent.”
They were really happy with the first version of music received, with the most iconic music associated with James Bond opening and closing the program.
The team’s next competition was in early October, the first of three Challenger Series events they’d enter and continue to improve upon. At the Denis Ten Memorial, they placed seventh with a total of 166.95, a couple of weeks later they competed at the Cup of Nice and bettered their score to 169.92, with their final competition of 2024 ending with their first Challenger Series win at the Golden Spin of Zagreb. At the European Championships in January, the team improved on their previous year’s placement by four to finish thirteenth.
“We were a little disappointed again with no Grand Prix but we know it’s not enough to show up at the last competition of the year and skate well, we have to do it through the whole season. We did a Q&A with the younger kids on the [GB] National Team and they asked what it’s like to transition through the levels, and our answer was every event matters – you have to bring your best.”
This year at the World Championships in Boston, skaters have the opportunity to qualify allocations for their countries for the Olympics, which is now only eleven months away.
Bekker, Hernandez, and their team have had this as their goal from before the season began. “We’ve set it as our goal for the season. We have our whiteboard for every day with our goals, what we need to do today, and we have it written down in the corner and it stays there.”
Hernandez described the joint goal as a uniting factor. “It’s why we turn up, why we put in the extra work. There’s never been such a clear goal.”
“We’ve got two programs we really believe in and are really happy with, The Beatles program is so fun and the James Bond program is something I’ve always wanted to do. This is our year to show everyone what we’ve got.”
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