Zachary Lagha reflects on his first competition with Hannah Lim

Zachary Lagha on their first competition with Hannah Lim. Dance team from the I.Am academy has won rhythm dance at Championnats québécois d’été with impressive 77.79.

It was good — we couldn't have asked for a better start, I think. More or less, we showed the level we're at right now. You always need that first competition to move forward, and I'm happy we got our first event so early in August, so now we know what to improve and we still have plenty of time.

Of course there's a lot of work to do, especially on the second half of the program. Maybe our performance lacked some attack, but it was our first run. It's hard not to be nervous when it's your first competition together as a new team.

I was pretty stressed all week, and surprisingly my nerves disappeared the moment we stepped on the ice. My brain was lucid, I wasn't freaking out — I knew what was going on. It was a new and different experience for me and Hannah, because we still need to establish our competition routines and settle into new traditions. So far it's going really well.

The coaches were happy with how we skated. They said we accomplished our mission: we stayed connected with each other and controlled our nerves. We’ve also had some feedback from the judges and we understand now what to focus on. Now we start getting ready for our next competition, Souvenir Georges Éthier in September, where we'll skate both programs. We'll also have our costumes ready by then, since the rhythm dance costumes need more detail. And now that we've done our RD, we'll concentrate more on the free dance over the next few weeks. We'll go from there”.

Zachary and Hannah have also revealed their RD costume design by Mathieu Caron.