Kamila Valieva, involved in a doping scandal of exorbitant proportions, despite pressure, won the short program in the most talked about genre – women’s single skating – at the Beijing Olympics. The current world champion Anna Shcherbakova is second, Alexandra Trusova is fourth. All of them, however, claim the gold medal, which will be played on Thursday.
If someone thought that, having turned out to be the main heroine of the doping scandal and, in connection with this, the most talked about person at the Beijing Olympics, Kamila Valieva would go on the ice depressed and begin to disrupt the elements one by one, then he was seriously mistaken. Despite the off-scale degree of tension, which, it seems, simply cannot be higher, the Russian athlete again turned out to be the best and took the first intermediate position according to the results of the short program.
The champion of Russia and Europe Kamila Valieva skated as if there was nothing that preceded the short program and that turned the Olympics into a nightmare for the 15-year-old figure skater. Neither the seven-hour session of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which ended in the morning, nor unsuccessful training sessions with falls, nor the numerous questions from journalists, from which she hid her face with a hood, about doping. In a pale purple dress, Valieva did not flinch to the lyrical composition of Kirill Richter “In Memoriam”, written in memory of the departed people, and did all the elements perfectly.
True, the skater made one mistake – on the most difficult jump. Summed up her axel in three and a half turns. Very successfully soared Valieva on the road led. And she, in order to resist, had to substitute the second leg. Axel was the only element that the judges judged for minuses.
After the performance, the figure skater (82.16), always smiling broadly and childishly, could not restrain herself and burst into tears. Valieva, who needs support more than the rest, got the biggest portion of applause. Ice dancers Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov, winner of the 2018 PyeongChang Games, Alina Zagitova, and vice-champion Evgenia Medvedeva gave Kamila Valieva a standing ovation.
The second was after the first day of competition the reigning world champion Anna Shcherbakova (80.20), whose preparation for the tournament also turned out to be fraught with difficulties, albeit of a different nature. As it turned out, a few days before the start, the skater had to urgently replace the skates: the old ones broke. This circumstance, however, did not in the least affect the short program of the figure skater. Shcherbakova, who does not own a triple axel, purely made a cheaper double, as well as a solo flip and a combination of triple lutz and sheepskin coat.
Another Russian woman, Alexandra Trusova (74.60), finished fourth. The reason is a fall on the triple axel, which the Russian woman, like Valieva, did not succeed. The difference lies in the fact that Valieva successfully landed it all season, and Trusova, who has been struggling with this jump for the third consecutive season, has never been able to do it cleanly in competitions. However, Trusova has repeatedly repeated that she does not intend to choose the path of least resistance and that the places she has taken are of the least interest to her.
“I don’t want to give up the triple Axel, this is my goal, I want to achieve it. And it doesn’t matter to me who skated how, what it could cost me, ”the athlete said now.
Trusova let the Japanese Kaori Sakamoto (79.84) go ahead, but in the free program the situation should change. Not a single foreign athlete has such content that would allow her to compete on equal terms with domestic figure skaters. And each of the three Russians – the gap between them is not so large – still retains a chance for gold.