Today in St. Petersburg, apparently, the most important tournament for Russian figure skaters starts – the national championship, as a result of which a team for the European Championship and, more importantly, the Beijing Olympics will be formed. This is, in fact, the first clash of all the main contenders for Olympic tickets in the season: the Grand Prix final, within which the favorites were to be determined, was canceled. The main battle in St. Petersburg will unfold between women, where there are several times more real applicants for Olympic licenses than the licenses themselves.
The Russian Figure Skating Championship, which will take place this week in St. Petersburg, is of enormous importance. It is on the basis of its results that the final composition of the national team for the European Championship, which will be held in January in Tallinn, and, let’s say, preliminary, for the February Olympic Games in Beijing, will be formed. In addition, the St. Petersburg tournament will be the first competition since the beginning of the season in which all Russian contenders for these very Olympic quotas will compete at the same time. It was expected that they would meet two weeks ago in Osaka, Japan as part of the Grand Prix series finals, but the organizers were forced to cancel the competition due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Especially intriguing is the alignment in women’s single skating. In St. Petersburg, for three quotas at the heart of the national team, there are already five clear contenders with ultra-difficult jumps in the arsenal. And this is without taking into account the current European champion Alena Kostornaya. She will not be able to perform due to a hand injury.
Each of the applicants, interestingly, could fight for victory at the Olympics. One of them is 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, who is spending her first adult season and who now holds three major records in women’s single skating: in total points for a short program, an arbitrary and for two programs. The other is the currently most titled athlete in the national team Anna Shcherbakova. For three years in a row, she retained the title of national champion and added the title of world champion to it in the spring. The oldest representative of the team, 25-year-old Elizaveta Tuktamysheva, also intends to fight for quotas. Tuktamysheva, who did not qualify for the two previous Olympics with a much lower level of competition, was able to stabilize and even complicate her jumping arsenal. Another contender – the same age as Valieva Maya Khromykh – is still somewhat lost against the background of more titled rivals, but has no less difficult jumps and retains the chances of getting into the Olympic team.
Meanwhile, the intrigue here is associated primarily with the figure of Alexandra Trusova. After she gave out a triumphant performance with five quadruple jumps during the September test skates, Trusova suffered a leg injury (sources believe that this is a stress fracture). As a result, she performed, and with simplified content – two quads, only at one stage of the Grand Prix in the United States. Trusova could not come to the second one. In this regard, the potentially most powerful athlete is now in the status of a “dark horse”. And now the fate of quotas largely depends on whether she managed to recover and whether she can land all her quads.
The fight will be fierce in the competitions of sports couples, where there are at least four competitive duos now. The reigning world champions Anastasia Mishina and Alexander Gallyamov should with a high degree of probability confirm the status of the leaders of the national team: they won at both stages of the Grand Prix with fairly convincing skates. For the remaining quotas, couples who are still doing a little worse will fight. Aleksandra Boykova and Dmitry Kozlovsky are still unable to stabilize the emission, which they periodically fail to achieve. Experienced Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov still have problems with jumping, they have not disappeared anywhere even with the transition to the group that mastered the technology of training magical single women Eteri Tutberidze. Daria Pavlyuchenko and Denis Khodykin, who, due to injuries, joined the season later than everyone else, had interesting performances with a large number of finds and tricks, but their uniforms (at least at the end of November) did not allow the athletes to present them properly.
The situation is similar in ice dancing. The undisputed leaders are the world champions Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov, for whom no duet poses a threat in St. Petersburg, but Alexandra Stepanova and Ivan Bukin, Tiffany Zagorski and Jonathan Gureiro, Anastasia Skoptsova and Kirill Aleshin will fight for the other two licenses. as well as the young duo Diana Davis and Gleb Smolkin. Despite the fact that Davis (daughter of Tutberidze) and Smolkin spend only their first adult season in their careers, at a recent tournament in Budapest they were able to score points (199.90), comparable to those of the couples in the top.
In the sense of unpredictability, men’s competitions stand out, which are of particular importance. Obviously, none of the domestic skaters are capable of fighting the elite now. However, it is important for the federation to identify the most stable athlete from the long list of middle peasants who can be entered in the team tournament for the Beijing Olympics. And although the nominal leader of the national team is now Mikhail Kolyada, the only domestic athlete who qualified for the Grand Prix finals, his candidacy – in the context of the past, Pyeongchang Olympics, at which he let the team down – raises many questions. One more intrigue is connected with which of these “middle peasants” – Evgeny Semenenko, Dmitry Aliev, Makar Ignatov, Mark Kondratyuk, Alexander Samarin or Andrey Mozalev – will be more stable in St. Petersburg.
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