Selective Series – Newspaper Kommersant No. 193 (7155) of 10/22/2021

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The Skate America tournament, which will take place this weekend in Las Vegas, will traditionally open the Figure Skating Grand Prix series. All the best athletes to date will compete within its framework, including contenders for the medals of the 2022 Winter Olympics. Based on the results of this particular series, it will become clear what are the chances of Russian figure skaters for a triumph in Beijing.

The first major and significant figure skating tournament in the current – Olympic – season will be the stage of the traditional series of the Skate America Grand Prix, which will be held this weekend. The series of six stages will continue in Canada, Italy, Japan, France and Russia, and will end with a final in which six selected participants from each event will perform on December 9-12 in Osaka, Japan.

In the Olympic season, the Russian figure skating team, which won three gold medals at the last world championship, and then became the best at the team championship for the first time, enters, at first glance, in the status of an undisputed leader. She and at the stages of the traditional Grand Prix series naturally received the largest number of licenses – for 35 representatives.

Nevertheless, there is some kind of intrigue associated with each sport, and it is extremely pleasant, perhaps only in the context of women’s single skating. It is in Russia – hardly anyone can argue with this – it has never been so strong as it is now. There are three times more domestic figure skaters who can go to the Beijing Olympics and claim the podium there than there are Olympic quotas. Of these, six athletes train under the guidance of one coach – Eteri Tutberidze, who prepared Yulia Lipnitskaya, Evgenia Medvedeva, Alina Zagitova for the Olympic Games.

All her athletes of the new generation are even more powerful than the athletes of the previous one. Each of them – Anna Shcherbakova, Alexandra Trusova, Alena Kostornaya, Kamila Valieva, Maya Khromykh and Daria Usacheva – is armed with ultra-si jumping elements (they are still only slowly sneaking up on the international arena), spins and tracks of the highest difficulty level. We should not forget about Elizaveta Tuktamysheva, who can still impose the struggle on younger rivals.

True, it will be extremely difficult for her, because the tendency emerging in women’s single skating is approximately clear. Yesterday’s juniors – 15-year-old girls with greater endurance and optimal conditions for multi-turn jumps – will crowd out the more “adults”, 17-year-olds. So, Kamila Valieva already this season managed to set two world records in the number of points at the Finlandia Trophy and easily outstripped Kostornaya and Tuktamysheva there. A week later, Maya Khromykh overtook the reigning world champion and three-time Russian champion Shcherbakova at the Budapest Trophy with two quad sheepskin coats.

Ice dancing layouts seem much less pleasant. All three domestic duos, which were considered by many as participants in the Beijing Olympics, have problems. Victoria Sinitsyna and Nikita Katsalapov, who became world champions in Stockholm in the spring, withdrew from the Russian Cup in Yoshkar-Ola a week ago due to the fact that their partner tore their backs before the free program. Now the couple is preparing for the Japanese stage, but, as Katsalapov said, so far “in a light mode.” The second duet of the national team – Alexandra Stepanova and Ivan Bukin – this season has not yet been seen on the competitive ice: the couple missed the test skates due to the partner’s illness, then the duet also withdrew from the Finlandia Trophy due to insufficient readiness. Tiffany Zagorski and Jonathan Gureiro also started the season by skipping starts. They will not perform at the American stage of the Grand Prix due to Zagorski’s illness, which, according to coach Svetlana Alekseeva, is in the infectious diseases hospital. Meanwhile, the rivals – the French Gabriela Papadakis and Guillaume Sizeron – have already managed to test the programs and get marks close to their best result for them.

The situation in sports couples is not as simple as it might seem at first glance. The Russian national team has three pairs that have firmly entrenched themselves in the elite: world champions Anastasia Mishina and Alexander Gallyamov, European champions in 2020 Alexandra Boykova and Dmitry Kozlovsky, as well as already considered veterans of the national team Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov. The latter, who managed to ride past the podium at the world championship in March, decided to urgently change something and joined Eteri Tutberidze’s group during the off-season. All these couples will have to fight with the Chinese Sui Wenjing and Han Tsun, who at the last Pyeongchang Olympics stopped one step away from gold and at the Beijing Olympics, the home ones again intend to storm the highest step of the podium. They have already managed to present their programs at the Asia Open, where they defeated all their rivals by a giant margin, and then Sui Wenjing and Han Tsun, according to their statements, only plan to get more complicated.

If these three genres promise Russia a scattering of medals at the Grand Prix stages and subsequent competitions, then with one more – men’s – the national team traditionally has serious problems. Although men now also have three Olympic licenses, those who can compete for medals in Beijing are not.

Mikhail Kolyada is still the nominal leader of the team, but he never managed to stabilize the jumping component of the programs. The other members of the national team – Dmitry Aliev, Alexander Samarin, Evgeny Semenenko – still have problems with stability.

Ekaterina Remizova

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