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The World Figure Skating Championships continued on Thursday with a short program in men's singles and a free program for sports couples. And along with this, our virtual championship with the participation of Russian skaters, who were suspended from a trip to Japan by the International Skating Union.
Good news — today we are celebrating the Russian virtual pedestal. The bad ones are the Russian couple, performing under the flag of Hungary, once again robbed by the judges, not allowing her to rise to the real podium.
- Recall that we compare the real performances of the participants in the World Championship in Saitama with the performances in the Russian Grand Prix Final in St. Petersburg. This is the closest domestic tournament with a serious prize fund in terms of dates — that is, on March 4-5, all the strongest skaters in Russia experienced enough stress, and the judges experienced enough responsibility to be able to draw parallels.
Of course, all the conventions of such analogies are obvious, but it is no less obvious that the world pair skating continues to be, as Kostya from Pokrovsky Gates said, in a big debt. How can progress be measured in sports? Of course, the growth of the athlete's results, the success of his attempts to surpass himself.
So, at the World Championships, if anyone showed this growth, then all the same Hungarians, whom we wrote about in the previous article, and after the European Championships — Maria Pavlova and Alexei Svyatchenko. At the end of January in Espoo, for two clean skates, the figure skaters training in Sochi were given so few points that they remained fifth behind those who could barely move their legs. “For me, Maria and Alexei are champions in skating,” said Fedor Klimov, the winner of the gold and silver of the 2014 Olympics, who trains this duet with Dmitry Savin.
Needless to say, if the strongest Russian representatives competed at this World Championship in pair skating, then even if the judges completely changed their conscience, they still could not leave them out of the top three. Because the class is heaven and earth. In the year that has passed since their dismissal, the Russians have begun to learn new complex elements, some of them are already being added to the programs, they are not afraid to experiment, and absolutely nothing has changed in world pair skating — it's still the same swamp.
Fresh memories of the great performances of Alexandra Boikova/Dmitry Kozlovsky and Anastasia Mishina/Alexander Gallyamov in the Russian Grand Prix Final. Now everyone would enjoy this mega-battle, and not a parade of jambs from the winners of the World Cup. And you see, even Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov, having received additional motivation, would have turned the duel into a fight of three. But even with the performance that the silver medalists of the 2022 Olympics showed in St. Petersburg, they would have made the podium in Saitama Russian. sometimes «plus»
In the second part of Thursday's program at the World Championships, men performed short programs. In this discipline, if there were no suspension, Russia would most likely be represented by the winners of the national championship in Krasnoyarsk — Evgeny Semenenko, Petr Gumennik and Alexander Samarin. Yes, perhaps, before the World Cup, they would arrange an additional roll between Samarin, who took third place in the Russian championship, and Mark Kondratyuk, the winner of the 2022 Olympic team tournament, who missed this tournament. But we will assume that the selection was made solely on the basis of sports.
Until recently, Russian men's single skating was in as much debt as the world's doubles. But recently, first of all, thanks to intense competition, the level of our guys has noticeably increased. They no longer hesitate to go for three or even four quadruple jumps in a free program. And two quads in a short is practically the norm for those who fight for the highest places.But stability is still a problem. And in this, the Russians are still inferior to the strongest foreign skaters. So, in the Final of the Russian Grand Prix in St. Petersburg, only Gumennik succeeded in the short program of our trio — he cleanly made a cascade of a quadruple salchow and a triple sheepskin coat, a triple axel, but made a small blot on the quadruple loop. But it still sounds great!
And thanks to this set, Peter would be in the top three with a score of 99.69, second only to the Japanese Sema Uno, who scored 104.63 today, and the American Ilya Malinin (100.38). Everything is on point — they also have two quads in the short program, but they are executed cleanly. Close to 100 points came Korean Cha Jung Hwan and Canadian Keegan Messing, and only one quadruple was enough for them. Well, the same method.
Semenenko in St. Petersburg also made a microscopic mistake on one of his two quads, but, unfortunately, he missed the triple axel. Therefore, with such a performance, he would be in the sixth or seventh place today. Samarin, with the same two blunders that he made in the Russian Grand Prix Final in the short program, would have closed the first dozen participants in the World Championship. However, unpredictability happens not only with a minus sign, but also with a plus sign. And so let's wait — how the men in Saitama will perform with a free program and see if our guys will compete with them in virtual competition.