These days there is a tournament traditionally opening the season in Russian figure skating — the championship of Moscow. For the general public, accustomed to watching only the World Championships, the names of the juniors who fight for awards in the Medvedkovo Ice Palace are hardly known. But since the world championships, it seems, are not expected in the near future, it is necessary to get acquainted with the youth — especially the dramas of the Olympic scale, as the first results showed, and there is enough here.
In previous years, the Moscow championship was held at the Megasport Sports Palace — moreover, it happened not only on the training arena, but also on the main ice. And this tournament opened not only the season, but also future stars. It is curious, for example, to look at a mini-report from the 2010 Moscow Championship and remember that the victory in pair skating was then won by future spouses and two-time Olympic champions Tatyana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov, who had just joined hands, and in women's singles by 12-year-old at that time, Yulia Lipnitskaya, who also had to thunder in three and a half years at the Games in Sochi.
However, now there are no adult competitions at the Moscow Championship — young people compete for medals in the categories of candidates for the master and the first category. That does not cancel the highest technical level of the participants. So, in the protocol of the free program of the girls' competitions under the CMS program, there are 11 quadruple jumps of varying degrees of success! And this despite the fact that the medalists are 12-13 years old.
Recently, a lot has been said about the fact that athletes in Russia are losing motivation due to the lack of international tournaments. It is safe to say that this thesis definitely does not apply to figure skating. More precisely, so — the stars who have already known the taste of big world victories, of course, have doubts about whether they should continue a career that involves exhausting training. It's clear. Despite the fact that the Russian Figure Skating Federation brilliantly and, most importantly, quickly worked with import substitution, providing solid prize money at domestic tournaments and new exciting formats, the champions will still earn more in the show, and without much effort.
But in order to break into these stars, juniors try their best — and this process often happens just as violently as the competitions of skilled adults, and with no less shocks. Those who follow tournaments, broadcasts from which do not go further than YouTube, will not let you lie. And the current championship of Moscow, it seems, was no exception.
In the KMS girls competition everything started on Monday with a short program. Half a thousand comments, kosteryashchie refereeing what the world is worth, on a popular Internet resource — this is a level! The main complaint is Margarita Bazylyuk, the new star of the Eteri Tutberidze group, the only one who went for a triple axel and coped with it, received the same marks as Alena Prineva from CSKA with a double axel and a fall on a cascade of triple flip and toe loop. The audience was no less shocked by the fact that Bazylyuk with the aforementioned trixel was only in ninth place in the intermediate protocol. The fact that Prineva was in tenth was not so surprising — rather, it was not very clear why she was not punished for rolling after the end of the music.
, 12-year-old Margarita performed three quadruples - two sheepskin coats and a salchow. Prineva did not do quads at that tournament, but she prepared a quad lutz for the opening of this season. About the fact that the leading skaters in such tender years now do all the triples, we don’t even mention it - it goes without saying.But the same high-profile event on the next day of the girls' rivalry, like those 11 quads for the whole company, was the referee's error in calculating the points of the free program. They have already awarded the gold medal to the winner of the competition, Milana Lebedeva, who, leading after the first day, managed to keep the advantage. Silver has already been awarded to Prineva, who made a clean combination of a quadruple lutz-triple sheepskin coat. Bazylyuk has already received bronze, having performed two quadruple jumps out of three without error. The tears of the figure skaters who remained outside the podium have already dried up - for example, Evgeni Plushenko's student Maria Mazur, who was very worried about her unsuccessful performance in the free program, which did not allow her to stay in the top three, where she was the day before.
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Be that as it may, after deducting the points that Prineva was awarded for the lutz repeated not according to the rules, she must transfer the silver to Bazylyuk. As of Tuesday evening, the organizers had not yet made a decision on this, but the chief judge of the competition, Alexander Chestnykh, confirmed that the issue was being resolved, and an official announcement would follow the next day. Indeed, it is not so obvious. According to the rules, protests are accepted only for mathematical errors, and a technical miscalculation can be attributed to a data entry error. However, logically, the results should still be reviewed. But regardless of whether this happens or not, we can already say for sure — a new chapter in the rivalry between the two schools — Khrustalny and CSKA has been opened. And it will be no less fundamental than all the previous ones, and just as rich and super-complex elements, and amazing performances. I would like, of course, a little less scandal — but then figure skating will cease to be figure skating, right?