16-year-old Adelia Petrosyan won the Russian figure skating championship

The Russian Figure Skating Championships in Chelyabinsk ended with a great confrontation between women’s singles. In it, the most recognizable Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva stubbornly tried to return the gold of the national championship (her last victory was canceled due to a doping history), but in the end she finished only third. She lost to Sofya Muravyova, who won silver, who brought her mentor Evgeni Plushenko the first serious award in his coaching career, and to her group partner Eteri Tutberidze, the smallest figure skater Adelia Petrosyan.

The last seasons in domestic women’s single skating could not help but bring some melancholy to those who have been closely following the sport for a long time. After the “quad revolution,” when figure skaters young and old began to study quadruple jumps and took the complexity to a fundamentally different level, there was a noticeable rollback in the genre. Multi-quad player Alexandra Trusova, who started this revolution, and Anna Shcherbakova, who performed the most expensive quadruple jumps, left the sport after the Beijing Olympics, Kamila Valieva and Maya Khromykh, who had matured, lost their ultra-si elements, and last year’s Russian champion of quads, Sofia Akatieva, decided to skip the season due to injury. Now a high concentration of quadruple jumps is preserved only among juniors. But women don’t have such fireworks of quads; a completely opposite trend has emerged there – to rely on the pure execution of triples.

Meanwhile, the title of Russian champion in Chelyabinsk was won by that skater who is still trying to integrate quadruple elements into her program. We are talking about the new prima of Eteri Tutberidze’s group, 16-year-old Adelia Petrosyan, who scored a total of 246.53 points for the short and free programs.

This season, Adelia was the only athlete competing at the adult level who managed to master quadruple jumps at the Grand Prix stages.

Adelia Petrosyan included three such elements in her free program at the national championship. And although the athlete did not complete the quad flip, as a result of which she collapsed on the ice, the other two jumps – a solo toe loop and a toe loop in a cascade – turned out perfectly for her.

The production itself, however, still raises a number of questions. Still, the lyrical composition “February” by Leonid Levashkevich does not want to “sit” on Adelia Petrosyan: it does not always fall into musical accents and cannot boast of conscious, thoughtful skating. The athlete is still much better at simpler and more understandable images – as, for example, in this season’s short program to a Michael Jackson medley.

The Russian Championship in Chelyabinsk was successful not only for the group of Eteri Tutberidze, whose student took the eighth gold of the national championship in a row (before this, her athletes also won the tournament: Anna Shcherbakova – three times, Evgenia Medvedeva – twice, Alina Zagitova, Alexandra Trusova and Sofia Akatieva – each once), but also for coach Evgeni Plushenko.

The silver medal of the national championship went to his ward, 17-year-old Sofya Muravyova (239.40). She, being one of the best skaters of our time, has been considered a contender for medals for several years, but jump failures at the last two national championships – in 2021 and 2022 – threw her off the podium.

Now the main star of two-time Olympic champion Evgeni Plushenko has finally managed to break into the top three. Although she cannot do quadruple jumps, she can handle another, no less valuable element – the three-and-a-half-turn axel. It also belongs to the ultra-si class of jumps, but, unlike quads, it can be performed in both a short and free program.

Sofya Muravyova also received deservedly high marks for her components – all nines and above. The athlete in a soft purple dress with white sleeves, although she was a little cautious, performed her routine with inspiration, ease and tenderness.

Meanwhile, ease was not enough for the main heroine of Russian figure skating, the champion of the Beijing Olympics in the team Kamila Valieva (237.99), who finished only third. After the standard performance of the short program, 17-year-old Valieva was confidently in the lead, and it seemed that if she had no mistakes, even Petrosyan, armed with quads, would not be able to impose competition.

However, these mistakes – or rather one, falling from a quadruple sheepskin coat – did occur. After this failure, the athlete’s mood disappeared, and she herself seemed to want to get even with the program as soon as possible. The matured Kamila Valieva consistently lacks strength for the second half: she gets stuck in her steps, spins slowly in her spins and unloads the jumping part to the maximum – in the final, instead of a triple Lutz, she only did a sheepskin coat. The athlete herself admitted after the skates that she is now experiencing a lot of difficulties. “This is both height and weight. It happens that the weight does not interfere much, but at the moment it was putting pressure on me,” noted Kamila Valieva. But she emphasized that she intends to continue performing.

The outcome in the competition among sports pairs was no less dramatic. There, for the first time since the beginning of the season, titans of the doubles genre collided – 2021 world champions and Beijing Olympics bronze medalists Anastasia Mishina with Alexander Gallyamov, as well as 2022 European champions Alexandra Boykova with Dmitry Kozlovsky.

The winner in this battle was the couple who did not make a single, even the smallest, misfire during the two days of competition. Anastasia Mishina and Alexander Gallyamov received points higher than world records for their absolutely impeccable performances. In the free program, they surpassed their own score at the 2022 European Championships (161.84 against 157.46), and in total they scored more than the record of Sui Wenjing and Han Cong at the Beijing Olympics (244.85 against 239.88).

Alexandra Boykova made a small mistake on the exit from the solo triple toe loop and did not look very convincing on the exit from the ejections, but we must admit: even if these nuances did not exist, they are inferior in class to their principal rivals as of today.

The debut of Alena Kostornaya, who this season switched to pair skating and now performs with her husband Georgy Kunitsa, was unsuccessful – the duo failed in the short program and overall took ninth place out of ten possible.

Ekaterina Remizova