Figure skaters will start without a leader – Newspaper Kommersant No. 169 (7370) of 09/14/2022
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The best figure skater in the world Anna Shcherbakova risks missing a significant part of the next season. On Tuesday, it became known that the athlete, who underwent knee surgery in Germany in August, would not have time to recover for the test skates of the national team. They will be held at the end of September at the Megasport Arena in Moscow.
This means that Shcherbakova, most likely, will not perform at the competitions that follow them and are extremely tight on the calendar. This season, the International Skating Union (ISU) suspended domestic athletes from international tournaments, so the Russian Figure Skating Federation organized their own series of tournaments for them – the Russian Grand Prix. It, like the international Grand Prix series, includes six stages with a final. They will be hosted by several Russian cities from October to November – Moscow, Perm, Kazan, Samara and Sochi.
The disappearance of Anna Shcherbakova from the list of participants is an extremely significant loss, because over the past two seasons she has become the absolute leader of the women’s team. The 18-year-old figure skater won the national championship three times in a row, despite the exorbitant level of competition. In the spring of 2021, Shcherbakova added to her collection a victory at the World Championships in Stockholm, and in February 2022, the gold of the Beijing Olympics. On it, she managed to get ahead of not only all foreign rivals, but also two famous compatriots – Alexandra Trusova and Kamila Valieva.
It seems that Shcherbakova is far from the only Russian figure skater who will miss at least the initial segment of this season. Earlier it became known that at the very end of August, the 2019 European champion Alena Kostornaya underwent hip surgery, and already in September, one of the stars of the group of coach Eteri Tutberidze, Maya Khromykh, earned a hand injury. Both of them, it seems, will not appear at the test skates.
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