Rest of the world championship – Newspaper Kommersant No. 48 (7493) dated 03/22/2023

Today in Japanese Saitama the World Figure Skating Championship starts, which, due to the absence of the Russian national team, can result in the triumph of its hosts. They claim three gold at once.

In the Japanese world championship, if you try, you can still find a “Russian component”. For example, in the rank of European champion, Anastasia Gubanova, who represented Russia, but has been skating for Georgia for a couple of years now, will perform in juniors, since she did not have a place in the national team of her native country. And in the mentor of the Italian Daniel Grassl, everyone who is interested in figure skating can easily recognize Eteri Tutberidze, the coach, through whose efforts the domestic single skaters made such a breakthrough that, perhaps, the whole history of the species did not know. But this component, of course, is too ephemeral to seriously pay attention to it. And so the World Cup in Saitama, perhaps the main victim due to the removal of Russia among the top tournaments of the closing winter season. All four disciplines suffer, two – sports couples and women’s single skating – so that anyone who calls the competitions in them inferior does not exactly run the risk of running into a reproach for trying to exaggerate the scale of the trouble. The content and ratings of foreign leaders in them this season are such that one of them could break through to the podium (and then obviously not to its top step) only under a fantastically successful combination of circumstances. No new heroes have appeared, and ahead of us is a wall of Russians pushed aside by sanctions with their much more advanced technical arsenal.

The intrigue in this championship is easy to detect. Japan is one of the absolute centers of world figure skating, if we measure “centrality” by popularity. Skaters are loved in this country. But she herself never aspired to the status of a superpower, confidently – in the pre-sanctions Russian style – winning in the team championship standings, she did not aim. There were not enough stars and strong genres. The specifics of this season gave Japan the opportunity to take a swing at him.

A unique case, but she seriously claims gold in three disciplines. The exceptions are the dances, in which he is likely to be played by Canadian (Piper Gilles with Paul Poirier) and American (Madison Chalk with Evan Bates) duets. In all the rest, the Japanese are the favorites.

In men, the Japanese is a 100% favorite. Shoma Uno has already mastered the role of a frontman in the Olympic cycle that has begun, and the real threat to him in Saitama comes, perhaps, only from the American Ilya Malinin. Malinin this season was the first to conquer the quadruple axel, and the complexity of his programs is comparable to the complexity of Uno’s programs. The question is whether the American will be able to avoid mistakes that, due to lack of experience, have so far constantly hindered him in top tournaments.

In women’s single skating, Kaori Sakamoto will perform as the reigning world champion in Saitama: she has everything in perfect order with experience. True, Sakamoto failed the December Grand Prix final in Turin, but her compatriot Mai Mihara backed her up on it. Another thing is that in terms of the maximum amount of points that could be scored in the season, this tandem is not too far behind a whole group of figure skaters, led by the Belgian Luna Hendrix.

Finally, gold shines in Japan in pair skating. At least if we take the assessments of recent months, next to Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara, of all the participants in the championship, only the Americans Alexa Knierim and Brandon Fraser. Actually, a year ago, at the championship in Montpellier, these couples fought for gold. Then Knirim and Frezeyr were higher up. Fresh competitions hint that the alignment is likely to be different in Saitama.

Alexey Dospekhov