The first stage of the Russian Grand Prix series in figure skating took place in Ufa

The domestic season in figure skating opened with a stage of the Grand Prix series in Ufa, which did not create a sensation. In all three disciplines in his program, the favorites won: in dance – Elizaveta Khudaiberdieva and Egor Bazin, in men – Evgeny Semenenko, and in women – one of the stars of coach Eteri Tutberidze, Adelia Petrosyan, who, however, demonstrated far from the best free skate.

The Ufa stage kicked off the Russian Grand Prix series, which, under the conditions of sanctions that have not yet been lifted, remains the main competition for domestic figure skaters. And from the point of view of intrigue, her first tournament turned out to be rather bland. In any case, some extraordinary takeoffs or crashes took place on it.

In the dancer competition, for example, Elizaveta Khudaiberdieva and Yegor Bazin, who were leaders in the genre last year, won. But their level of resistance in Ufa turned out to be, strictly speaking, low. The main rivals of Khudayberdieva and Bazin are the famous duo of Alexandra Stepanova and Ivan Bukin, multiple winners of top tournaments who returned to the ice after a break in their careers. But they did not perform at this stage.

Among the men, the already quite experienced Evgeniy Semenenko excelled. And his excellent free skate performance, for which he received 191.63 points, hinted that, had the Russian team not been suspended, it would have had hope of a breakthrough on the international stage in a discipline in which its successes in recent years have been much greater. more modest than the other three. Semenenko appears to be in great shape at the beginning of the season.

In women’s single skating, another talented student of coach Eteri Tutberidze took the top line with amazing content from a technical point of view.

True, the impression of the performance of 16-year-old Adelia Petrosyan was blurred by two falls in the free program and the fact that, as in the case of Khudaiberdieva and Bazin, Petrosyan’s potentially most dangerous competitors were not in Ufa. The heroes of the 2022 Beijing Olympics – its champion Anna Shcherbakova and silver medalist Alexandra Trusova – are skipping the current season. But Sofya Akatieva, Elizaveta Tuktamysheva, Veronika Zhilina, and Kamila Valieva remain.

The Russian Grand Prix calendar, which will crown the March final in Sochi, includes five more stages: in Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kazan, Samara and Moscow. Next year, in Omsk, greenhouses will compete for the first time in the season. And it will be a competitive debut for the new duet of the best singles skater of the end of the last decade, Alena Kostornaya, who changed discipline after a series of failures, and Georgy Kunitsa.

Alexey Dospehov