Valieva in the Russian Grand Prix Final lost to Petrosyan and won against Tuktamysheva

Axel on treason

Women’s single is always an intrigue. This time Kamila Valieva’s silver, Elizaveta Tuktamysheva’s bronze and Sonya Akat’eva’s wooden medal were divided not even by hundredths. Camila’s 241.76 points versus Lisa’s 241.61 and Sony’s 241.09. It’s downright cruel.

… Suddenly I remembered: the amazing Liza Tuktamysheva would not have been Tuktik, having lost her humor. At one of the internal championships, she once talked about the fact that negative comments often become funny for her. She knows that fans sometimes call her style of skating “ai-nane”, but she even jokes like that in her circle. And also – she liked the expression “dinosaur handles.” So someone called the way she folds her hands just before the axel. “I never thought about it, but I really have them very relaxed, and it looks like the legs of a tyrannosaurus rex.”

Relaxation is not about the axel, of course. The only ultra-c element allowed in the women’s short program, he amazingly submitted to Adelia Petrosyan. But the second starting number was not a gift. But the program “Voila” brought Adelia to the first place unconditionally. And she literally sang a duet with a French singer. “I sing and get used to the image, it helps me.”

Kamila Valieva in the short program fell from the triple axel. If you hadn’t fallen, would you have been in front of an arbitrary not third? Why was this axel given to her? I would do without the insidious ultra-si, who always lives according to his competitive laws. There – Sonya Muravyova, it would seem, has already mastered it to perfection, how many times she has already demonstrated it, but – she also blundered in the short program in the Grand Prix final. True, she beautifully rehabilitated herself in the free program.

As well as the champion of Russia Sonya Akatieva, who immediately performed two triple axels and two quadruple jumps (in the second half of the program, the quadruple turned out with an error). Sonya was catching up with herself, just because of the torn axel, she ended up in fifth place in front of the free program.

This is about him, his main trump card, Alena Kostornaya once said in an interview with MK: “This axel is such an axel! Literally, you don’t jump for a couple of weeks and everything is new – you fly like a kamikaze. It is necessary to catch the feeling from which you jump. And if you lose it, then … And it’s not like my mother, for example, says to me: you won’t forget how to ride a bicycle, will you? You have learned the bike for life. And with the axel – somewhere in Krasnoyarsk someone sneezes wrong and everything will go awry for you. It’s totally personal.”

This personal becomes public and decisive at the start. And, it would seem, the very perfection in his performance, Elizaveta Tuktamysheva casually admitted after the short program: what can I say, the axel turned out to be good. And in response to the words of Alexei Mishin transmitted to her that Lisa gave the best jump in her life in the final, she suddenly compared it with what happened in Moscow three years ago, at the 2020 Grand Prix. Then, too, they say, it was good.

And in three years, how much did Liza bounce? This is all about the insidiousness of the jump, which, as Tuktamysheva once said, having lost the axel and returning it before the 2015 World Cup (where she won), requires a lot of strength and a lot of courage.

In the free program of the Grand Prix finals, Lisa again went for two axels, one still let her down a little. But Liza was nice and gentle, like the whole season. She performed on home ice. And all emotions were in the skate.

Do not jump, but how else?

… So, why didn’t Kamila Valieva give up the Axel in the short program? This is sport at its best, wrestling. Camila returns all the season lost after the Olympic Games. Former lightness, enchanting form, which did not allow rivals to approach. It was the “butterfly” on the axel in the short program of the Russian Championship that may have cost Kamila gold. If I had made not even three, but at least two turns in Krasnoyarsk, there would have been points, not zero. Could after all go down this path in the final for the title?

It’s hard to imagine how the skater performs under such massive pressure due to the ongoing doping case. Camila is not one of those people who closes the world from herself. He sees everything, he reads everything. And WADA’s thirst to punish her, and ruthless comments blaming what happened, and an indistinct prospect: does Camila have a future on the ice at all – could break even the most persistent. And Valieva, the only one of the three figure skaters who have passed the Olympic Games, is on the ice.

And to the question about the axel, Camila answered with surprise: “Do not jump? How else?” And she says: it’s not like that, but quite the opposite – if she didn’t make jumps that didn’t work out, that would be strange. And the goal in the Grand Prix finals was exactly this: to jump the axel, during the execution of which I made a “butterfly” at the last start. “I see no reason not to do it. On the contrary, it’s a very good workout.”

It was the last start of the most difficult season for her. Camila performed two quadruple sheepskin coats on the Yubileiny ice, fell from a triple lutz, supported the program and the audience. I gave all my strength. I got on my knees. And then she said: “I went into decline this season, but this does not mean that it will continue. You can’t go up all the time, but it spurs you on to keep going.”

And Adelia Petrosyan went for the most difficult program: she performed a quadruple flip (for the first time!), a quadruple toe loop in a cascade, with a mistake on landing a solo quadruple toe loop, nevertheless fell on this axel that exhausted our nerves, but did not give up. Voila! That’s it! The history of the Grand Prix finals ended with the victory of the fearless skater.

And about the weather…

And about the weather in the ice figure skating house. Unstable. Figure skating was, is and will be a sport in which the same skate can cause opposite sensations. From which point to look – in the direct (angle is important for assessing the element) and figuratively.

Our ability to see intrigue, even crave it at times, where it does not exist, cannot be strangled or killed. And it was, is and will be. We do not trust the judges and their revisions of positions during the execution of the elements. We do not believe in protocols in which everything can be calculated if necessary. We rely on the eyes and follow the emotions.

Fans, maybe forgivable. But, if, for example, the coach has questions for the judges, then they should be asked them instead of throwing into the masses the painful topic of changing citizenship by young athletes due to “wrong” assessments.

There is also a coaching council, who, if not him, should analyze the conflict, studying the conclusions made by the judges in hot pursuit. And do not appeal to the code of ethics. If judicial violations are revealed, then it is not the code that should work at all.

And no one canceled creativity in work. In the judiciary – including. And why would the judges not go to the people, for example, during a break in the competition? And right in the hall on the big screen to show what this or that element looks like on their camera, for which they reduced the cost and received shouts of “shame” from the stands? Let the stands and all the coaches watch.

Another painfully rumbling topic at the Grand Prix finals: the words of Tatiana Tarasova that the channel broadcasting figure skating removed her from broadcasting because of the support of Evgeni Plushenko in his criticism of the judges. Whether this is so, in the sense that this reason worked, is a question to which we will once again not know the answer. But it is absolutely certain that any monopoly on rights is fraught with conflicts. Whoever has dinner with a girl dances her.