Views without Russia - Newspaper Kommersant No. 23 (7468) dated 02/08/2023

Views without Russia - Newspaper Kommersant No. 23 (7468) dated 02/08/2023


The Biathlon World Championships, which opens today in Oberhof, Germany, is one of the many top competitions of the winter season, which will be held without the participation of Russian athletes suspended from them due to international sanctions. Kommersant tells what happens in their absence in biathlon, as well as in two other key Olympic sports for Russia - cross-country skiing and figure skating.

Biathlon

In the Biathlon World Cup, which was left without Russian and Belarusian athletes, rather curious things were happening before the championship in Oberhof. Their essence in men's and women's competitions was completely different.

In men, the usual Norwegian leadership suddenly turned into the rarest for this species, almost absolute hegemony. The Norwegians won all four relay races held in the World Cup, and out of 14 personal races, they did not win only one - which opened the season at the end of November in the Finnish Kontiolahti "individual", in which the Swede Martin Ponsiluoma achieved success. However, in four of these races, they took all the places on the podium.

And inside, perhaps, this dominance hid another, already personal. Johannes Boe, four-time champion of the Beijing Olympics held a year ago, has 11 wins. Sometimes he seems almost invulnerable. So Boe is confidently leading the overall World Cup standings, ahead of Sturla Holma Legrade and Vetle Sjöstad Christiansen. And the closest foreign pursuer, the Frenchman Quentin Fillon-Maillet, who in 2022 seemed almost equal to the Norwegian frontman, has more than two times less points than Johannes Boe.

But for women, the “Norwegian component” unexpectedly turned out to be minimal due to health problems in the two best biathletes in Norway. Tiril Eckhoff was not able to recover at all for the World Cup and risks missing the entire season, and Marte Olsbu-Røiseland returned to action in the course of it, but keeps quite modestly.

The victories at the stages of the World Cup were shared by a cohort of well-known athletes - Swedes Elvira and Hanna Oeberg, Italians Lisa Vittozzi and Dorothea Wierer, German Denise Hermann, Austrian Lisa Teresa Hauser. And more stable than the rest was the Frenchwoman Julie Simon, who leads the overall standings.

And with new names, women are also doing much better than men, who have only the old guard in sight. For example, Anamaria Lampich has already been recognized as the opening of the season. Even last season, the Slovenian was an excellent sprint skier. She has three world championship medals to her credit. But, in fact, at the peak of her career, the 27-year-old Lampich, surprising everyone, decided to change her look and quickly adapted to the new one. She had not yet reached the podium, but she was already next to him. In January, in Antholz, Italy, Lampic closed the top five, and the numbers tell a good story about her superiority in speed over the elite: the Slovenian, with two misses, was only 18 seconds behind the clear-shooting winner Wierer.

Ski race

For skiers, the World Championship will take place at the end of February in Slovenian Planica, and at the last stages of the World Cup, by and large, no really interesting events happened. The three-time champion of the Beijing Olympics Alexander Bolshunov does not take part in the men's competitions, and Johannes Klebo, the opponent of the suspended Russian in the struggle for the status of the king of modern skiing, feels extremely comfortable without him. The Norwegian reigns in the sprint, sometimes shoots in distance races and won the prestigious Tour de Ski series for the third time. In the overall standings, he is almost two hundred points ahead of compatriot Paul Golberg. And the company of the same seasoned as Klebo and Golberg, the Norwegians, in which Hans Christer Holunn, Didrik Tönset and Simen Hegstad Kruger, is diluted in the upper part of the classification only by Italian Federico Pellegrini, also a veteran. Young people have not yet been able to break into the elite.

Skiers, like biathletes, have a much more shaky hierarchy. After the Olympic season, the great Norwegian Teresa Johaug ended her career, and her role remains vacant. The highest line of the cup standings belongs to compatriot Johaug Tiril Veng. But not to say that she stands out against the background of her opponents - American Jessie Diggins, Finnish Kerttu Niskanen, Swedish Frida Karlsson. All these are athletes, with whom the strongest of the Russians missing the draw - Natalya Nepryaeva, Yulia Stupak - coped not so rarely.

Figure skating

There is, however, a winter sport that has suffered even more than cross-country skiing due to the suspension of Russian athletes. We are talking, of course, about figure skating, in any case, about two trump domestic disciplines - women's singles and pair skating.

Here, simple numbers illustrate the picture very well. Here are last year's Olympic greenhouse competitions. In Beijing, the gold in them went to the Chinese Xu Wenjing and Han Cong who left the sport. Three Russian couples were not far behind them - Evgenia Tarasova with Vladimir Morozov, Anastasia Mishina with Alexander Gallyamov and Alexandra Boykova with Dmitry Kozlovsky. The main so far - before the March World Cup in Japan - the international competition of the current season was the December Grand Prix final in Turin. It was dominated by the Japanese Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara with a total of 214.56 points, six less than the Beijing sum of Boikova and Kozlovsky who flew past the medals, two and a half dozen less than the sum of Tarasova and Morozov who took silver. At the same time, the Japanese are by no means a young duet. The partner, for example, is already 30. Moreover, only the Americans Alexa Knierim and Brandon Fraser found themselves next to them. The rest of the couples did not reach the 200 mark.

The contrast with the previous season is quite striking in the singles competitions, in which the Russians literally reigned in recent years. In Beijing, Anna Shcherbakova won the gold award, Alexandra Trusova won the silver. Mai Mihara of Japan won the Grand Prix final in Turin. Her total score - 208.17 - was so modest that at the Olympics she would not have got into the top six with her. And in comparison with the results of Shcherbakova and Trusova (both received for 250 points), her performance looks simply ridiculous. And an important nuance. It does not seem at all as if, while Russian athletes are in isolation, someone picked up the revolution initiated by them and began to master quadruple jumps not for one-time, but for systematic use.

In this sense, in the post-Olympic season, in principle, only men's single skating stands out, which seemed to be waiting for a lull due to the loss of two of the brightest stars - the Japanese Yuzuru Hanyu and the American Nathan Chen, who, however, is still going to return to the ice. It stands out thanks to Ilya Malinin. This 18-year-old American skater was the first in history to perform a quadruple axel in official tournaments and collected such a set of multi-turn jumps that even their king Chen did not have. True, mistakes still prevent him from surpassing Japanese competitors, primarily Shomu Uno.

Alexey Dospekhov



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