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Post by Admin on Apr 10, 2020 22:21:11 GMT
Ice dance 2019-20 was truly Madison Chock and Evan Bates’ season. The couple, who moved to Montreal to train under Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon last season, created a mesmerizing “Egyptian Snake Dance” program, won a silver medal at the Grand Prix Final and defeated longtime rivals Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue to take their second U.S. title, some five years after they first won the crown. Two weeks later, they won a second straight Four Continents title, defeating Hubbell and Donohue and Canadian champions Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier. With Papadakis and Cizeron showing some cracks in their armor — the French duo placed second at the European Championships, their first loss since the 2018 Olympics — a world title seemed to be within Chock and Bates’ grasp. “This has been the best season of our careers, no doubt about that, and a big part of that is our program [“Egyptian Snake Dance”] and the way we performed it,” Bates said. “Also just the improvements we made to our skating, generally, since moving to Montreal have started to be recognized and rewarded.” The French, who train alongside Chock and Bates, Hubbell and Donohue and many other teams in Montreal, may be glad to bid the 2019-20 season farewell. Their programs, especially their free dance to a spoken word poem, were not nearly as praised as their past efforts. After Europeans, a stressed Papadakis spoke to reporters about her mental fatigue, and the couple took a two-week break from training. Now, they have a long off-season to recoup and plan new programs. Hubbell and Donohue, too, had a few ups-and-downs. The skaters and their coaches, Lauzon, Dubreuil and Romain Haguenauer, re-worked music edits and sections of choreography in their Star is Born free dance, hoping for a peak performance in Montreal and a third consecutive world medal. Now, the two-time U.S. champions will have a long off-season to create new programs. The season ended on a truly somber note, with the loss of Chris Reed, a three-time Olympic ice dancer for Japan who died of a sudden cardiac event at age 30 in March. Fellow skaters paid tribute over social media for the Michigan-born Reed, who won 10 Japanese titles over his career.
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Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2020 19:39:21 GMT
Pairs Chris Knieirm, winner of an Olympic team bronze medal and three U.S. Championships with his wife, Alexa, announced his retirement shortly after the couple withdrew following the short program at Four Continents.
The Knierims, the only U.S. pair to execute a quadruple twist in competition, capped their career in January, at the U.S. Championship in Greensboro. Their final complete competition was highlighted by a clean, emotional performance to the romantic ballad “At Last,” which gave them a seven-point lead over Calalang and Johnson, and, ultimately, their third U.S. title.
“It was a dream that was attainable to skate the way we did today, but it always seems something gets in the way,” Scimeca-Knierim said at the time. “I’ve just been wanting for this moment to happen, because it’s been a little bit of time for Chris and I to have a skate that makes you feel, like, alive. I’m just so happy.”
Haven Denney and Brandon Frazier also announced a split, and Scimeca-Knierim and Frazier plan to for a new pair and compete next season.
The shakeup will add to the likely shuffling of U.S. pair rankings next season. U.S. silver medalists Calalang and Johnson won the free skate at the U.S. Championships, and two weeks later placed a solid fourth at Four Continents. Lacking an international resume, they were controversially left off the world team in favor of 2019 U.S. champs Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc, who placed fourth in Greensboro. They had placed ninth at the 2019 Worlds, earning a second quota spot for the U.S. in the discipline. These two pairs, along with 2016 U.S. champions Tarah Kayne and Daniel O’Shea, and perhaps, a few improving teams, will compete for supremacy. This, partnered with the new Scimeca-Knierim/Frazier partnership should lead to something to watch for in the upcoming season.
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Post by Admin on Apr 12, 2020 20:52:25 GMT
Other notable aspects of the season: By the middle of September, it already was clear the season would feature a jump revolution in women’s skating. Yet no one could have foreseen the speed at which it occurred and how far it went.
With statistics courtesy of skatingscores.com, this illustrates what happened: Until 2018, just one junior or senior woman, Miki Ando of Japan, had been credited with landing a quadruple jump in a significant national or international competition (2002 Junior Grand Prix Final). From the 2017-18 season until the start of this season, there were 21 quad attempts by three skaters (Shcherbakova, Trusova, Yelizabet Tursynbaeva) in significant international competitions, with 13 getting full rotational credit and eight judged clean (positive or neutral grade of execution).
This season, seven women were listed for 42 quad attempts in significant international competitions, with four — Shcherbakova, Trusova, Kamila Valieva and Alysa Liu — getting credit for at least one clean quad and 25 of the 42 judged clean. Trusova landed three clean quads in a single free skate and did three different types cleanly during the season — Lutz, flip and toe loop (plus a fourth, the Salchow, at the Japan Open, which Skating Scores does not list among its “major,” or significant, events because of its limited field). Shcherbakova did two clean quad Lutzes in a single free skate. There was a similar great leap forward on triple Axels.
Until this season, only eight women had been credited with landing one in a significant international competition. Four of those eight had done it in the pre-IJS and pre-replay era.
This season, the triple Axel club got three new members: Liu*, Kostornaia and Young You. Two previous members, Yelizaveta Tuktamysheva and Rika Kihira, did more. The five had an aggregate 23 judged clean.
And all that was without the senior worlds.
(*Liu was credited with landing a triple Axel at the 2018 Asian Open, when she competed in the advance novice division.)
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Post by Admin on Apr 13, 2020 22:11:19 GMT
The sport’s culture dictates that athletes should smile through pain and errors. In the ‘kiss and cry’ area - where skaters wait for their scores – there are rarely dramatic displays. Even when a performance is unfairly marked by the judges, skaters will blow kisses to the camera and wave to the crowd. However peeved they may be, they’ll never reveal it, preferring instead to suffer in silence. Burying true feelings just goes with the territory.
“It’s a vicious cycle when you live inside the bubble,” says Kiira Korpi, a two-time Olympian for Finland who is now a psychology student at the New School in Manhattan and a children’s rights activist. “You don’t even realise how unhealthy or toxic some of the cultural norms are.”
Last week should have seen the world championships take place in Montreal, but the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to that. Unintentionally, it may have shifted the landscape of women’s figure skating in the process.
Barring a minor miracle, three Russian teenagers would have battled it out for the podium places: 16-year-old Alena Kostornaia and a pair of 15-year-olds, Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova. The trio have revolutionized figure skating. They only made their senior debuts last year but blitzed through the sport, ensuring a multitude of headlines. In the Grand Prix final last December, Kostornaia claimed gold while Shcherbakova and Trusova rounded out the medals. They repeated the trick at the European championships the following month; their opponents left dumbstruck by their dominance.
What makes them so good? Well, owing to their remarkable jumps, they maximize the technical points on offer. Trusova and Shcherbakova have both mastered skating’s holy grail: the quad, an exhaustive element – and up until recently an unheard-of feat for ladies, which is four full rotations in the air.
However, there are concerns. First, rather than a skating competition for women, are we now dealing with a jumping competition for girls? Second, and much more importantly, what’s the cost of success – physically, emotionally and psychologically – for this collection of raw, developing children?
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Post by Admin on Apr 14, 2020 21:42:22 GMT
“The worst aspect to this is that most of the time, in skating and gymnastics and maybe other sports, you grow up in a culture that’s very authoritarian,” Korpi says. “You grow up to believe if you get injured it’s because you’re weak. Or if your body or psychological state fails it’s because you are weak. But why does the body of a teenager break?
“Obviously, the athlete has responsibility but we never really question if there’s something wrong with the coaching. Has there been a lot of over-training? I hear from doctors about 12-year-olds in America, Finland and Sweden – and I’m sure in Russia it starts even earlier – coming to clinics with stress fractures and things which shouldn’t happen at that age. It points to the fact the training has been too much. And how do they deal with that when they’re so young?”
All three Russian teenagers boast the same coach: Eteri Tutberidze, who has built a stable of female talent. She is a divisive figure, though not much is known about her – unusual for a skating community that can border on the incestuous. She made her name as a coach in 2014 when a 15-year-old girl in a red dress named Yulia Lipnitskaya cast a spell in Sochi and was crucial to Russia winning gold in the team event. She became a star. The following month, she finished second at the world championships but was quickly discarded as her body began to develop. By the end of 2016, she was done with the sport altogether. Drained and disillusioned, the following year she revealed a long-running battle with anorexia. “I’m no longer drawn to the ice,” she said, damningly.
By that stage, Tutberidze had moved on and guided another prodigy, Evgenia Medvedeva, to back-to-back European and world titles. But at the 2018 Olympics, Medvedeva was pipped to first place by her training mate, 15-year-old Alina Zagitova, three years her junior. Tutberidze had a new favorite and within months, Medvedeva made a startling and unprecedented move. She left Russia altogether, deciding to continue her skating career in Canada. “I feel more adult here,” Medvedeva said later in 2018.
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