Figure Skating: He's Here, He's Weir, Get Over It

[royalwave]

There was some suggestion that Eteri helped cook the books to get her daughter and her partner, who live and train in the U.S., to Beijing. Apparently the top Russian ice dance team abruptly withdrew from a national championship tournament in late 2021, citing injury, allowing Davis and Smolkin to win the silver. The top two pairs qualified for the Olympics.

Davis and Smolkin had ranked fifth at the 2020 World Junior Figure Skating Championships and competed only once at the national Russian Cup final in the past season as Davis had broken her foot. So to suddenly vault into a silver medal position was, well, a bit surprising.

[eveschmeve]

Those 14 year olds will be 18 in 2026, who knows if they’ll make it that far. I saw a replay of the podium yesterday and the difference between the Russian girls and the Japanese girl was striking. The Japanese skater looked thrilled to be there and looked so much healthier too. Those Russian girls looked miserable in every way possible.

I’m not entirely convinced that Kamila didn’t throw it away on purpose. If I was her mom that’s what I would have told her to do. If she made it into the top 3 it would have been so, so much worse for her.

Age limits would help with some of this but you would simply have miserable 18 year olds at the Olympics instead of 15 year olds. It’s not like they start skating at age 15, by the time they get to that point they’ve been training for years and years.

[FiggyPudding]

Also, didn't China fake birth certificates for female gymnasts in the past? Cheaters are so relentless.

[Ginger]

Mar 7, 2005 15:24:15 GMT -4 eveschmeve said:

I’m not entirely convinced that Kamila didn’t throw it away on purpose. If I was her mom that’s what I would have told her to do. If she made it into the top 3 it would have been so, so much worse for her.

I'm fully convinced that she threw it away on purpose. It was the path of least resistance. She even said in the Kiss and Cry "At least now they can have a medal ceremony" so it was obviously at the forefront of her thoughts that if she medaled, she was going to be the villain spoiling things for everyone else.

The legal nightmare she's facing is somewhat smaller now too.

[magazinewhore]

That was brutal. They need to raise the age minimum. Watching child abuse in real time is not cool.

[Deleted]

The whole thing was just brutal to watch, and so so sad. I started crying a little myself when they were showing Sakamoto Kaori bawling her eyes out. To me it looked more like stress-release tears than happy tears, although I'm sure part of it was happy tears. If figure skating were a fair world she would've won gold.

[tabby]

Sept 28, 2005 19:00:14 GMT -4 @roisin54 said:

To me it looked more like stress-release tears than happy tears, although I'm sure part of it was happy tears. If figure skating were a fair world she would've won gold.

Going into the Olympics, the conventional wisdom was that the Russians would go 1-2-3. She's probably been thinking for ages that she wanted to just do the best skate she could, and be proud of herself. The huge wave of emotions when she realized she'd medaled was probably overwhelming. I loved her performance, it was beautiful.

[OnyxRose]

Those current 14-year-olds will probably be world champions in the next two years but they most certainly will be retired with hip and back injuries by the next Olympics.

[lpatrice]

Just a couple of quick things:

Russia sent three ice dancing teams to the Olympics. Including their top pair, who won silver. Eteri is powerful but she’s not powerful enough to get the Russian Skating Federation to bypass their top teams for Diana; Diana and her partner Gleb have been the number three team in Russia for at least the past cycle.

Russians have almost always trained their skaters to pre-rotate their jumps. It’s just a different technique and that in itself is not causing insane harm to these young skaters; Johnny Weir and other non-Russian skaters who were trained by Russians tend to do the same thing. Russian skaters themselves have been doing it for decades. Nathan Chen also does this on a lot of his jumps because his coach is Russian.

There are a lot of problems in figure skating but people are missing an opportunity to try and get some things changed by trying to act like all the problems boil down to Russia bad.

I am also opposed to raising the age, you already have to be 16 in the calendar year to participate in seniors and raising the age won’t do anything about abuse coaching situation, bad interpretation of the scoring system, the over valuation of big tricks, etc.

I’d also like to point out that women’s figure skating became a revolving door way before Russia started dominating. In fact Evgenia Medvedeva repeating as world champion in 2017 was the first “woman” to do so so since Michelle Kwan did it in 2000-2001. Tara Lipinski, Sarah Hughes, Oksana Bauil, and Shizuka Arakawa are all Olympic champions who were basically one and done or who only won one world title along with their Olympic gold.

I'm fully convinced that she threw it away on purpose. It was the path of least resistance. She even said in the Kiss and Cry "At least now they can have a medal ceremony" so it was obviously at the forefront of her thoughts that if she medaled, she was going to be the villain spoiling things for everyone else.

The legal nightmare she's facing is somewhat smaller now too.

She didn’t throw it, she cracked under pressure and had a meltdown. It’s also not the first time she’s had an error laden performance. She still has gold medal, hence Trusova’s rant. And Russia is going to fight tooth and nail to keep that medal. I don’t have much confidence that the team standings will change when this is “resolved”.

My hope is that Kamila can go to a decent coach and flourish. She didn’t move to Sambo 70 until 2018, so unlike some of Eteri’s other charges, she has good fundamentals and basic skating skills and technique. With a decent coach and a normal diet and training schedule, she wouldn’t have to take supplements and drugs (approved and banned) to help with endurance and stamina so that she can train for 12-14 hours a day.

[seat6]

Adam Rippon said that if a skater wanted to throw an event, she would pop out of the jump early, which would be easier to do than falling and easy to pass off as a mistake and not a deliberate error. He said throwing an event by deliberately falling would be dangerous and risk injury, and no skater would do that when the safer option of popping out is available and credible.

From that I gather he believes Kamila did not throw her free skate.

I am not an expert on skating but I have crumpled under pressure and that’s what Kamila’s performance looked like to me.