The Russian Ice Jumping Championship was slightly overshadowed by the ending: two falls by the youngest participant, Lena Kostyleva, and, as a result, destroyed by intrigue.
If these most annoying mistakes had not happened, now we would be able to savor the details of the fight, figure out whose strategy is better, in a word, experience the aftertaste of an incredibly exciting tournament.
But one can hardly talk seriously about strategy when one of the teams loses fifty points overnight, and there is no longer any chance of recouping this loss.
The show format seemed to emphasize: everything that happens on the ice is not too serious.
In fact, it turned out a little differently.
There were plenty of bitter upsets in the personal tournament.
As Veronica Daineko, under whose leadership Pyotr Gumennik trains, noted, no prize money can bring as much emotion to an athlete as triumph, but when you fail to win, it is always very painful, no matter how “frivolous” the rivalry may be.
On Saturday, the entire adult champion company had to go through the pain of defeat: Gumennik, Evgeniy Semenenko, Mark Kondratyuk, the two strongest couples in the country and even Adelia Petrosyan.
But the Sunday team tournament more than compensated for all the personal failures: almost all the participants of the event managed to capture their share of enthusiasm.
The competition was accompanied by such enthusiastic comments from the presenters and the main television guru Tatyana Tarasova that it was time to believe: somewhere out there, on the other side of the screen, the figure skating world was simply obliged to lie in a faint, and all of them.
Although, if you tone down your emotions a little, you have to admit: the tournament did not show anything completely revolutionary, with the exception of the unique “quadruple Salchow - oiler - quadruple Salchow” cascade performed by Margarita Bazylyuk.
Rather, the mentioned cascade only confirmed a long-known trend: extreme complexity is much easier for 12-year-old girls than for 16-year-olds.
Tarasova’s phrase addressed to Bazylyuk: “God grant that she doesn’t gain weight and nothing happens to her figure” is purely rhetorical in this case.
We have too often had the opportunity to see that children's uniqueness in figure skating is an extremely perishable thing.
Another question is that the history of figure skating has never seen such a concentration of quadruple jumps in both children's and adult performances.
This alone is a fairly weighty argument in favor of holding such tournaments, and not only in Russia.
Jumps and paired elements of maximum difficulty automatically entail an increased likelihood of injury.
Horrifying at first glance, Kostyleva’s fall ended, fortunately, with a severe bruise, but it showed how thin the line is in modern figure skating that separates success from disaster.
It can generally be considered lucky that during the jumping championship, not one of those athletes who will compete at the Spartakiad of the strongest in Magnitogorsk in February was injured.
A month before the main start of the season is the time when the fight for the right to be called the strongest goes on non-stop.
The Moscow tournament highlighted this perfectly.
It was very interesting to observe how ex-world champions Anastasia Mishina - Alexander Gallyamov and ex-European champions Alexandra Boykova - Dmitry Kozlovsky build a strategy for their performances.
In the personal tournament, Tamara Moskvina's students were the only ones among all the participants who performed the three prescribed elements (jump, twist, throw) without pauses.
This is a kind of show of force: “Does anyone need a break?
We don't.
One - two - three, thank you everyone, everyone is free!
This was especially impressive on the first qualifying day of the tournament.
But punching your opponents on the nose does not mean achieving victory.
This was confirmed by the Saturday final.
It was assumed that the main competition for the ex-world champions would be Boykova and Kozlovsky with the announced quadruple ejection, but quite suddenly both of them were knocked out of the playoffs by Elizaveta Osokina and Artem Gritsaenko.
This looked like a serious signal to the leaders that not only they can boast of the standard quality of the elements.
And that we urgently need to come up with something that will allow us to simply run away.
Boykova and Kozlovsky did not succeed in the quadruple throw during individual competitions, despite the fact that the skaters entered it three times, but an attempt to perform the element as part of a team tournament, entering the ice with the first starting number, looked like a serious strategic miscalculation.
It’s easy to explain why the athletes needed this: entertaining competitions, in which you lose absolutely nothing except money, are an excellent springboard for trying a new element on a whim, with the stands full.
But if at the very end of the team tournament there had not been a force majeure in the form of Kostyleva’s falls, the disrupted quadruple throw could well have caused the defeat of the entire “blue” team.
So the Reds’ captain, Alexander Gallyamov, acted much more shrewdly.
He and his partner performed a standard set of the most confident elements (a jump cascade and two triple throws) and briefly commented: “We performed first, we had to lay the foundation.”
In other words, even in this captain’s confrontation, Alexander appeared to be a more far-sighted strategist than his counterpart.
Whether it was worth allowing juniors to compete, who beat everyone in the individual tournament and determined the outcome of the team tournament is a rather ambiguous question, but it was thanks to this thermonuclear mix of “fathers and sons” that we saw that the three strongest singles players in the country - Evgeniy Semenenko, Vladislav Dikidzhi and Peter Gumennika does not have nerves of steel at all.
In the same way, using the example of “invited guests” Elizaveta Tuktamysheva and Dmitry Aliev, everyone understood how quickly you can lose jumps if you don’t practice them every day.
Was the presence of these skaters in the team competition justified?
Probably not after all.
Aliyev was only remembered for his backflip, which looked completely ridiculous against the backdrop of the failed jumps, and before the start of the team competition, Liza hardly thought that she would complete it under Tarasova’s comment: “Well, what is this?
Arms and legs in different directions..."
It is quite possible, by the way, that we will someday remember the current jumping championship as the tournament where the unofficial title of queen of the triple Axel passed from Tuktamysheva to Sofia Muravyova.
Evgeni Plushenko's ward not only successfully landed all her attempts, but, it seems, learned to truly enjoy this jump.
Now the coach can go to bed for another spinal operation with a calm heart, and we will wait for the Spartakiad of the Strongest.
The jumping tournament significantly fueled interest in the main start of the season.