Upside down: why Samarin and Aymoz failed the short program at the European Championship, and Brzezina did not jump above his head

Where it is thin, there it breaks

Two-time world champion Stefan Lambiel considered the favorite of the men's tournament Kevin Aymoz. He made this publicly in an interview with one of the Russian television channels immediately after the rental of the Latvian Denis Vasilievs. At that moment, the Frenchman was just getting ready to go on the ice. As it turned out, get out in order to find out in five minutes, looking at the scoreboard, that the European Championship was over for him.

Alexander Samarin was more fortunate. Of course, if you can apply the word "lucky" to a place in the second ten, in which he ... no, did not find himself, but spread out in an intermediate protocol. When such a failure befalls a person who has every reason to claim victory, this requires at least some explanation. But they did not follow.

Svetlana Sokolovskaya, under whose guidance Alexander is training, immediately made it clear that she did not intend to comment on anything, and disappeared into the locker room. Samarin himself was extremely concise: “I want to thank everyone for their support and faith, as well as my team, which works with me. I have nothing more to say. I wanted to show clean skating, but showed as usual ... ".

It is hardly possible now to give an objective assessment of what happened to one of the strongest Russian skaters. Honored trainer of Russia Inna Goncharenko, who fostered Samarina for juniors, suggested that the failure was the result of the transition to new shoes - Alexander changed them a few days before the start of the continental championship.

The athlete himself did not say a word about this. Perhaps in vain. At least, he could cut short the conversation in the spirit of the famous quotation of Viktor Chernomyrdin: “There has never been such a thing, and here again ...”. A similar thing happened with Samarin: speaking at the Russian championship two years ago, he completely failed the free program and only after some time admitted in an interview that he had failed during the rental and stopped holding his shoe leg.

But this time it is unlikely that this is only about the shoes. If we raise the statistics of Samarin’s performances in the new season in the short program (that is, exactly where a certain level of stability is always expected from the leader of the team), it begins to alarm.

At the first stage of the Grand Prix in Grenoble, Alexander scored a record amount of 98.48 points. At the stage in Moscow - 92.81 (with these points, the skater could be the first in Graz). In the Grand Prix finals, the result slipped to a mediocre 81.32, and at the Russian Championships it froze at around 80.68.

That is, from rental to rental, jumping seemed to be aggravated by some kind of problem, which was not always noticeable from the side, which made it difficult to show a consistently high result. Is it any wonder that the result in Graz was beyond - 74.77? Perhaps this is a rhetorical question.

Before the European Championships, the athlete and coach decided to replace the problematic quadruple flip with a simpler sheepskin coat, but this measure did not work out. Plus - "unfortunate" shoes. According to Goncharenko, for a tall athlete jumping quadruple jumps, new shoes are akin to disaster, since all sensations change and you have to forget about the ideal jumping technique and sense of rhythm for a while.

Remembering how desperately and unsuccessfully Samarin fought during the season with two of the most difficult leaps of his program - a lutz and a flip - Lambiel cited Nathan Chen as an example.

“After all, there is no special strategy and no secrets to be successful in a short program: you just have to go out and show what you can do. And there are no general recommendations either. We can say as much as you like that it is not advisable to jump in the same program and Lutz flip, but in fact the world champion copes with this task. Another issue is that rental is not just about jumping. These are steps, and links between elements, and rotations - all that makes a program a program. Two jumps is only forty seconds, and you need to ride for almost three minutes. And in order to be successful, you need to be able to work out every second of this time as well as possible, ”the Swiss explained.

Dropout Location

Experienced coaches are well aware of the phenomenon: when a recognized favorite drops out of the participants in a major tournament, the rest often panic. This manifests itself, first of all, in excessive emotionality: everyone understands that victory is becoming more accessible, and they are eager to get it faster. Something similar happened in Graz, where for the first time in many years among the participants in the European Championships there was no two-time world champion and seven-time European champion Javier Fernandez.

Most of all, the “absence” hit Kevin Aymoz. At the last continental championship, the Frenchman became the fourth. In the new season, he immediately went to the Grand Prix finals, where he lost only to Nathan Chen and Yuzur Han. There, in Turin, Aymoz climbed to a hitherto unprecedented height, having skated a short 96.71 points, and even came to Graz in the status of double champion of France.

In other words, Lambiel, and not only him, had every reason to call Kevin the most likely candidate for victory. Surely, Aymoz himself thought about his new status several times, and therefore went out to destroy everyone and everything. This played a trick on him.

“And after all, Kevin started beautifully, with mood, with courage, it was clear that he was incinerated by the desire to break everyone. Here emotions swept over, ”Goncharenko shook her hands after it became known that the Frenchman had not seeped through the qualifying sieve into an arbitrary program.

And the 30-year-old Michal Brzezina, for whom the current continental tournament is already the 13th in a row, took the place of an intermediate leader without two months. However, it is much more interesting that in the previous 12 Czechs only once managed to climb the podium. In 2013, in Zagreb, he took advantage of errors in the free program of another Frenchman - Brian Joubert and won bronze.

The skater got to Rafael Harutyunyan, rather, from hopelessness, and the coach was not too lazy to start learning it again, and not to apply makeup. When the work brought its first fruits (in 2018, Brzezina first qualified for the Grand Prix in seven years), the specialist admitted that he was much more interested in pulling people out of the pits, since in case of success it is much more than the work that goes hassle-free.

“Usually an athlete comes to training, does something, sometimes very conscientiously and actively, but does not think too much about why he has no progress. He continues to do the same work every day, not realizing that this will not change anything at all. So the skater has to change consciousness. To teach him to listen, to do what they say, and not what he considers to be right ... Moreover, a person obviously does not believe you. And this already creates very big problems in the work. It's like in ordinary life: if you were once bitten by a dog, then everyone else will seem angry and biting. But is that not so? ”Harutyunyan admitted.

On Thursday, the Czech has every chance to take the throne left by Fernandez. On the one hand, I really want him to be prevented by Dmitry Aliev and Arthur Danielyan (and, possibly, Samarin) who were skating a bit worse, and on the other hand, it’s hard to disagree with the fact that in the current company of candidates Brzezin deserves victory more than others.