Medvedeva's back problems and the transformation of Kolyada: what did the first day of skaters test skates in Moscow remember?

Open skates are like the first ball: the audience missed the spectacle, the athletes are eager to show themselves.

Well, the pandemic only increased the degree of stress - in the latter, and expectations - in the former.

As for the intrigues, they were all known in advance and mostly concerned women's single skating: in what images will the replacements of coaches Alexander Trusov and Alyona Kostornaya appear?

How will Anna Shcherbakova who has grown noticeably over the summer look like and what will Kamila Valieva's adult debut look like?

Will Elizaveta Tuktamysheva and Yevgeny Medvedeva be able not to get lost on the bridgehead, where the students of Eteri Tutberidze will fight “to death” with her ex-students?

Indeed, with all due respect to the Olympic champion Yevgeny Plushenko, who took Trusov and Kostornaya under his academy's wing, it would be naive to assume that a few months of summer work can magically transform athletes in terms of style and technical arsenal.

Spectators who yearned for transformation received it.

True, on the men's ice - for the authorship of Alexei Mishin, in whose group the bronze medalist of the 2018 World and European Championships Mikhail Kolyada moved to the group in the summer.

The last two seasons turned out to be frankly disastrous for the athlete, and it was not too hard to believe that the mentor would be able to achieve any significant changes in such a short time.

In a television report aired on the eve of the box office, the coach himself noted that there was nothing to talk about yet.

They say that is why he even told his new ward that the best interview is silence.

But the short program called “Let's turn it up” turned out to be one hundred percent hitting the target: the choice of music and choreographic solution ideally suited the character of the skater, and the extremely laconic costume only enhanced the effect.

Actually, the rental of Kolyada made me think that the first public appearance of the season is primarily a story about how to make an impression, and not about the technical complexity of the elements.

Probably, this is precisely why none of the girls' short programs really sounded: the 2015 world champion Elizaveta Tuktamysheva and the European champion Alena Kostornaya lacked a triple axel - a jump that by default is able to distinguish any skater from the general row, Evgenia Medvedeva was hampered by an inappropriate aggravated injury her back, due to which the quality of all spins was noticeably affected, and besides, her very powerful program "Masquerade" was greatly discolored by her black training leotard: the suit was simply not ready for the start of the rental.

The story, as they say, is trivial (at the beginning of the season, skaters are faced with this all the time), but in Megasport, in the presence of a sufficiently large number of spectators, the simplicity of girlish outfits cut the eye.

With the very high quality of the skates themselves, not a single athlete could surprise with something unexpected - the way Kolyada managed to do it. 

On the other hand, none of them disappointed, and this is a lot, given that Shcherbakova and Valieva have grown noticeably over the summer, Kostornaya and Trusova had to get used to a completely different training style in a short time, and Medvedeva was completely forced to train via Skype, and even in Megasport, as the audience joked, the two-time world champion was shown at the start by a phone, on the screen of which, on the other side of the ocean, Zhenya was given instructions by her Canadian coach Brian Orser.

However, it is definitely not worth giving any assessments to the skaters in an attempt to understand the balance of power, since the main weapon - quadruple jumps - was not used.

In pair disciplines, performances were slightly blurred by the lack of leaders: two-time European champions Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov refused to participate in the skates, stating that this performance was not included in their preparation plans for the season, and the two strongest dance duos - European champions Victoria Sinitsina - Nikita Katsalapov and winners of four European championships, Alexander Stepanov - Ivan Bukin, withdrew due to injuries.