The evening "Globe-Arena" is a fascinating sight.
The huge round dome, illuminated in cosmic blue with portholes along the equator, seems to imply by default: something incredible, alien, from another life must necessarily happen inside.
This, in fact, is what the current forum turns out to be in the era of the third world coronavirus wave.
Beautiful and extremely strange in sensations.
With the lower tier of the stands covered with a strict blue fabric, so that empty red chairs do not loom in the background of the performances of the world's strongest skaters.
And this is probably the first championship in history, where even a few accredited journalists at the event applaud athletes.
The feeling of injustice is felt too sharply: outstanding masters create history on the ice, and no one sees it with their own eyes.
Can a TV show compensate for the magic that is happening?
Someday it will surely happen.
New technologies will appear that will allow you to display a lot of interesting data on the screen, such as the speed of sliding and spinning, the height of ejections and twists, and also everything else that can be squeezed out of a sports competition.
In the meantime, the television picture in most cases is just a surrogate, only partially conveying the impression of live skating.
But do we really need spectators?
From those who become champions, you can often hear that the moment when the audience stands up in a single impulse and applauds standing up is so emotional that no medal can match it.
The paradox is that it is precisely those who have won that say.
But if you ask the loser what exactly he would prefer - a victory or a standing ovation, the answer, I'm afraid, will be obvious.
In other words, if anyone lost in Stockholm because of the lack of spectators, they are definitely not those who came to the World Cup to fight for medals.
It is no coincidence that the 2015 world champion Elizaveta Tuktamysheva, who showed the second result in the short program on Wednesday, noted: skating in empty stands is much calmer.
I don't know how much Liza's point of view was shared by the two-time European champions Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov, who could not cope with their nerves in the short program, but when the final group of finalists flew out onto the ice on Thursday and instantly filled the entire site, it became somehow immediately clear that this company is not at all interested in what is happening around: each of the couples was able to both win the champion's crown and never get on the podium at all.
Two-time world champion in pair skating Megan Duhamel said before the start of the world championship that Tarasova and Morozov always lacked really cool programs.
And that now Zhenya and Vladimir have such programs, and, therefore, the fight against the favorites of the tournament - the Chinese Sui Wenjing and Han Tsun, is likely to be conducted on an equal footing.
The Canadian could not imagine one thing: that in the short program Zhenya would disrupt the jump and even the debutants of the world championship Anastasia Mishina and Alexander Gallyamov would bypass the current champions of Russia, and the duo would be almost nine points behind the leaders - Alexandra Boykova and Dmitry Kozlovsky.
“In the free program we will skate as cleanly as we can, for our pleasure.
We will not place any big hopes and expectations, ”Morozov commented on the situation.
But it would be a miracle for the skaters to maintain a victorious attitude, not to mention the courage, realizing that for the first time in the last five years it is possible to remain in the world championship without a medal.
This is probably why it did not happen: Tarasova made a second gross mistake - this time in a cascade of jumps, and the first pair of Russia finished the performance with a score of 212.76 - too low to count on a medal.
The most cinematic and beautiful, of course, the plot was seen not with the Russian, but with the Chinese victory: in terms of the totality of sports merits, hardly anyone deserved gold more than Sui Wenjing and Han Cun, who experienced so many dramas, injuries and other shocks in their lives , which would be more than enough for ten.
But the safety margin turned out to be insufficient: the program two years ago, which seemed at the world championship in Shanghai as a masterpiece of choreographic art, has noticeably lost its freshness.
And with two under-rotations in the jumping elements, as expected, she sent the legendary and charismatic couple under Mishina and Gallyamov, who were skating in front of them at some, if not outrageous, then close to it level.
Young, sporty, impudent, and most importantly, surprisingly unmistakable, as true champions should appear at major tournaments.
It was at that moment that it became clear that Russia was already guaranteed to have the first gold in Stockholm.
It's just that at that moment, when the newcomers finished their rental, hardly anyone thought that they would become the owners of this gold, even though the program for the legendary Queen's composition “We Are The Champions” obliged a lot.
But the European champions Boykova and Kozlovsky did not work: the partner first collapsed from a jump that did not portend a problem, being left without a cascade, and then stumbled on the landing from the ejection and touched the ice with her hand.
And the advantage of 4.37 points won in the short program did not help.
It not only melted, but washed away the leaders into third place.
As for Mishina and Gallyamov, their "unplanned" triumph, obtained at the debut World Championship, is undoubtedly a merit not only of themselves, but also of their coaches.
In the world of figure skating, this is an axiom that is not accepted to dispute.
Moreover, the heroes of the evening were not only Tamara Moskvina and Arthur Minchuk, whose work is visible to the naked eye, but also the former mentors of figure skaters Lyudmila and Nikolai Velikov, who at one time created one of the most charismatic pair skating duets - Ksenia Stolbova and Fyodor Klimov.
It was they who put Nastya and Alexander in a pair and in a fairly short period of time did exactly that technical work that is considered rough, but in fact creates a colossal foundation for progress.