In late October, at the Grand Prix stage in Vancouver, Canada, a very non-trivial debut is expected: in the tournament of sports pairs, the host country will be represented by Vanessa James and Eric Radford. The skaters teamed up after they realized that continuing their careers with former partners (Morgan Sipre in the first case and Megan Duhamel in the second) was not possible.
Two and a half weeks before the International Skating Union published the grid of the Grand Prix participants, the sports world was stunned by another piece of pair skating news: the five-time world champion and Olympic Pyeongchang gold Alyona Savchenko. Well, if we add here the not too old decision of Eteri Tutberidze to take under his wing two-time European champions Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov, we can confidently assume that in the world of sports couples there is a movement that has not been observed in this type of figure skating for many years.
Will any of the above couples be able to push Tamara Moskvina's wards to second positions, under whose leadership the reigning world champions Anastasia Mishina - Alexander Gallyamov and the reigning European champions Aleksandra Boykova - Dmitry Kozlovsky play now?
There is no answer to this question yet, and Tamara Nikolaevna herself will certainly do everything in her power to prevent this from happening.
But one thing is clear: the world pair skating has long needed a good shake-up.
And it seems to get it this season.
A year before the Games in Sochi, the famous Canadian coach Richard Gaultier, who then skated in a pair and were not yet two-time world champions Duhamel and Redford, explained that it takes three years for the duo to fully form.
“When, relatively speaking, partners do not need to turn their heads towards each other in order to understand where they are. Of course, we are talking about athletes who already know how to ride and jump. The first year is usually spent just figuring out if people are capable of skating together. On the second, you start to deal with transitions, paired elements, although not very difficult. But on the third, there is already really creative work, when you already know in advance how quickly athletes will be able to do what you offer them, how they will react to comments, how they will behave in competitions. So, by the way, it was with Salé and Pelletier: they became a couple only for the third season ... ”, - said Gaultier.
I remembered those words of the Canadian coach a year after the Games in Sochi, when the main character of those Games, Yulia Lipnitskaya, balancing herself on the verge of ending her career. It was then that Olympic champion Oleg Vasiliev seemed to be joking, but in fact, quite seriously, offered the athlete and her new environment an option to think about pair skating. Now, of course, one can only guess what heights Julia would be able to achieve if Vasiliev's proposal interested her. But the idea, which could become a grandiose media project, went into the sand, not really being born.
I will not be surprised, by the way, if Tutberidze will become the first one who begins to implement Gauthier's principles on a massive scale in Russia: today, in her school, she has perhaps the largest number of well-trained, but not too "liquid" singles, and in order to get her hand in a new profession for herself, she has Tarasova and Morozov.
On the other hand, if this happens, it will clearly not happen today.
It remains for us to follow the reincarnation of the veterans and regret that Vanessa was paired with Redford, and not Alena.
It would be, firstly, no less beautiful in appearance, and secondly, more box-office: after all, both Savchenko and Redford have a much richer sports and media background than the former Frenchwoman.
Could it have turned out differently? In my opinion, yes. Savchenko, it seems, just miscalculated: she was too internally sure that she would snap her fingers at the right time and her Olympic gold partner Bruno Masso would stand by her side to storm the next Olympic peak. According to the figure skater's calculations, two years should have been enough to return to their previous conditions and to their former places. But Masso flatly refused to repeat the experiment, and Alena found herself alone with her own ambitions in an extremely difficult situation for herself. On the one hand, she continued to incinerate the desire to return to her old life, on the other hand, the choice of opportunities for this was extremely limited: the same Radford had already made his choice.
“Alena is an outstanding figure skater, unique, there are simply no other such skaters in pair skating, but let's look at the situation from the point of view of show business: Alena's most valuable asset is her titles. The history of figure skating knows cases when an athlete performing in a pair became in demand without a partner. So it was at one time with Katya Gordeeva, with the Canadian She-Lynn Bourne, but Savchenko is a different story. If a noun like Nyman is in the world of figure skating is paired with a star of this rank, no titles will help keep the producers' interest at the same level. You can't sell the product profitably: you need to wait for the first results in terms of memorable programs, unique elements or won tournaments, and only after that the commercial value of the pair can begin to grow. Will it happen now? I doubt it "- said the famous manager Ari Zakaryan after the Olympic champion announced her decision to return to the sport.
How successful the joint project of James and Radford may be will become clear in October, and the Canadians at their stage of the Grand Prix have real chances to compete for the top three: ex-world champions Sui Wenjin and Han Cong, as well as extremely ambitious Russian duo Daria Pavlyuchenko and Denis Khodykin. But all the others can be dealt with without difficulty.
The Canadian stage of the Grand Prix itself is to a certain extent an illustration of the rather deplorable state of the current pair skating, not counting its Russian part: among the participants in the Vancouver tournament are the Englishmen Zoe Jones and Christophe Boyadzhi: a 41-year-old mother of three children with a partner suitable for her in sons. The couple's media exoticism, which the world has already sucked down to the smallest detail, does not negate the fact that Jones and Boyadzhi were the last in the short program at the world championship in Stockholm, did not qualify there, and as part of the commercial Grand Prix, which implies the participation of the elite, their presence, by definition, looks like nonsense.
If one fantasizes and supposes that among the participants of the Grand Prix there would be the vice-champion of the Games in Pyeongchang, Evgenia Medvedeva, who is now mastering the basics of pair skating with Alexander Enbert, from the point of view of sports results, this would cause, I believe, much fewer questions.
And the result itself would certainly have been higher.
True, we have to admit that the two-time world champion lost her time greatly, trying to maintain the illusion that her era of a loner is not over yet.
But the project could become much more interesting than the one that Vanessa with Eric and Alena with an unknown American muddied.