The first final of the Spartakiad in single skating with outstanding performances by Evgeniy Semenenko and Mark Kondratyuk became one of the most striking moments of the figure skating tournament, and at the same time reminded: men's skating is not about quadruple jumps, not about the ability to slide and spin, but, above all, about character and nerves.
After Evgeni Plushenko ended his career, it was these components that Russian skaters found themselves in greatest deficit. The ability to get together and give your best where it is most important was lacking in different years for Maxim Kovtun and Mikhail Kolyada, Dmitry Aliyev and Alexander Samarin. This is partly why Mark Kondratyuk’s Olympic team performance in Beijing was greeted with such enthusiasm. I really wanted to believe that this athlete would become a leader for a long time. It is no coincidence that the figure skater’s coach Svetlana Sokolovskaya said after those Games: “Mark and I must prove that the brilliant performance in the team was not an accident.”
It was impossible to prove it for a long time. Too many negative factors came together: recovery from the Olympics, isolation from world sports and lack of understanding of what to do next. The last two points did not fall on Mark alone. The same Aliyev and Samarin, who had already understood how beautiful the world is when you look at it from a pedestal, also found themselves at a loss - with the feeling that their usual life had suddenly crumbled into pieces. It is impossible to condemn for this, but perhaps this is precisely why Samarin considered it more reasonable to announce his retirement in Magnitogorsk.
Against this very depressing background, the appearance in Russian men’s skating of a whole galaxy of interesting, talented, jumping almost all possible quadruple jumps, and most importantly, still hungry for results, seemed like a complete paradox.
This was confirmed by the numbers. The content of the first six guys at the December Russian Championship in Chelyabinsk totaled three dozen quadruples, most of which were performed at a fairly high level. There, the debutant of the senior season, Vladislav Dikidzhi, became the undisputed discovery of the season, and the victors of the previous season, Evgeniy Semenenko and Pyotr Gumennik, showed a fight of such a level that could decorate any championship, even the world one.
Therefore, in fact, I dreamed that at the main start of the season (which was announced as the Spartakiad of the Strongest) everything would work out for everyone.
By and large, it worked out for only two people - Kondratyuk and Semenenko. If it weren’t for the blot in the cascade in the short program (with a double second jump instead of a triple), Mark would have had a chance to cross the real grandmaster mark of 300 points, as Evgeniy did. Even without this, the skater made a phenomenal breakthrough: he improved his December result by almost 50 points. But even with such a great quality of performance, the final in Magnitogorsk became, first of all, a battle of characters. Which only two survived.
One could name a third - Dmitry Aliyev, who showed the third result in the free program, but in the aggregate it is hardly worth perceiving his performance as a success. In his comment after a completely failed short program, for which both the athlete and his coach had to explain after the fact, the skater said absolutely nothing criminal. I simply called a spade a spade, honestly admitting the lack of excitement and passion.
The fact that Aliyev has zero this season was evident throughout the entire season. Perhaps it would be more honest to yourself to do as Elizaveta Tuktamysheva did. She simply took a break, not feeling strong enough to motivate herself to fight seriously. But, again, one should not judge strictly: what is criminal in the fact that an individual athlete, who is in his tenth season of competing at the adult level, no longer has enough drive and courage?
The saddest thing is that drive, courage and the desire to win are no longer enough for those who have not won anything in their lives. And this, with the exception of Dikiji, is virtually the entire remaining list of participants in the men's tournament.
Of course, there is no tragedy in this. Even if we consider Kondratyuk’s Saturday breakthrough to be a consequence of a coincidence, it already becomes obvious: in Russian men’s skating there will be someone to compete for the only quota that will be provided to the country at the time of its return to international ice.
By the way, I would not say that Semenenko will certainly be the lucky one, and not Dikidzhi, Kondratyuk or Pyotr Gumennik, who missed the Spartakiad for health reasons. This season has once again confirmed that each of these four has what is commonly called “full stuffing” in sports slang: complexity, quality, focus on results and, most importantly, character. After all, even with an equal initial result, preference will certainly be given to the one who has it. Who managed to prove that at the decisive moment he will not flinch.
If, in the presence of such a powerful guideline, some of those catching up no longer have enough personal motivation, you definitely shouldn’t worry about them. So it's just not their game.