2022 Olympics
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Anonymous
When you touch the ice with your bare hands, it doesn't feel good. Beyond that, matching color gloves elongate your arms and can produce a more flattering line. |
Anonymous
Yes. I noticed the gloves too. Valieva's seemed like a part of the outfit, but Scherbakova's and Trusova's seemed like an afterthought. |
Anonymous
They aren't usually wearing matching color gloves. oftentimes it's some contrasting color. Like mime gloves. I wonder if it's just part of the over the top theatriccal look they prefer. |
Anonymous
Trusova's did the opposite of elongating. |
Anonymous
Nah. They don't wear them in practice and they wear contrasting gloves. It's just part of the garish costume style. |
Anonymous
Illuminating! So how do you change an entire culture? Rafael Arutyunyan has ideas. Before coming to the U.S., Arutyunyan coached for 25 years in Moscow. He knows the ins and outs of the way rinks function there and the resources and power available to coaches. Since he moved to the U.S., he’s coached skaters to 11 national titles, and under his tutelage, Nathan Chen has won three world titles. But even with Arutyunyan’s success, he says the U.S. will never match Russia (or Japan or South Korea) in women’s skating without a complete overhaul of the current structure. “We have everything in this country,” he said. “Everything, more than anyone else. Money, ice rinks, energy, population. What we don’t have? We don’t have proper management of what we have. We don’t have a system.” Arutyunyan says he isn’t talking about U.S. Figure Skating, which he thinks does a good job providing skaters with plenty of opportunities to compete. To Arutyunyan, the problem instead is that coaches are all freelancers, each doing whatever they think is best for their skaters using different methods. He also says that coaches aren’t given enough decision-making power. In most cases they report to the rink manager, who isn’t always a figure skating expert. “If [the coach] creates great skaters, management should help him to do it instead of being the boss and saying not this, not that,” he said. “I need more and I ask for more, because I want to win.” The 65-year-old says he “knows what he knows” and he dreams of a system where he could create an academy to not only train skaters, but to train coaches (in his coaching style) to streamline the process. Many times, when a skater comes to him for help, it’s too late in their career to make meaningful changes. “You should get ready for war before war started,” he said. “My problem is I am coaching women, not [junior] ladies skaters, because until they get to the point to come to me, they become women and then it’s too late. The system should be created when a child comes to you from 4 or 5 years old and you give them the shortest way to get more than anybody else.” Arutyunyan says that everything Nathan Chen does today was planned 10 years ago when Nathan first came to him for coaching. “Maybe there would be another Nathan, but consistent producing, I don’t think it will happen [here],” Arutyunyan said. “That’s why you say, oh, there is some [American] girl that was trying [a quad] and there are eight or 10 Russians who try, because they are a mass production.” U.S. Figure Skating did not make high performance director Mitch Moyer available to the media after the Olympic team selection. His job title suggests that he is uniquely qualified to discuss how the U.S. women stack up internationally and why they’ve fallen so far behind in skating’s technical evolution, but when I requested to speak with him, the public relations director informed me that Moyer has turned down every request to discuss this topic. While talking about her struggle in training her triple axel, Karen Chen said she wished she’d focused more on building the right basics when she was a younger skater learning all her jumps. “I think what is truly important when it comes to these women doing quads, is they have really, really amazing, like perfect technique when it comes to their triples. What’s been a struggle for me, I am going to be perfectly honest, is breaking bad habits that I have developed over the years as I skated. From juvenile, I had a really bad wrap [leg position in the air] and I actually rotated like this [she held one arm up like a goal post and one arm down]. I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong and I didn’t have that guidance.” Eight years ago, Arutyunyan said, he “really, really tried” to create a system to develop American skaters, to make sure the talented young skaters learned the correct basics to prepare them for the technical revolution he saw coming. “I talked to people in the U.S. Olympic Committee, I talked to the best people in U.S. Figure Skating, I talked to the best people from the Professional Skaters Association, and everybody said yes, we agree. Nothing happening yet.” If Arutyunyan sounds defeated, he’s also found some acceptance in that defeat. “I was frustrated eight years ago. Now I am not … I feel I am getting old and that it will not happen during my life.” |
Anonymous
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Something is horribly amiss with the coach and the medical staff. That child did not drug herself.
And I agree that the new scoring system is quite flawed as it encourages shenanigans like this |
Anonymous
The skater from Georgia wore flesh colored gloves, and Gracie Gold had flesh colored gloves too. It seems very common with Russian skaters, or skaters with Russian training. |
Anonymous
What? Valieva practice: /cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/OKGT726OMBLN5IWGYWLYMMSIIE.jpg)
Trusova practice: 
Scherbakova practice: 
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Anonymous
She is not "from" Georgia. That she represents Georgia is just a way for her to compete internationally, and for Georgia to have a skater that clears the qualifying round. Country shopping. She neither lives nor trains there, and neither is she an ethnic Georgian. |
Anonymous
There's a great debate on jumping style. In America they're taught the straight line approach, while in Russia they're taught a curved approach. The curved approach is better for quads, because judges don't call skaters on pre-rotation. Nathan Chen uses a curved entry, because he's only had Russian coaches. It's said that Frank Carol ruined Gracie Gold's jumps because she was taught the curved entrance, and he was adamant she follow the straight line approach. Even Scott Hamilton admitted during these games, that the US has to revaluate how they're training jumps. |
Anonymous
so this was the same problem in women's gymnastics until the Karoyis took over. While their methods of trainng were awful, they did revoluitionize the structure of the sport - creating a national team that comes together to train every month and a structure to identify up an comers through a bunch of JOs, camps etc. Until then it was the same thing- a bunch of individuals doing whatver they and their coach wanted to do. It also helped to create an actual team feeling where the women really know and support each other. It could be done in skating if they wanted it to. |
Anonymous
Yes, when I said "common with Russian skaters" I was referring to her. This was the first year she even competed for Georgia. There is a lot of country shopping for American and Russian skaters looking for slots to compete. |
Anonymous
I doubt she chooses her song or costume. Get real. It’s Russia. |
Anonymous
Eteri’s skaters frequently have to stop skating due to injuries. She has them doing quads by rotating early on the ice and this, over time, ruins their backs. The quad should be eliminated for women so this abuse stops. |