Defector.com article on female skaters & Quads

[becca]

I'm sure we'll see more women doing quads and 3As as the next generation comes up.

Women have always lagged behind the men in terms of difficulty, but they do get there.

And as more girls/young ladies show interest in learning those jumps, training techniques will evolve that are suited to them.

Exactly. The reality is that women were not really trying them it’s not like Yu Na was landing quads as a junior and somehow stopped Miki landed her quad like once. Since no one was doing them it wasn’t with the risk.

But now enough are doing it more will train it. Typically girls learn their jumps prior to puberty from what I have seen and then keep them.

So it’s not surprising that 18 year women were not able to immediately get this jump.

 

[MacMadame]

I also think that in general, the Russians start the kids with harnesses much younger than here. Not every rink has a harness or off ice equipment to train multiple revolutions.

I'm not sure how true this is. Every rink I've ever skated at including a rinky-dink, smaller than NHL size, devoted to hockey rink has had a harness. It's not very expensive to install.

 

[Sylvia]

Another article on this topic! This one is by Dvora Meyers for fivethirtyeight.com (Feb. 3) titled The Quad Jump Revolution Has Transformed Women’s Figure Skating. How Far Will It Go?

How Quad Jumps Have Changed Women’s Figure Skating

Yet again, the sport is grappling with how to propel itself while retaining the qualities that make it timeless.

fivethirtyeight.com

On the one hand, people are excited by the possibilities; on the other, they’re anxious about what this progress means for the future of the sport. The current quad revolution in women’s figure skating — like the quad revolution in men’s figure skating that preceded it, and the triple jump revolution that preceded both — means that yet again, figure skating will have to grapple with how to propel the sport while retaining the qualities that make it timeless.

 

[Frau Muller]

@Frau Muller I cringe at Peggy Fleming's commentary and I wonder if views like hers lead Tonya to club Nancy. I wonder what she would say about Eteri's students. Kami and Sasha look so strong out there with those shoulders and legs. They are not dainty little princesses but real athletes.

I bet Sasha will keep her quads after 18. Valieva can as well provided she doesn't retire right away.

Every society and culture has long-ingrained aesthetics. We can’t just lobotomize an entire population overnight.

 

[soogar]

I'm not sure how true this is. Every rink I've ever skated at including a rinky-dink, smaller than NHL size, devoted to hockey rink has had a harness. It's not very expensive to install.

It's pretty expensive to use though. People don't use a harness unless they are on an private lesson. There are also other cool things like ropes with some spinner that suspends the skaters. The Eteri students have the benefit of monitored practice time and ample opportunity to use a harness without worrying about paying a fee.

 

[Frau Muller]

This just happened to show up on my YT feed…a recent local-TV news story on an area skater who recently won USFS Juvenile National. Sofia Bezkorovainaya will be age-eligible - the “right” side of 15 - for 2026 Olympics. We need to encourage these little Sofias to continue. She just happens to be of Russian heritage…and the coach seems familiar (name from the past).

ABC7 DC

m.youtube.com

 

[Sylvia]

There was another local news piece on Sofia Bezkorovainaya that I posted about in the Kiss & Cry section in December: https://www.fsuniverse.net/forum/th...oct-5-nov-20-2021.108695/page-21#post-6131929

Local news piece on Sofia Bezkorovainaya, age 11, coached by Inna Volyanskaya:

11-year-old Alexandria ice skater has eyes set on Olympics after national championship title

A local ice skater who recently won a national championship has her eyes set on the Olympics.

www.fox5dc.com

Last month she won Juvenile Girls group D in Alpharetta, GA (landed 3Fq, 2F, 2A+2T+2Lo, 2A, 2Lz+2Lo) with the highest score (65.00) across all 8 CS qualifying competitions

 

[gkelly]

Sofia Bezkorovainais will be age-eligible - the “right” side of 15 - for 2026 Olympics.

Depends whether her birthday is before or after July 1.

 

[overedge]

@Trillian makes some excellent points about the "hidden" costs of skating that can discourage even families who might seem to be financially secure.

Trillian's post made me think of my own experiences as a board member at my club. This was before online registration/payment (I know, back when dinosaurs chased us to and from the rink), so registration was on paper forms. Usually parents would submit postdated cheques, monthly or quarterly, to pay the fees. There were always some parents who just couldn't scrape together the $$$ to pay at the expected times. It wasn't that they were trying to scam the club, but a lot of them worked temp or contract jobs and were paid irregularly. Or they had other expenses to cover and couldn't always have the payment money on hand for a specific date.

Sometimes the club was able to cut these parents some slack and let them pay late. But other times, the club had to say, sorry, if you can't pay now, then your kid can't skate. And that was really sad. I'll add too that even if the parents ended up paying when and how they could, they always paid. I can't think of any parents in these circumstances that didn't eventually pay the fees in full.

Something that really struck me was how humiliating it was for the parents to have to contact the club and say, I don't have enough money, can we work something out? I don't know if it's even possible now to set up alternative arrangements with automated online registration where you have to have a credit card to pay - families with difficult financial circumstances may not even have a credit card, or be able to get one.

These are the sort of invisible, or less visible, barriers that need to be considered when we think about making skating more accessible or affordable.

 

[soogar]

Or better yet, figure out how to train figure skating concepts on pic skates. Roller skating is much cheaper than figure skating and there have been a number of skaters who came from the roller skating side. I believe there was a German skater in the 90's who actually competed in both roller skating and figure skating. Was it Marina Kiellmann? I think it was because ice rinks closed during the summer that she did roller skating.

The US speedskating team got a lot of racers from inline racing. In fact, they had an advantage because they had learned how to push stronger on roller blades which translated to more speed on ice.

 

[overedge]

Another article on this topic! This one is by Dvora Meyers for fivethirtyeight.com (Feb. 3) titled The Quad Jump Revolution Has Transformed Women’s Figure Skating. How Far Will It Go?

How Quad Jumps Have Changed Women’s Figure Skating

Yet again, the sport is grappling with how to propel itself while retaining the qualities that make it timeless.

fivethirtyeight.com

I don't know that the sport needs to be "propelled" this way. Focusing on a very specialized jump that only a few skaters can do well is not going to build the long-run sustainability of the sport.

 

[overedge]

Or better yet, figure out how to train figure skating concepts on pic skates. Roller skating is much cheaper than figure skating and there have been a number of skaters who came from the roller skating side. I believe there was a German skater in the 90's who actually competed in both roller skating and figure skating. Was it Marina Kiellmann? I think it was because ice rinks closed during the summer that she did roller skating.

The US speedskating team got a lot of racers from inline racing. In fact, they had an advantage because they had learned how to push stronger on roller blades which translated to more speed on ice.

It was Claudia Leistner who competed in both. And don't forget tiny Tara who was a national champion in roller skating before switching to ice skating (or before her mom made her switch, depending on who's telling the story).

 

[Trillian]

These are the sort of invisible, or less visible, barriers that need to be considered when we think about making skating more accessible or affordable.

Probably also worth throwing geography into the mix. I grew up in less affluent and more rural parts of the country. I didn’t live anywhere near a rink with a USFS program until I was a teenager, and then we managed to pay for Learn to Skate (and a pair of skates that felt very expensive even though they probably cost less than $100). But I had a single mom with a full-time job who was raising two kids, and the 20-minute drive each way ended up being unsustainable. Even as a kid who really wanted to skate, I understood why she couldn’t do it.

I love to watch figure skating, but it is a very privileged and insulated world. As a competitive sport, it’s inaccessible for the vast majority of kids in this country. And for anyone who comes outside the more traditional circles of people involved in the sport, it’s not always the most welcoming experience even when they do manage to compete.

 

[bytheriver]

This just happened to show up on my YT feed…a recent local-TV news story on an area skater who recently won USFS Juvenile National. Sofia Bezkorovainaya will be age-eligible - the “right” side of 15 - for 2026 Olympics. We need to encourage these little Sofias to continue. She just happens to be of Russian heritage…and the coach seems familiar (name from the past).

ABC7 DC

m.youtube.com

Sofia’s birthday is August 2010 so she will be 16 in 2026 but on the wrong side of the age cutoff for the Olympics. In Sofia Akatieva’s position, but not a bad position to be in.

 

[Frau Muller]

Sofia’s birthday is August 2010 so she will be 16 in 2026 but on the wrong side of the age cutoff for the Olympics. In Sofia Akatieva’s position, but not a bad position to be in.

I knew that the name is familiar! Sofia Bezkorovainaya’s coach, Inna Volyanskaya, toured the US and beyond with various Tarasova tours of the early ‘90s…including Torvill & Dean with the Russian All-Stars! Many of today’s important coaches in Russia & the US were also a part of those tours…Schpilband, Irina Zhuk, Svinin, Liapina…Eteri too, I think. Eteri connection!

 

[bytheriver]

I knew that the name is familiar! Sofia Bezkorovainaya’s coach, Inna Volyanskaya, toured the US and beyond with various Tarasova tours of the early ‘90s…including Torvill & Dean with the Russian All-Stars! Many of today’s important coaches in Russia & the US were also a part of those tours…Schpilband, Irina Zhuk, Svinin, Liapina…Eteri too, I think. Eteri connection!

Praying to the skating gods that she makes it to the junior/senior level so that we can have an Eteri and Inna reunion.

 

[Frau Muller]

Praying to the skating gods that she makes it to the junior/senior level so that we can have an Eteri and Inna reunion.

As Dick Button would say: “This should hold Sofia in good stead.”

 

[layman]

Another article on this topic! This one is by Dvora Meyers for fivethirtyeight.com (Feb. 3) titled The Quad Jump Revolution Has Transformed Women’s Figure Skating. How Far Will It Go?

How Quad Jumps Have Changed Women’s Figure Skating

Yet again, the sport is grappling with how to propel itself while retaining the qualities that make it timeless.

fivethirtyeight.com

That was a really excellent article. I like the way it traced the history of women's technical achievements in the sport of figure skating and how those achievements were shaped by societal attitudes towards women in general.

I like the way that the article explored how women have been discouraged from pushing the technical envelope in figure skating right from the beginning...discouraged from doing certain figures, discouraged from doing double jumps, discouraged from doing triple jumps, discouraged from doing quadruple jumps...with the same arguments used...it's not lady-like, it's not safe etc.

I also like the honesty of the article in talking about how the latest technical achievements (quads) have been pushed with faulty technique...a technique that does not last past puberty.

If I learned anything from the article, it's that women's technical progress in figure skating will continue to advance (regardless of the attitudes towards that progress).

 

[Lizziebeth]

Another article on this topic! This one is by Dvora Meyers for fivethirtyeight.com (Feb. 3) titled The Quad Jump Revolution Has Transformed Women’s Figure Skating. How Far Will It Go?

How Quad Jumps Have Changed Women’s Figure Skating

Yet again, the sport is grappling with how to propel itself while retaining the qualities that make it timeless.

fivethirtyeight.com

That was an excellent article, and thank you for posting the link. I do think that quads and 3A for women are here to stay.

I do wish that jumps were looked at for prerotation but maybe that will come someday. I also think that there are many times that quad jumps do not go as planned and they need to be completed to give the skater points. Many skaters are still very inconsistent. Most women skaters will never get a quad or 3A but there should be a place for them in this sport

 

[bytheriver]

That was an excellent article, and thank you for posting the link. I do think that quads and 3A for women are here to stay.

I do wish that jumps were looked at for prerotation but maybe that will come someday. I also think that there are many times that quad jumps do not go as planned and they need to be completed to give the skater points. Many skaters are still very inconsistent. Most women skaters will never get a quad or 3A but there should be a place for them in this sport

I think eventually prerotation and other issues with the harder jumps in women's skating will be addressed. It will almost certainly take some exceptional skaters being able to pull off those jumps in a more textbook manner. If we saw ladies with quads and 3A's like the top men (in quality, not in difficulty), it would be hard not to create a distinction between their jumps and the weaker quad and 3A attempts we see.

Trusova definitely comes to mind as one of the better examples of quads, although I would say she falls into weaker technique on her quads other than the 4T. So maybe if we saw more skaters able to pull off quads consistently at a high quality, we would have a reason to start differentiating their jumps from the others.

 

[VGThuy]

I think the ISU wants to reward the effort right now and let the quad queens have their moment. Hopefully, the prerotation and the strange lutzes will be addressed before next season and the tech committees will make rule changes that prerotation as harshly or even more so than under rotations. If that happened, believe me, the scoring and rankings would be quite different and people would look at things differently the way we’ve all been conditioned to freak out over URs of all degrees.

 

[LeafOnTheWind]

I don't care who is doing what. They always should be looking at quality. It pisses me off that they don't.

 

[Seerek]

It was Claudia Leistner who competed in both. And don't forget tiny Tara who was a national champion in roller skating before switching to ice skating (or before her mom made her switch, depending on who's telling the story).

It was Marina Kielmann who competed in both.

And Matteo Guarise as a current example.

 

[overedge]

It was Marina Kielmann who competed in both.

And Matteo Guarise as a current example.

Per Wikipedia, Leistner was a roller skater before she started competing in figure skating. I remember this being mentioned at the time she was competing too.

 

[Frau Muller]

Per Wikipedia, Leistner was a roller skater before she started competing in figure skating. I remember this being mentioned at the time she was competing too.

I remember that, too. Leistner was a roller skater first…Dick Button may have made a snark or too about it.

 

[soogar]

It was Claudia Leistner who competed in both. And don't forget tiny Tara who was a national champion in roller skating before switching to ice skating (or before her mom made her switch, depending on who's telling the story).

https://memim.com/marina-kielmann.html - Says Marina Kiellmann and on wiki as well- however I wouldn't be surprised if Claudia Leistner also competed in roller skating as well.

According to a coach in Wilmington skate club , Johnny Weir also had a lot of roller skating experience as well.

 

[MacMadame]

I think the ISU wants to reward the effort right now and let the quad queens have their moment. Hopefully, the prerotation and the strange lutzes will be addressed before next season and the tech committees will make rule changes that prerotation as harshly or even more so than under rotations. If that happened, believe me, the scoring and rankings would be quite different and people would look at things differently the way we’ve all been conditioned to freak out over URs of all degrees.

This is exactly what happened for the guys so I expect it to happen for the women. However, I would be surprised if this happened so quickly as there are still very few Womens competitors who can do Quads. Also, they don't ding pre-rotation for anyone as far as I can tell. It may be in the rules but the rule seems to be ignored.

 

[gkelly]

Also, they don't ding pre-rotation for anyone as far as I can tell.

It seems to be somewhat regularly applied for toe axels at the ends of combinations, but not for other jump takeoffs.

 

[Seerek]

As it relates to this topic, The mainstream and social media sentiment this past weekend after the Team Event has been this odd mix of admiration for Valieva, combined with resignation (as it relates to the US ladies).

I'm surprised at this defeatist attitude. I'm sure in the next Olympic Cycle, someone will emerge with the necessary competitive technical base.

 

[tylersf]

I don't know that the sport needs to be "propelled" this way. Focusing on a very specialized jump that only a few skaters can do well is not going to build the long-run sustainability of the sport.

True, but if you want to sustain your country in international competition, the skaters/coaches need to reach international standards. At this point, the USA women doesn't realistically stand a chance to easily medal at the 2022 Olympics because we haven't rewarded technical ability, but artistic interpretation. If we want to be able to keep sending 3 female skaters to Worlds in the near future, our USA females need to up their technical content.
The USA has a history of not appreciating the athletic female skater. The tide for American female skaters has to change. If we maintain status quo, we'll have a crop of pretty, artistic skaters who will finish low at international events, then have to qualify to meet World minimums. Pretty soon, the USA will struggle to send one female to worlds.
If we don't have American female skating stars, what happens to the sustainability of the sport in the USA?