Finnish skating news, 2018 onwards

info/entries for Nats (15.-16.12 in Kouvola): https://taitoluistelunsm2019.sporttisaitti.com/yleisolle/

sr women (12)
Emmi Peltonen, Viveca Lindfors, Jenni Saarinen, Linnea Ceder, Laura Karhunen, Selma Hede, Sofia Sula, Vera Stolt, Hanna Kiviniemi, Sallianna Özturk, Oona Ounasvuori, Jade Rautiainen

jr girls (20)
Milania Väänänen, Selma Välitalo, Enja Ruokonen, Mai Helske, Fanny Lindfors, Vilma Leppänen, Anni Skogberg, Melina Brusi, Essi Korpi, Dina Pöllänen, Sirkku Koskenvaara, Natalia Periainen, Petra Palmio, Olivia Hentunen, Siiri Julkunen, Tilda Liukkonen, Inka Melender, Emma Karjalainen, Sanna Tuomioksa, Venla Väisänen

sr men (3)
Valtter Virtanen, Roman Galay, Benjam Papp

jr boys (7)
Lauri Lankila, Lucas Tiilikainen, Warttu Riihimäki, Makar Suntsev, Aaron Hirsimäki, Toivo Kokk, Nuutti Järvinen

sr dance (1)
Juulia Turkkila/Mattias Versluis

jr dance (1)
Margareta Poutiainen/Mirko Niskanen
 
Viveca won her first senior title and her younger sister Fanny was first in junior ladies. :) I am happy for Jenni Saarinen who seems to have her triple jumps back now. She is a beautiful performer, my favorite lady. She is the bronze medal winner in senior ladies and Emmi Peltonen was second. Roman Galay won the men's event and Valtter was second. Lauri Lankila was first in junior men. He is practising triple axels and two different quads, not quite ready yet to perform in competition.
 
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I am also so happy for Jenni Saarinen's comeback. Poor Valtter Virtanen, it was surely a hard competition to him after losing his coach Jean-Francois Ballestier.

I predict the Finnish team in Minsk will be V. Lindfors and Peltonen in ladies, Galay in men and Turkkila-Versluis in ice dance.
 
Kati said:
Viveca won her first senior title and her younger sister Fanny was first in junior ladies. :) I am happy for Jenni Saarinen who seems to have her triple jumps back now. She is a beautiful performer, my favorite lady. She is the bronze medal winner in senior ladies and Emmi Peltonen was second. Roman Galay won the men's event and Valtter was second. Lauri Lankila was first in junior men. He is practising triple axels and two different quads, not quite ready yet to perform in competition.
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I'm adding some more tidbits from the STLL article:

- Viveca is being very Viveca about winning her first sr title: ”I always want to do my best on the ice. Today I skated well enough. Winning feels nice.”

- Jenni says she’s found the right people to surround herself with so she’s feeling good, taking it day by day but feeling confident about her future prospects.

- Roman is super stoked about skating 2 good programs and actually landing stuff in the FS (ICYMI: earlier this season, he imploded in the FS both in Finlandia and in Tallinn, so being able to skate a fairly clean & solid long program here was clearly a big deal for him.)

- Valtter actually won the FS (thanks to Roman having an invalid 3T in his FS because he had already landed 3A1Eu3S, 3A, 3F3T, and 3S2A+seq - seriously, I wonder how did that last 3T happen? Just a brainfart?) but agrees that Roman won the title fair and square. Looking at the protocol, Valtter’s 4T was deemed fully rotated but the landing was messy enough to earn him GOE marks from -3 to -5

- This was the 1st jr season for Fanny Lindfors and she says she just wanted to enjoy her first Jr Nats competition so she felt no pressure and winning the title came as a happy surprise.

- Milania Väänänen won silver in juniors but she says she’s planning to move to pairs and is excited about it. Her partner is an Aussie called Hector Giotopaulus Moore. (The article doesn’t say which country they’re planning to represent.) They’ve tried doing some lifts and throws together earlier on this season and now Milania is going to Australia for a couple of months to train together. At this point, a singles skating career is a plan B for her in case the pairs thing doesn’t work out for some reason.

- The jr dance champs Poutiainen/Niskanen teamed up last summer and she switched from synchro to dance only last spring. This was their 3rd comp together and they'll have their first int. comp. next spring in Italy (so that’s gotta be Egna Spring Trophy, right?)

Finnice said:
I predict the Finnish team in Minsk will be V. Lindfors and Peltonen in ladies, Galay in men and Turkkila-Versluis in ice dance.
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Does Roman have the FS TES min for Euros? I'm not sure...
 
nimi said:
Does Roman have the FS TES min for Euros? I'm not sure...
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Yes: he has the SP minimum from this season (33.98/minimum=28 from Tallinn Trophy 2018) and the FS minimum from last season (52.95/minimum for 2017-18=48 from Bavarian Open 2018).

He was just .02 short of the Worlds SP minimum of 34, but has a way to go to reach the Worlds FS minimum of 64 for 2018-19.
 
Finnice said:
@nimi , Milania and Hector aim to represent Finland.:cheer2::cheer2:if we finally get a decent pair.
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Yay! :cheer: I'm trying not to get too excited because it's so early stages and anything could happen but I'M EXCITED!!!!!

Oh BTW does anybody know what's happening with Ljuba Efimenko? I think she was supposed to represent Netherlands with some Dutch pair skater at some comp but then they disappeared from the entries list?
 
nimi said:
Oh BTW does anybody know what's happening with Ljuba Efimenko? I think she was supposed to represent Netherlands with some Dutch pair skater at some comp but then they disappeared from the entries list?
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It was Golden Spin of Zagreb that Liubov EFIMENKO / Dmitry EPSTEIN NED withdrew from... no idea if they are still skating together. He had competed at Egna Spring Trophy earlier this year with Anastasiia Smirnova but since they were the only senior pair, their scores did not count for ISU minimums.

Federation's article on the success of the inaugural Helsinki Grand Prix event: https://www.stll.fi/2018/12/20/helsinki-gp-toi-miljoonatuloksen/

According to Google Translate:
The result of the event in early November 2018 was € 1 million. The total spending of the GP competition during the event brought about EUR 7.5 million to Helsinki.
...
Laura Raitio, Chairman of the Finnish Figure Skating Association, is delighted with the success.
... Over 20,000 seats were sold to the event. Much of the audience followed the competition with the All Event. There were 12,100 individual visitors to the event. The largest number of foreign visitors came from Japan. A total of 3650 tickets were sold to Japan. In Finland, tickets were bought at the same rate. A significant number of viewers also arrived from China, Russia and the UK. 222 people were present at the press and came from 17 countries. In Japan alone, the event had more than 10 million television viewers.
...
In addition to the sportingly tough competition, special attention was paid to the number of soft toys thrown on Hanyu. The Finnish Figure Skating Association delivered about 700 mascots to the Christmas Tree Collection and Hope ry. Japan's news magazine Asahi Shimbun and local TV news reported.
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From Skating Finland twitter:
Scoring the personal best, Finnish Linnea Ceder won 3rd place in the Mentor Toruń Cup. Laura Karhunen was 4th. In juniors Selma Välitalo came in 2nd place. What a fabulous team we had in Poland!
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The STLL write-up mentions that earlier this season both Linnea and Laura were dealing with back issues, so they are very happy with the way they performed here. Linnea's back injury was bad enough to keep her off ice for a prolonged period in the fall, but she says she's doing really good now.

The archived YT stream from Torun Cup has Linnea's & Laura's SPs back to back, starting circa 4:36:30
(ETA: Looks like the archived long program stream from Torun got blocked? Oh well...)

These Torun Cup results might have some importance the Jr Worlds team selection. According to the published selection criteria, the jr skater who has the best jr SB (plus the required ISU TES minimums) gets the spot, but the Fed accepts jr SBs that are acquired in sr competitions, they just deduct 3 points from the sr total score. So, Linnea's new sr SB from Torun is now 146.81 and therefore her new "jr SB" is 143.81; for comparison, Fanny Lindfors won jr Nats with a SB of 128.91 points. I haven't really kept track of the domestic & international jr results, though, so I'm not sure if some jr eligible girl has a higher SB than Linnea.
 
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nimi said:
.)These Torun Cup results might have some importance the Jr Worlds team selection. According to the published selection criteria, the jr skater who has the best jr SB (plus the required ISU TES minimums) gets the spot, but the Fed accepts jr SBs that are acquired in sr competitions, they just deduct 3 points from the sr total score. So, Linnea's new sr SB from Torun is now 146.81 and therefore her new "jr SB" is 143.81; for comparison, Fanny Lindfors won jr Nats with a SB of 128.91 points. I haven't really kept track of the domestic & international jr results, though, so I'm not sure if some jr eligible girl has a higher SB than Linnea.
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From a quick glance on the ISU website, these are the age-eligible Finnish ladies who have the jr. world technical minimums: Linnea Cedar [S5], Minttu Heikkinen (age-eligible?), Laura Karhunen [S9], Enja Ruokonen [J5], Vera Stolt [S8], Sofia Sula, Milania Vaananen [J2], Selma Valitalo [J4], and Emma Veijalaninen (age-eligible?). Fanny Lindfors does not yet have her jr. world minimums, though there's still time to get them.
 
Linnea Ceder was picked for Team Finland in the European Youth Olympic Festival next month. She's the sole Finnish figure skater there: https://www.olympiakomitea.fi/2019/01/22/suomen-joukkue-eyof-talvikisoihin-valittu/

In #EuroFigure, Viveca skated a solid SP and is sitting 4th with a new SB, only 0.03 points from 3rd! :40beers:

Emmi is currently 10th. She made mistakes in 2 out of her 3 jumping passes, but at least she didn't pop or splat... and she got all level 4s which was a pleasant surprise. Thanks, Lambiel! (Also, seeing Stéphane wearing Team Finland jacket in the k&c felt nice...)

SP protocol: http://www.isuresults.com/results/season1819/ec2019/ec2019_Ladies_SP_Scores.pdf

ETA: Speaking of Stéphane, here's a new interview with him (in Finnish) about coaching Emmi and coaching in general: https://yle.fi/urheilu/3-10609499
 
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Whoah, that was an exciting last group to watch... *wipes sweat*

So awesome that Viveca managed to keep it together and skate yet another solid program when the pressure was on and the medal was on the line! And it was great to see her react like that! After hitting the final pose, I mean.
I'm so proud of her!

Also, Viveca's 3Lz3t was the highest scoring element in the SP; taking a quick look at the FS protocol, that might be also the case in the free.

Laura Lepistö congratulates Viveca on twitter:
https://twitter.com/LauraLepisto/status/1088873342101278720

Now on to other Finns....

Emmi was disappointed in her performance: https://yle.fi/urheilu/3-10615318
It was quite a surprise for me that a skate like that turned out to be enough for 8th place, but congrats to Emmi anyway for helping to secure 3 spots for the next year! I hope this experience will somehow help her find her competitive fire, but we'll see.

And ICYMI: The Finnish ice dancers also did surprisingly well, T/V are sitting 10th (!) after the RD where they improved their SB by 4 points: https://yle.fi/urheilu/3-10614453
ETA: You can watch T/V RD here
 
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Congrats to the Finnish ladies, even if it wasn't the performance Emmi wanted. On a superficial note, does anyone else think that Viveca looks a little like Emilia Clarke? The Finnish girls are all so stunning.
 
alexikeguchi said:
Congrats to the Finnish ladies, even if it wasn't the performance Emmi wanted. On a superficial note, does anyone else think that Viveca looks a little like Emilia Clarke? The Finnish girls are all so stunning.
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Well done to the Finnish Girls!! , Finland women back on the radar! Loved Viveca loved her 3lutz+3toe combo awesome, also enjoyed Emmi very much despite the mistakes, i thought it was a good performance and one of the best programs choreographically out there , so she deserved 8th place, can I just say congrats to the French girls too, they also secure 3 spots next year...
 
Looking at the European results . . . three spots for the Finnish women at next years' Europeans. Great, and Congratulations to them!!!

And it looks like, barring injury, there will be deserving skaters to use those spots.
 
Today, on her 20th birthday, Viveca Lindfors first took the math test of the Finnish matriculation exam in the morning, and then had the celebratory/obligatory "medal coffee" (served by the Finnish Figure Skating Association) in the afternoon - where she gave her trademark super laconic answers to questions presented by (mainstream) media, who then described her as "reminiscent of young Kimi Räikkönen". :D I love this interview!
https://www.is.fi/taitoluistelu/art-2000005983598.html

On a more serious note: Viveca also said that she likes to read novels during her trips to competitions, and feels that literature has contributed to her artistic development as a skater, and in life in general. The latest novel she read was The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and her further book tips include A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, as well as the whole Harry Potter series.
 
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Thanks for the link. Interestingly, Viveca seems to give more thorough answers and insights in this interview than anywhere I've seen or read in Finnish in the past 5 years.
 
IDC a.k.a. Ritti said:
Thanks for the link. Interestingly, Viveca seems to give more thorough answers and insights in this interview than anywhere I've seen or read in Finnish in the past 5 years.
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Yes. Thanks for the link it's an interesting interview! Viveca did amazingly well last week ...

I wonder if she and Emmi peltonen get along ... I remember seeing minimal communication between them at medal ceremonies in Finnish nationals
 
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