News and updates à la Française, part quatre

alchemy void

Post-its for the win.
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Can MBM still qualify for Worlds even though she wasn't able to go to Nationals?
MBM (and Mazzara) are on the roster for the Tallink Hotels Cup in two weeks, which would lead me to believe she still is definitely in the conversation for Worlds.
 

Orm Irian

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Can MBM still qualify for Worlds even though she wasn't able to go to Nationals?
If she has the relevant TES minimums, then yes, she can. Nationals is largely irrelevant compared to that. The question is whether she'll be ready to compete after her knee rehab and able to travel.
 

Sylvia

TBD
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FFSG announced their 2021 Worlds selections and alternates on March 1: https://www.ffsg.org/Mondiaux-la-selection-francaise

Ice Dance: Adelina Galyavieva/Louis Thauron et Evgeniia Lopareva/Geoffrey Brissaud [debuts for both teams; Marie-Jade Lauriault/Romain Le Gac are the alternates]

Pairs: Coline Keriven/Noël-Antoine Pierre et Cléo Hamon/Denys Strekalin [debuts for both teams]

Kévin Aymoz a été appelé (Adam Siao Him Fa est remplaçant).

Maé-Bérénice Méité qui représentera la France (Maïa Mazzara est remplaçante).

Worlds 2021 "disappointment for Brian Joubert and Léa Serna after the non-selection of the skater" (March 3):

Machine translated excerpts:
Victorious of the Masters at the start of the season, then of her first French championships in February, Léa Serna (21) undoubtedly pays for her poor performance in Tallinn [Tallink Hotels Cup comp. in Estonia], during her only international event, ten days ago. Sixth at the end of the short program, Brian Joubert Poitiers Glace's member fell to 12th place after numerous errors in the free. She was beaten by Maïa Mazzara (6th) at the end of this competition which was a test.
...
For Léa Serna’s coach, disappointment gives way to incomprehension. "Especially since we didn't have an explanation. The three skaters have a very similar level. Lea thought at least to be a replacement. His national title and the hard work done this season have not paid off,” says Brian Joubert.
The 2007 world champion and his pupil are now looking towards the next season. “Léa tries to be positive and thinks that this non-selection can be bad for good. We are going to do some fundamental work on the technique, on the triple axel and the quadruple jump. We are also thinking about the next programs. We want to get a qualification for the Olympic Winter Games in 2022 in Beijing," said Brian Joubert.
 
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Orm Irian

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Bruno Massot is taking the next step in his coaching career - he's moving to Caen, France to start a high-level training centre for pairs and singles skaters based at Ascel club. In this Instagram post he says it was something he and Jean-Francois Ballester wanted to do together, and now it's one last dream to fulfil.

It will be very interesting to see which teams and singles skaters take a chance on moving to work with him!

In other news, in her Insta stories Mae-Berenice Meite says she's at home with her parents, waiting on medical appointments for her torn Achilles tendon.
 

Karen-W

Checking Senior Bs for TES mins...
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Bruno Massot is taking the next step in his coaching career - he's moving to Caen, France to start a high-level training centre for pairs and singles skaters based at Ascel club. In this Instagram post he says it was something he and Jean-Francois Ballester wanted to do together, and now it's one last dream to fulfil.

It will be very interesting to see which teams and singles skaters take a chance on moving to work with him!

In other news, in her Insta stories Mae-Berenice Meite says she's at home with her parents, waiting on medical appointments for her torn Achilles tendon.
Well, that ends any dreams of a Savchenko/Massot comeback for next season. But, that's great news for France! Hopefully he will be able to help Hamon/Strekalin improve.
 

text_skate

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Well, that ends any dreams of a Savchenko/Massot comeback for next season. But, that's great news for France! Hopefully he will be able to help Hamon/Strekalin improve.
Well just yesterday Aliona said, that without funding by sponsoring, they can't start anew. They have to earn a penny for their living, they have children to provide for.

I'm happy for Bruno, that he is into fulfiling his and Francois' dream. Wish him all the best in doing so.
 

Sylvia

TBD
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79,989
Love Maé's positive attitude! https://www.instagram.com/p/CNDfep3Dmsy/
Excerpt:
Hello all !!!!
A little update to tell you that I’m doing amazing, I had my surgery and it went well j’y the Grace of God 🙏🏾 now is time for me to... patiently wait for it to heal and rest ☺️

Once again, THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART for your well wishes, messages, positive vibes, it uplifts my spirit on a daily basis and it’s a real boost to my mindset !
:kickass:

Adam Siao Him Fa shared a clip of him training his Stars Wars/Darth Vader-themed SP for WTT: https://www.instagram.com/p/CNDPUU5oKX1/

FFSG named their World Team Trophy team yesterday (March 29):
Léa Serna, Maïa Mazzara, Kévin Aymoz, Adam Siao Him Fa, Cléo Hamon/Denys Strekalin et Adelina Galyavieva/Louis Thauron représenteront la France.

Romain Ponsart et Coline Keriven/Noël-Antoine Pierre sont remplaçants.
 
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nimi

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Below are some machine translated excerpts from this new interview with Péchalat:
Nathalie Péchalat, présidente de la Fédération Française des Sports de Glace : "On a regagné la confiance"

Q: You say that people left of their own free will or yours, how did you choose the people who were to leave this federation?
N.P: "There are providers with whom you have to have a relationship of trust. With the lawyer who was previously at the Federation, we did not necessarily have the same vision in terms of communication with the ministry, and I wanted to clean up those relations so that there would be less tension. In these key positions, you have to surround yourself with people you trust."
She goes on to say that most of the Didier loyalists left on their own.

Q: Have you discovered new files, new confessions of sexual assault once you became head of the FFSG?
N.P: "Yes. An ethics committee has been set up with integrity references with all the necessary documents so that clubs can inform and educate licensees. There we had a few report cards that came back to us and we were able to deal with it through a protocol, but not the magnitude of the ones we all heard in the media. We received a lot at the beginning, until the summer, and since then we really have less (...)"
She says they've started to work with organizations like Colosse aux pieds d’argile to raise sexual abuse awareness among managers and club leaders: "We should have had a general meeting with this association and all the club presidents but it was done in video, unfortunately it was less impactful. It is true that the C*vid does not help us in this struggle."

Q: The ministry had threatened the FFSG to take away its accreditation during the scandal, did it give you any objectives?
NP: "They asked me for guarantees twice. The first on the ethical aspects, I had to respond to a very detailed letter on all the actions that had been put in place. The second was the evolution of the statutes and regulations, which was done with all club presidents at the beginning of October. Following this, the Minister of Sports lifted the possible threat of the withdrawal of the delegation. We have regained the confidence of the ministry."

She also says something like they didn't have any records and had to rebuild everything from scratch. Can somebody who actually speaks French confirm that's what she said? (Une fédération, c’est énormément de dossiers sur les volets éthique, juridique, sportif, administratif, communication et les événements. On a beaucoup trimé mais on a des résultats qui sont probants, on est en ordre de marche. On n’avait pas d’archives, on a mis tout à plat pour tout reconstruire à zéro. Maintenant les équipes sont au complet et on est prêt à attaquer cette saison olympique avec de vrais objectifs sportifs.)
 

Orm Irian

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On n’avait pas d’archives, on a mis tout à plat pour tout reconstruire à zéro.
My French is not idiomatic, so I might be missing some nuances, but I read this sentence as "We [the FFSG] had no files/archives/records, so we [the new people] had to lay everything out on the table in order to reconstruct them from nothing".
 

cholla

Grand Duchess of Savoie - Marquessa of Chartreuse
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My French is not idiomatic, so I might be missing some nuances, but I read this sentence as "We [the FFSG] had no files/archives/records, so we [the new people] had to lay everything out on the table in order to reconstruct them from nothing".
That's correct 😉
 

Orm Irian

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They had no records? 🤨

Someone must have purged everything before Péchalat got there. Now who could that be? :unsure:
That or they never kept them in the first place. Why bother creating a paper trail you’ll just have to destroy, after all?
 

Primorskaya

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It's weird, from that last paragraph it literally sounds like they had no archives of anything that went on before, no paper or digital records whatsoever. Which seems...impossible? Or like something out of a Cold War, fall of the Berlin Wall thriller where they burn all the Stasi archives before foreign spies can get to them.
 

millyskate

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It's weird, from that last paragraph it literally sounds like they had no archives of anything that went on before, no paper or digital records whatsoever. Which seems...impossible? Or like something out of a Cold War, fall of the Berlin Wall thriller where they burn all the Stasi archives before foreign spies can get to them.
It doesn’t sound that dramatic in French. More likely processes weren’t properly documented etc
It could be some of the archives have been removed by investigators in recent history.
 

Orm Irian

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It doesn’t sound that dramatic in French. More likely processes weren’t properly documented etc
It could be some of the archives have been removed by investigators in recent history.
Yeah, I joked above about the records never having existed to start with, but it's probably more like what we'd call in English 'loss of institutional memory' - some things, particularly processes, never got written down because everyone knew what they were, but then over time, and in the post-Didier exodus, those people left and the ones who remained didn't know what was needed to fill in the gaps, so when Pechalat came in her team had to rebuild them from scratch. But when you get a situation like that, a lot of the time people also don't bother documenting issues fully because, again, 'everybody knows' what's going on (and, let's be honest, it can be convenient for those in charge to be able to hide behind the vagaries of memory). That's when things can get a bit hairy.
 

Primorskaya

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It doesn’t sound that dramatic in French. More likely processes weren’t properly documented etc
It could be some of the archives have been removed by investigators in recent history.
Thanks, I know, I'm French :) Still an odd thing in such an institution. For the rest, I was exaggerating for effect ;)
 

beckab81

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Looking ahead to Nebelhorn, is there anyone other than Serna/Mazzera/Meite that might be in the discussion? What ever happened to Anna Kuzmenko? Based on WTT, I don't have much confidence that Serna/Mazzera are capable of getting a spot, and Meite is unlikely to be ready.
 

Kateri

void beast
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Looking ahead to Nebelhorn, is there anyone other than Serna/Mazzera/Meite that might be in the discussion? What ever happened to Anna Kuzmenko? Based on WTT, I don't have much confidence that Serna/Mazzera are capable of getting a spot, and Meite is unlikely to be ready.
I was wondering what happened to Kuzmenko, too! She seemed incredibly promising.
 

Orm Irian

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I just came across this article on the issue of hypersensitive drug testing and the punishments imposed for even unintentional ingestion of tiny amounts of banned substances on the ABC website, and it made me think of Laurine's case. :( I didn't know back when the reports of her situation came out the drug tests used in sport are genuinely sensitive enough to pick up traces of banned substances so minute that they actually plausibly could be the result of one contaminated batch of supplement, or a kiss, or - I don't know - picking up something somebody had previously touched in the supermarket, for crying out loud! And yet athletes are still held fully responsible for those minute traces getting into their systems, on account of some of them might possibly have been 'microdosing' in the past in an attempt to avoid getting caught. Sheesh. You'd have to live in a complete bubble without ever touching anything or anyone again to keep yourself safe from that possibility!

It really does drive home the extent to which the sports anti-doping system is adversarial and presumes all athletes to be intentional wrongdoers out to cheat the system except in the few seconds following their most recent tests returning negative results.

But anyway, rant aside, the article made me wonder whether the French anti-doping agency ever did get its act together and move forward with Laurine's case, or whether it got abandoned because she retired.
 

cholla

Grand Duchess of Savoie - Marquessa of Chartreuse
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But anyway, rant aside, the article made me wonder whether the French anti-doping agency ever did get its act together and move forward with Laurine's case, or whether it got abandoned because she retired.
Thank you for posting this but unfortunately your link doesn't work. As you can guess, I'm very interested in reading this 😉 so maybe you could help me find the article elsewhere? EDIT : OK I found it!
Laurine's case has not been abandoned and she was forced into retirement, it wasn't her choice. Her case has been pending for the past 20 months!! We are still waiting for a date for our hearings (I've recently testified in writing as have several other people, but it took this long to be "invited" to do so). During a recent video-conference, as her test showed only tracks of a prohibited substance, the anti-doping agency finally agreed she could have been contaminated accidentally. But she is supposed to prove it and how could we do that? As I was with her prior and during the entire competition, I have had my hair tested too and the result was negative, just like hers. So we have no clue how and where it happened. Due to a particular affection and its treatment, Laurine has a very slow metabolism so she could have been contaminated as early as 3 to 4 days before the test. Anyway, it would take a very stupid girl to ingest a prohibited substance that cannot even enhance performances, before a competition like Masters, particularly when you have been tested at said competition on a regular basis for the past 3 years. Laurine is everything but stupid. This crap has been going on for almost 2 years, she has been forced to leave her sport, has lost all forms of financial support, and her reputation has been forever tarnished. She has spent all this time going from fatalism to revolt. She has stopped counting how many times she tried to reach the anti-doping agency by phone or mail to ask what was on with her case. The answer varied from "nothing yet", to a recent and infuriating "we have more important cases to review than yours". She has a lawyer but as he his working pro bono, she can't be too demanding and he isn't often available for her. She has established a 7 pages report of every single thing she did from the moment she left her training camp in Italy to the moment she was tested. She could have been in contact with a prohibited substance any time, as we can all be. I've seen Laurine refusing to take regular analgesics during a massive toothache while we were hiking in summer because she was afraid it could contain prohibited stuff. She isn't even a partygoer, she doesn't drink, even now, she is a control freak when it comes to her health. Frankly, I don't know how she is able to endure all this. Her career has been destroyed after it had been plagued with non stop crap and just when things were finally going smoothly. I have had to bite my tongue a million times when speaking to authorities in order not to just lose it and scream. What happened is the most unfair thing of all and it's still not resolved because no one cares. The anti-doping agency apparently doesn't know what to do and has put her file on the back burner for ages. We have tried everything to make things move, and nothing works. The anti-doping agency is all sovereign. They can do absolutely what they want. Including nothing. And it's precisely what they are doing.
 
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cholla

Grand Duchess of Savoie - Marquessa of Chartreuse
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This sucks. Is there any chance that Laurine would be willing to return to competition if all this is resolved in her favor?
Not much chance no. She really has had it with the skating world. But that being said, she's still able to land clean triples when skating as leisure only once in a while... Better than what a lot of other French ladies can do. Maybe if FFSG was a little more helpful... (as opposed to remember she exists only after Maé got injured). But still, the chances are close to 0. Even if she was cleared by the anti-doping agency, it would be very complicated. 2 years without training, a complete loss of faith in the sport world and its governing bodies, the permanent fear a new catastrophe is on its way. It would be very very difficult. Coming back and being good would be a wonderful revenge. But the risks for her mental health would be too big. She is a tough cookie but even mental strength and resilience have their limits.
 

MsZem

I see the sea
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Not much chance no. She really has had it with the skating world. But that being said, she's still able to land clean triples when skating as leisure only once in a while... Better than what a lot of other French ladies can do. Maybe if FFSG was a little more helpful... (as opposed to remember she exists only after Maé got injured). But still, the chances are close to 0. Even if she was cleared by the anti-doping agency, it would be very complicated. 2 years without training, a complete loss of faith in the sport world and its governing bodies, the permanent fear a new catastrophe is on its way. It would be very very difficult. Coming back and being good would be a wonderful revenge. But the risks for her mental health would be too big. She is a tough cookie but even mental strength and resilience have their limits.
If you get the chance, please pass along the message that not all of us consider her reputation tarnished, and that there are plenty of people who miss seeing her skate. She owes us nothing at all, but it might be nice for her to know that? :)
 

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