Student-Skaters Face Off at the Winter Universiade

Denis Ten shines at home; Elena Radionova wins the post-Nationals competition she qualified for; Ukrianians take the ice dance.

The Universiade Games, held every two years, is an Olympics for student-athletes, open to all athletes between 17 and 28 (though it will soon be lowered to 25), either in college or graduated within the previous year. The 2017 Winter edition is going on until February 8 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The figure skating events started Wednesday, and concluded Saturday. Originally there were supposed to be events in all four disciplines, but lack of entries in the pairs event resulted in its cancellation. Although most don’t consider it a highly important competition, a number of skaters will do it. That includes some top ones. Often they failed to make anything bigger to end their season with. But sometimes they did, but compete at the Universiade anyway.

Men

Denis Ten might not get the home Olympics he’d once hoped for in 2022, but a home Universiade helped make up for it. He had no trouble winning it either. Once upon a time, perhaps Czech Michel Brezina might have been competition for him. But with Brezina tailspinning his way onward with seventh here, no one here was at Ten’s level. Both of his programs were good, with no trouble on the easier jumps. His triple axel jump caused him trouble throughout. He even singled out his intended triple axel jump combination in the free. However, he landed a clean quadruple toe loop jump in the short, and one with a hand down in the long. The crowd went crazy for both programs, maybe the short especially.

Japanese skater Keiji Tanaka continued his breakout year here with silver. His quad of choice was the quad salchow, and he more or less pulled off clean ones solo in both programs. He did fall while attempting one in combination in the long, though. His other combinations weren’t easy for him either, and he doubled an intended triple in one, though at least he held on to his three-jump with a triple axel in it. This led to him being third in the segment, though he still had no trouble holding on. His solo triples were no problem in either program.

After the short program, bronze looked like a Russian battle. Artur Dmitriev, Jr. and Andrei Lazukin were in third and fourth with clean skates, though the former had been shaky on a quad toe-triple toe, and the latter shaky on a solo quad toe and triple axel. Dmitriev even did the first half of his long well, offsetting a scramble on the quad-triple with a clean solo quad toe, and his own three-jump with a triple axel. Then he fell three times. Seventh in the segment, he finished fourth. Lazukin fared far worse. After putting a hand down on a quad toe-double toe, he went down on his solo quad, which the technical panel fully downgraded to a triple. In his three-jump, he doubled the intended triple axel. One fall on his solo axel and a couple more stumbles later, he posted a twelfth-place score and fell to ninth.

Bronze went instead to Sweden’s Alexander Majorov. A skater who’d never quite met early expectations, he’d been in sixth after a short where he landed a clean quad toe, only to fail to do his combination. But he skated maybe the best free skate he’s ever done. It wasn’t perfect; he fell on the three-jump. But with another clean quad toe and the rest of his jumps done well, he still got the highest technical score of the night, and was second in the segment.

Ladies

At first it looked like the ladies competition might be another Russian show, with Elena Radionova and Elizaveta Tuktamisheva one-two after the short. Even then neither of them were perfect. Tuktamisheva landed a good triple toe-triple toe, but turned out on her axel. Radionova did a harder triple lutz-triple toe, but it wasn’t quite clean, and her other jumps weren’t well done. She ended up leading Tuktamisheva by a hundredth of a point. Rin Nataya was a distance third. She landed everything, include a triple lutz-triple in the back half of the program, but had much lower presentation scores.

Radionova’s triple lutz-triple toe was far better in the free. She also skated the first half of her long program about as well as she has this season. But she had trouble with the jumps of the second half, culminating in a fall on her final triple. Winning wasn’t a problem, however, because Tuktamisheva’s free went wrong much earlier. She opened with another strong triple toe-triple toe, but the only triple she managed after that after that was a triple set of falls. Placing sixth in the segment dropped her to fourth, barely ahead of 2015 Universiade champion Alena Leonova. Leonova lost her triple toe-triple toe in her sixth-place short to a fall, though she did manage a triple-double. She landed the combination in her fourth-place free. That was generally a good performance for her, even if she popped a lutz and struggled to rotate a final combination.

So instead of two Russian girls, the podium had two Japanese girls. Nataya had the technically best free of the night, including her triple lutz-triple in the back half again. She might have won the segment had she not also singled her solo lutz. Bronze went to Hinano Isobe. She was fifth in the short, where she managed the dubious accomplishment of getting both her lutz and her flip jumps called and heavily penalized for very obviously taking off on the wrong edge of her skate blade, damaging her triple lutz-triple toe. Both lutzes and both flips in the free got less penalizing edge calls. But there her triple lutz-triple toe was one of two underrotations, and she doubled a loop. Nonetheless, when she still skated one of the night’s cleaner programs, she beat out the Russians for her medal by two and a half points.

Ice Dance

After the short dance, there were less than three points between the top four. But they divided themselves a bit more in the free dance, and the order was the same throughout. On the other hand, it could’ve easily gone differently, especially for third and fourth.

Ukranian favorites Alexandra Nazarova & Alexander Nikitin led by only .16 over Sofia Evdokimova & Egor Bazin after the short. But this was mostly because he’d gone awry on the twizzles, while the Russians had no such issues. In the free dance, the Ukrainians showed themselves to truly be the class of the field. Their free dance is a piece of creativity well above most, and they skated it excellently, with technique on a level the other teams in Almaty lacked. Meanwhile, Evdokimova & Bazin were a bit weak in their opening elements, though they got stronger and sharper as the program went on. They actually got a slighter higher technical tariff, but it made no difference. Nazarova & Nikitin won their gold by nearly ten points.

Initially two German teams were exactly a point apart. Shari Koch & Christian Nuechtern’s lead, however, was due largely to a two and a half points’ difference in their technical tariff. Katharina Mueller & Tim Dieck were better enough as performers to make over half that gap up. But things went worse for Mueller & Dieck in their free dance. That started with her stumbling in the middle of the twizzles, and ended with her falling on their second step sequence. They were eighth in the segment and lucky not to drop overall.

Koch & Nuectern, meanwhile, had an easy and graceful free dance, and beat Evdokimova & Bagin technically. Perhaps they should’ve even beaten them at least in the segment. However, the Russians got the higher presentation scores, which helped secure them the silver, and Koch & Nuectern settled for the bronze.

Next: International Fallout from U.S. Figure Skating’s President’s Remarks

View full results here.

The Four Continents now approaches, starting Feb. 14, but there are a few more international events between now and then.