Russian Junior Nationals Determines a Junior World Team

Junior Grand Prix Champions win both golds in the singles, absence of pairs favorites allows other top pairs to battle title out; shock win in the dance.

For Russia’s numerous top junior skaters, it’s harder to make it to the World Junior Championships than it is to medal there. This is especially true in the men and ladies, where the competition is thickest. This year, as typical, the main event to determine the team was the Junior National Championships in St. Petersburg. Ultimately, the medalists in three of the four disciplines all got spots on the team. The only spot that did not follow the results here was one of the ones for the men.

Men

The men’s short program was certainly a pleasing show to watch. Most of the top eight landed everything, and no one had any major mistakes. On the other hand, none of them even tried any quadruple jumps. Some did try them in the free, where mistakes creeped in for more skaters than not. Dmitri Aliev was among those men who followed this pattern. When he survived a close call on his jump combination, his superior artistry easily gave him the lead. He benefited from this too in the free to make the win easy. He did double two jumps, but he also landed one of the competitions two clean quadruple toe loop jumps.

Alexander Petrov, after spending the fall competing as a senior, returned to the junior ranks in hopes of getting to Junior Worlds. He skated both his programs clean after the opening jump. In the short, that was only a triple axel with a hand down, though that still took him down to third. But in the long, it was a quad toe attempt he fell on, and was then downgraded to a triple. That may or may not have cost him the gold, and certainly cost him the segment, which Aliev won by a fraction of a point. He had to settle for moving up to win silver and his Junior Worlds spot.

The two men who had accompanied Aliev to the Junior Grand Prix Finale were less impressive. Though Ilia Skirda did as well as he could. He landed all his jumps, and was one of the most entertaining things on the ice. But when his jumps didn’t include the triple axel, sixth was the highest he could do. Roman Savosin, despite surprisingly low presentation scores, got through his jumps for fourth after the short. But when he opened his long with an underrotated quad toe, a fall on an underrotated axel, and a complete failure to do a salchow, he never really recovered. A tenth-place score left him in ninth.

The other man who medaled on the JGP circuit, Alexei Erokhov, did a little better. He went almost entirely clean through both programs. His free even included the competitions other clean quad. But it also included a fall on an underrotated axel. Had he avoided that one mistake, he likely would’ve won bronze. When he didn’t, his elements were sometimes mediocre, and they especially showed the effects of fatigue near the end of his long, he found himself finishing fifth, behind two surprise contenders for the last spot on the podium.

Good skating in his clean short plus a dramatic flair got Igor Efimchuk second. In his free, he went for the quad toe, and fell on it. He landed one triple axel with a triple toe, and stumbled on the other. He landed all the easier triples, but like Erokhov, he showed his fatigue by program’s end. That left him fourth in the segment, behind Makar Ignatov. Ignatov managed to skate two programs where he landed everything no problem. But he while he matched Efimchuk technically in his fifth-place short, he didn’t have his presentation scores. In the free, the two got the exact same presentation score. But Ignatov didn’t have any quads, or the hardest of combinations. So he only beat Efimchuk in the segment by two points. That wasn’t quite enough, and Efimchuk won bronze by about half a point.

Despite his bad skate here Savosin had far more credentials than Efimchuk, as did a couple of the other men who finished between them. Ultimately the Russian federation sidestepped the question of which of them to send to Junior Worlds alongside Aliev and Petrov by naming Alexander Samarin instead. Samarin would have competed here if he hadn’t made the European Championships. After his poor performance there, this looks like a consolation prize, and indication they won’t be sending him to the senior World Championships.

Ladies

Alina Zagitova further solidified her position as the newest Russian breakout girl by cruising to the ladies title. It actually wasn’t completely smooth sailing. It was in the short, where she knocked it dead, complete with a triple lutz-triple toe and her arms high up. But in the free, she failed to get out the second jump of her intended opening triple lutz-triple loop. But she simply attached it to the intended solo lutz in the second half. One wouldn’t have known that wasn’t where she’d intended to put it.

Polina Tsurskaya had been expected to vie with her for it. But Tsurskaya’s career is now more complicated. She has now been diagnosed with Keonig’s disease, and had to have surgery to have a disconnected cartilage removed from her knee. She was unable to complete her triple lutz-triple toe in the short and ended up fifth. Tsurskaya fought back with a second-place free, where she landed the combination by itself and with a double toe. She also doubled a flip which was supposed to be in combination. But she improvised to get three combinations in, attaching a double toe to the double axel right afterwards.

It was good enough she almost won silver. But the flip kept it from being quite enough, and she ended up with bronze, a little less than a point behind surprise medalist Stanislava Konstaninova. Konstantinova was initially second after a short with a triple lutz-triple toe, though she did nearly go haywire in her step sequence. The first part of her long, including the triple-triple, were also pretty good, though an underrotation and two doubled jumps in the back half made the results close. In fact, not only did she barely hold on to the silver, she was only third in the segment by .95.

As in the men, the other two ladies from the JGP Finale failed to keep up. Anastasia Gubanova and Elizaveta Nugumanova were a shocking eleventh and thirteenth respectively after the short. Gubanova had lost her combination to a fall. Nugumanova failed to rotate any of her triples, and the lutz in her triple-triple attempt was fully downgraded.  Gubanova tried to make up for it by upping her long’s technical difficulty. She pulled off the new harder jumps. But she failed to attach the toe to her underrotated lutz, and when she tried it with a triple flip instead, she got another underrotation. Nugmanova managed to rotate most of her jumps in her long, but still had a flip fully downgraded. That left only one triple harder than a loop, two of which she did as a triple-triple. They were sixth and seventh in the segment, seventh and eleventh overall.

Alisa Fedichkina, trying to bounce back from JGP disappointment, had the opposite problem. Landing her triple lutz-triple toe and her other jumps in her short left her third, only a fraction of a point behind Konstantinova. But long had five underrotations, including the triple-triple attempt she also fell on, and all three jumps of her triple lutz-loop-triple salchow attempt. Eleventh in the segment, she dropped to sixth.

Pairs

The biggest story of the pairs competition didn’t center on who skated there; it was about who didn’t. Not long after he uploaded his profile to a partner search website, Anastasia Mishina & Vladimir Mirzoev confirmed they’ll be parting ways after this season. Their coach initially said they would finish the season first, skating both here and at Junior Worlds. But then they pulled out of Junior Nationals, citing a knee injury to him, and after the competition, the Russian federation did not name them to the Junior Worlds team. So it seems as if their partnership is ending immediately after all.

Meanwhile, none of the other pairs who skated on the JGP circuit skated a clean short. Amina Atakhanova & Ilia Spiridonov came closest, with a hand down on a throw triple flip. That got them the initial lead, three points over Aleksandra Boikova & Dmitrii Kozlovskii, who nearly fell on theirs. But in the free, Atakhanova went down on fully downgraded side by side salchows and the throw flip, and they didn’t rotate their side by side three-jump either. When they also went wrong coming out of a lift, they ended up third in the segment, though they ultimately held on to silver. Meanwhile, Boikova & Kozlovskii landed everything, including salchows and a three-jump. He did only narrow avoid disaster on both the salchows and the closing spin, but they’d done more than enough to claim gold.

Alina Ustimkina & Nikita Volodin were fifth after the short, thanks to underrotated double axels. But even then, there were only a little more than a point behind Daria Kvartalova & Alexei Sviatchenko, who had surprised for third. Kvartalova & Sviatchenko’s short had been clean, if technically easier, and unsteady at times. Their free included the competition’s only quadruple split twist and one of the competition’s triple salchow three-jumps, if a hand down on a throw. But it ended with a botched lift and final spin. Losing all value on both elements, they found themselves eight in the segment, and fell to sixth. Ustimkina & Volodin underrotated their axels again, and they too were very shaky near the end of their program. But they more or less pulled everything except the axels off, including the competition’s other triple salchow three-jump, and got second in the segment and bronze.

Ekaterina Borisova & Dmitri Sopot’s already bad sophomore season went into free fall here. Going back to last year’s short program, they skated it so badly they placed last. Their long was a little better, but the still did badly on both side by side jumping passes. They could only place sixth in the segment, eighth overall. It is now all too possible we could lose both teams which won the last two JGP Finales within weeks of each other.

Dance

Favorites Alla Loboda & Pavel Drozd skated a flawless short dance, with the highest technical tariff of the night. Naturally, they took the lead. But their fellow JGP Finalists, Anastasia Shpilevaya & Grigory Smirnov, didn’t perform too badly themselves, and got the second-highest tariff of the night. They kept it to within two points. Then in Loboda & Drozd’s free dance, both step sequences went wrong. The first was weak even before she had a moment off balance, and on the second she outright fell. Meanwhile, Sphilevaya & Smirnov’s technical tariff was two and a half point’s higher than anyone else’s, and the level of joy in their free dance was pretty high too. Fourth in the segment, Loboda & Drozd dropped to second, and Sphilevaya & Smirnov claimed a surprise win.

Bronze was a battle between Anastasia Skoptsova & Krill Aleshin and Sofia Polishchuk & Alexander Vakhnov. Both teams skated both of their programs excellently. Polischuk & Vakhnov managed a slightly higher tariff in the short, Skoptsova & Aleshin a slightly higher one in the free. But Skoptsova & Aleshin were just a touch steadier in the short dance. They also performed both programs, the free dance especially, with a bit more maturity. Ultimately, superior execution and presentation carried the day in both segments. Even so, it was close in both segments, and their winning margin overall was only 2.01 points.

Next: Student-Skaters Face Off at the Winter Universiade

View results here. It’s mostly in Russian, but thankfully they follow the usual color scheme of blue for men, red for ladies, green for pairs, and yellow for dance.