Beijing : According to the results of the US and Canadian championships, the teams of these countries for the 2022 Olympics became known. Traditionally, Americans and Canadians are the main competitors of the Russians in the team tournament of the Games. A miracle must happen this Olympic year for the Russian team to miss out on Beijing gold. MK-Sport analyzed the results of the collections of the USA and Canada with the performances of our figure skaters at the national championship, and was also glad that the Americans did not take a prodigy with Russian roots to the Olympics.
The Beijing Olympics will be the third in a row, in which figure skaters, in addition to individual competitions, will compete for medals in the team tournament. Since the Games in Sochi-2014, an Olympic commander has been operating in figure skating, within which the skaters (one or two in each discipline) present their short and arbitrary numbers, and the places occupied by them are converted into points. At the end, the points are summed up, and the winner is determined: in Sochi, the Russian team won the team tournament, in Pyeongchang-2018, the Canadians became the winners of the new competition format.
In Beijing 2022, the Russians have more chances to win the commanding officer than they did four or even eight years ago. The fact is that this season the Russians are competitive in every discipline. Only men’s single skating is lame, where the composition of the team for the Games is not known to the last, and the singles of Canada, the USA and Japan are head and shoulders above.
The US Championship has proved it once again. For the Americans, Nathan Chen became the champion of the country for the sixth time in a row , but he was not the main hero of the tournament. In a free skating program, Chen fell from a quadruple flip and stretched out on the ice during the step sequence, but he was still ahead of Ilya Malinin , a 17-year-old skater with Russian roots, who perfectly performed both difficult programs at the US Championships was placed only on the second step of the podium.
As a result, the son of Soviet figure skaters Tatyana Malinina and Roman Skornyakov did not even make the US team for the 2022 Olympics, Chen, Jason Brown and Vincent Zhou were sent to Beijing . Chen’s coach Rafael Harutyunyan even had to apologize for the misunderstanding from the Federation .
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“We don’t even know who exactly is on the commission dealing with this issue. I do not know for sure. But right after the roster was announced, I called one of the people responsible for the development of figure skating in America and asked how he would now look this boy and his parents in the eyes? What did this guy do wrong? In addition, I called Ilya’s parents and said that I wanted to apologize to them for what happened on behalf of all American figure skating. I am really ashamed of this decision. I just can’t explain it. “
One way or another, but Malinin with super content (4 quads in an arbitrary!) Will not come to Beijing 2022, which means that Russian singles have a chance to compete for command points at the Games, because neither Brown nor Zhou, theoretically capable of replacing Chen in one of the programs, this season no stars were caught from the sky. But at the national championship they made mistakes: Zhou fell from a quadruple lutz, and Brown did not cope with the only quadruple salchow in the program.
Keegan Messing (who became the country’s champion for the first time) and Roman Sadovsky (2020 country’s champion) will go from Canada to Beijing 2022 . By and large, there are no more strong singles in the country, but Messing and Sadovsky will be enough to compete with the Russians at the Games. At the national championship, both according to estimates did not even reach Alexander Samarin,
who became the sixth in the Russian championship, but, as you know, in Beijing 2022 there will be a completely different refereeing, and different estimates. Dancers and sports couples are much more dangerous in the Canadian national team. Kirsten Moore Towers and Michael Marinaro, Vanessa James and Eric Redford will perform in pair skating in Beijing 2020 . In ice dancing, the country will be representedPiper Gilles and Paul Poirier, Laurence Fournier Baudry and Nicholas Sorensen, Marjorie Lajo and Zachary Laga.
But even they are not as dangerous as the dancers and greenhouses in the US national team. In pair skating, Ashley Kane-Gribble and Timothy Leduc, Alexa Knierim and Brandon Fraser will perform . Ice dancing will feature Madison Chock and Evan Bates, Caitlin Hawayek and Jean-Luc Baker, Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donoghue.
American dancers have already beaten the Russians in the Olympic season, and Chock and Bates (winners of the national championship in 2022) earned four points more than our champions Alexandra Stepanova and Ivan Bukin for their two programs at the national championship . In cooperation with Hubbell and Donoghue, the champions of the United States will certainly impose competition on the Russians in the Olympic team tournament, especially since it is not clear to the last what form the leaders of the Russian national team Victoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov will take to Beijing , and whether Diana Davis and Gleb are capable of replacing them in the team leader Smolkin .
There is no doubt about the victory of the women’s singles skating in Beijing 2022. In the USA and Canada, they have not yet raised competitive skaters who can oppose anything to the quads of Alexandra Trusova and Kamila Valieva .
The American champion of the country was Mariah Bell , in the absence of Alice Liu and Brady Tennell , who became the oldest winner of the national championship in singles in the last 95 years. Bell won the country’s gold at 25 years, 8 months and 21 days: at the 2022 Games, she will become the oldest figure skater from the United States since 1928. Together with her, Karen Chen and Alisa Liu will go to Beijing – our skaters know how to fight them.
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