Yulia Lipnitskaya

Guys, I have created a thread with some new information. Feel free to speak your thoughts there: http://www.goldenskate.com/forum/sh...-speculations-and-drama&p=1053515#post1053515

Snow63 said:

Lakernik specifically mentioned Lipnitskaya. I think if Radionova for some reason will be third, she will still go at Euros.

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Yes, but if she finish in 3rd place, right? I'm saying that if she finish 1st or 2nd she will be sent.

yet another article on Yulia and Adelina.

http://tass.ru/sport/1665625

Fayruza said:

yet another article on Yulia and Adelina.

http://tass.ru/sport/1665625

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I think this is where Yulia spoke about the selection, rght? What did she said?

In short, what Yulia says is that her task is skate and perform as well as she can, while the Federation will do the picking out. If she gets to the Euros, she does, if she doesn't, it's her own fault - it's not the end of the world, she'll try to get to the Worlds and she won't quite retire at 16. It was both her and Eteri's decision to skate this year. And she won't be ashamed to lose to such good skaters she has to compete with.

Also Yulia said that she's glad that Eteri has supported her and that she'll try not to let her down at the RCh. I'm in shock, she's a 16 years old girl and such a character, she's not afraid to speak her mind on the other hand you see grown up people but completely spineless(see Ana P. trainer and other trainers who can't protect their own students, lol).

Thank you Fayruza and waterskiiiepic.

Great to see that Yulia expresses her fighting spirit. She is taking the responsibility if not skating well. I see no complaint. What a girl of amazing character!

And I've already seen some comment this interview as 'meaningless PC stuff'. Ah well, it would possibly have been more exciting for them to see Julia sulk.
Shutting up on this point.

Oh geez.....the drama

It's probably just to gain attention and boost ratings for Russian Nationals.

I hope we get vintage Yulia to show up throwing death glares and all. "Wait....you want to take my place this year in what event"

https://pp.vk.me/c540105/v540105760/1fc9b/-9_sRMFs1VY.jpg

"I don't think so"



Lets not forget that Yulia was "unexpected child" to the fed. Adelina has always been their favorite and it pushed her to earn everything in spite of it. Maybe this is will push her to fight for her spot the way she always had. All up in everyone's face

Fayruza said:

And I've already seen some comment this interview as 'meaningless PC stuff'. Ah well, it would possibly have been more exciting for them to see Julia sulk.
Shutting up on this point.

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At this point you just can't win if she does well people will always say she's overscored (not according to the rules), her jumps aren't high enough, (revealed to be false by the data from last year's comps) she's not good enough with the PCS criteria (so untrue as she fulfills many if not all bullet points of the criteria). And if she skates a little bit badly (a top five finish at the GPF is great skating for anyone else, besides that's only 1 time out of 17 or 18 comps), she's losing her jump technique, or puberty is hitting her (completely ignoring the flawless jumps she's done that morning, or a couple of days ago, or at the last competition).

On the non-skating side one incident of missing the medal ceremony under extenuating circumstances and people are waiting to tear her to pieces, if she does an interview were she reveals just how much character she has and people will always try to turn into something negative.

Seriously what does it gain these people to post such negative things, like a thread at FSU about the GPF that has turned absolutely vicious. If you have a point to make present the evidence, they shouldn't just make comments that criticize.

Sorry, rant over.

Isabel_O'Reilly said:

At this point you just can't win if she does well people will always say she's overscored (not according to the rules), her jumps aren't high enough, (revealed to be false by the data from last year's comps) she's not good enough with the PCS criteria (so untrue as she fulfills many if not all bullet points of the criteria). And if she skates a little bit badly (a top five finish at the GPF is great skating for anyone else, besides that's only 1 time out of 17 or 18 comps), she's losing her jump technique, or puberty is hitting her (completely ignoring the flawless jumps she's done that morning, or a couple of days ago, or at the last competition).

On the non-skating side one incident of missing the medal ceremony under extenuating circumstances and people are waiting to tear her to pieces, if she does an interview were she reveals just how much character she has and people will always try to turn into something negative.

Seriously what does it gain these people to post such negative things, like a thread at FSU about the GPF that has turned absolutely vicious. If you have a point to make present the evidence, they shouldn't just make comments that criticize.

Sorry, rant over.

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What I find harder to understand is that the comment was made by a Russian-speaking member of the FSU forum - she dismissed everything Julia says out of hand. Again it's a matter of interpretation, I think - but it reflects more on the interpreters than on Julia.
I find it rather amusing, to tell the truth - they always seem to know better what Julia meant. She's usually said to be forthright and blunt - but in this case she's all hypocrisy, as it turns out! While I think she can't really care for all that rat-race just now - she has to concentrate on her performance at the RC.

Isabel_O'Reilly said:

she's losing her jump technique, or puberty is hitting her (completely ignoring the flawless jumps she's done that morning, or a couple of days ago, or at the last competition).

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Or the SP. I'm still waiting for somebody to explain to me, how the puberty can hit in the long but not in the short program. :think:

Fayruza said:

What I find harder to understand is that the comment was made by a Russian-speaking member of the FSU forum - she dismissed everything Julia says out of hand.

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That particular user is always like that. She likes to be seen as such, apparently.

waterskiiiepic123 said:

Also Yulia said that she's glad that Eteri has supported her and that she'll try not to let her down at the RCh. I'm in shock, she's a 16 years old girl and such a character, she's not afraid to speak her mind on the other hand you see grown up people but completely spineless(see Ana P. trainer and other trainers who can't protect their own students, lol).

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I understand Eteri's reaction. It's good that she wants to defent her skater, and it's also normal since she is still a young coach and with less power thatn Buianova, for example. It's all part of the game in the end.

However, I would've prefered her not to speak before the competition. It's not good to send that message out, while your skater still has to compete. It can be seen as if you do not believe that she can make it 1st or 2nd at RN. Besides, different things can happen, Yulia winning, or finish 3rd but with a high score.
In that case I think nobody will put her in doubt. Even if she doesn't go to Euros she has to work for the Worlds, which counts much more. Nothing is a done deal till you are done.

Alba said:

Or the SP. I'm still waiting for somebody to explain to me, how the puberty can hit in the long but not in the short program. :think:

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Well it's that same special puberty that only hits the Russian girls but no other country's young skaters

Oh my goodness…I’ve missed so much! So much drama going on About Euros, I sincerely hope that the Rus Fed will pick Yulia to go, not only because I’m a huge fan, but because she really does deserve it. Even though she has struggled this season, she didn’t give up on the grand prix but rather choose to remain and compete. And she is the defending Euro champion with a score over 209 points. I hope she skates out at nationals, leaves her worries off the ice, and shows everyone that she’s not going “out” without a fight!

Yulia Lipnitskaia said that it's not an easy season for her, but she'll do her best at Nationals to take a spot in National team. She basically said, her goal is to skate, and specialists will decide who should be in the team. And even if she will not be there, it's not the end of the world, she still will have a chance to go to Worlds. She's just sixteen, it's too soon for her to retire
She also said that the competition will not be easy, many Russian girls in an amazing shape this season. So only the best will go to Euros.
Source: http://itar-tass.com/sport/1665625

I think she did well in this interview to be so diplomatic.
If Eteri as a successful coach makes sharp remarks (which are 100% true), it is dismissed as "protecting her students".
If the skater herself has such a sharp tongue the nay-sayers and fed officials, who are obviously 'not on her side', could see a disrespectful teenager and accuse her of seeking excuses for failure etc.

Everyone knows that Yulia wasn't on the Fed's list or radar, it was always Adelina and as their second priority if she didn't deliver Liza.
Then suddenly Yulia fought her way to the top, not being raised and nurtured by the big names like CSKA or Tarasova but with her sheer determination and talent, and of course her amazing coach.

I hope that exactly this kind treatment right now and such comments made by the officials will put freaking fire in her belly
The same fire she had last year, we know that it's in her and maybe this is enough to make it come out big time

Alba said:

I think Vanishilar said he use MATLAB.

I'm curious to know if he has done something like this. :think:

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Oops. Apparently I missed the last few pages of this thread.

Anyway, I use Matlab the way somebody uses Microsoft Excel. It's a really really big program geared more for academia or engineering, but one of its features is that it has an easy user interface for doing C-like programming (without having to worry about all the variable declarations, etc.). So depending on what I'm doing, I'll use either Matlab or Excel.

Anyway, for the jumps, there's nothing really mystical about it. Assuming we can ignore things like air friction and how extended the skater's legs are during takeoff, there's an easy relationship between the jump's height and how long the jump is in the air. The rest comes down to details, like how the person actually counts the number of frames. For me, I look at the first frame when the skater is in the air at the beginning of the jump and the first frame when the skater touches the ground at the end of the jump. This is because video capture is discrete; the actual time of takeoff is between the last frame when the skater is still on the ground and the first frame when the skater is in the air, and the same thing for the landing. Thus counting the number of frames in this way more closely approximates the actual time.

It seems like the Russian site does some sort of rounding to convert 30 FPS (frames per second) video into 25 FPS video for the calculations. I do not. Thus, my results will be more accurate (if it's 30 FPS, I directly calculate as 30 FPS). Additionally, the site doesn't account for how late in the program each skater did their jumps; one would expect that jumps later in the program would be lower than jumps earlier in the program. So I don't think it's valid to compare jumps of different skaters without taking this into account.

If you have video that on freeze frame shows horizontal banding, those are actually the most accurate type of video (other than 60 FPS video but those are rare because of how much space they take up) to measure jump height. Basically, the banding is because of interlacing; in my analysis it basically allows me to double the number of frames. So a 25 FPS interlaced video is like a 50 FPS video in terms of measurement. More FPS means better measurements.

Additionally, for jumps which they show on slow motion, I can sometimes make even more accurate measurements depending on how they do the slow motion. That's only for a few select jumps though (the ones where they have slow motion).

Anyway, I had started to do this, but never completed it. The main difficulty is that most of the videos are at 25 FPS or 30 FPS, and realistically, with such a slow frame rate, the jumps are usually within the error (which I consider to be +- 0.5 frames) of each other. What I mean is that if for skater A I counted 13 frames and for skater B I counted 14 frames, you can't really say that skater B jumped higher than skater A, because they're within the error of this measurement method. Now, if for skater C I counted 15 frames, then you can say skater C jumped higher than skater A, but not skater B. So I think it might be somewhat misleading to report the heights of their jumps without taking this error into account. As you might guess, many unscrupulous forum posters will happily ignore such measurement issues in order to try to support whatever their position might be, even if it's unfounded.

The process of measuring isn't that difficult, it's really just counting the number of frames in a video as you advance it frame by frame. The only difficult part sometimes is interpreting what you see, i.e. for a given frame, whether or not the skater had landed or not (or taken off or not).

Anyway, the measurements that I had made so far were (for a 25 FPS video) in the order they were executed in the program for Sochi FS:

Sotnikova:
3Lz (1/2) = 15 frames = 44 cm
3T (2/2) = 11 frames = 24 cm
3F = 15 frames = 44 cm
3Lo = 14 frames = 38 cm
2A (1/2) = 14 frames = 38 cm
3T (2/2) = 14 frames = 38 cm
3F (1/3) = 14 frames = 38 cm
2T (2/3) = 10 frames = 20 cm
2Lo (3/3) = 11 frames = 24 cm
3S = 13 frames = 33 cm
2A = 12 frames = 28 cm

Kim:
3Lz (1/2) = 15 frames = 44 cm
3T (2/2) = 13 frames = 33 cm
3F = 14 frames = 38 cm
3S (1/2) = 12 frames = 28 cm
2T (2/2) = 11 frames = 24 cm
3Lz = 15 frames = 44 cm
2A (1/3) = 13 frames = 33 cm
2T (2/3) = 11 frames = 24 cm
2Lo (3/3) = 8 frames = 13 cm
3S = 12 frames = 28 cm
2A = 13 frames = 33 cm

Asada:
3A = 17 frames = 57 cm
3F (1/2) = 14 frames = 38 cm
3Lo (2/2) = 12 frames = 28 cm
3Lz = 14 frames = 38 cm
2A (1/2) = 14 frames = 38 cm
3T (2/2) = 12 frames = 28 cm
3S = 13 frames = 33 cm
3F (1/3) = 14 frames = 38 cm
2Lo (2/3) = 9 frames = 16 cm
2Lo (3/3) = 9 frames = 16 cm
3Lo = 14 frames = 38 cm

Kostner:
3Lz = 15 frames = 44 cm
2A (1/2) = 12 frames = 28 cm
3T (2/2) = 12 frames = 28 cm
3F = 15 frames = 44 cm
3Lo = 13 frames = 33 cm
3T (1/2) = 13 frames = 33 cm
2T (2/2) = 9 frames = 16 cm
3S = 13 frames = 33 cm
3S (1/3) = 13 frames = 33 cm
2T (2/3) = 9 frames = 16 cm
2T (3/3) = 9 frames = 16 cm

Lipnitskaya:
3Lz (1/2) = 13 frames = 33 cm
3T (2/2) = 13 frames = 33 cm
2A (1/3) = 11 frames = 24 cm
3T (2/3) = 13 frames = 33 cm
2T (3/3) = 9 frames = 16 cm
3F = 12 frames = 28 cm
2A = 12 frames = 28 cm
3Lo = 12 frames = 28 cm
3S = 12 frames = 28 cm
3Lz (1/2) = 13 frames = 33 cm
2T (2/2) = can't tell (skates not in video frame)

Basically, you can see how even a one-frame difference leads to significantly different height measurements (~5 cm), so it's not particularly precise. (I'm in the process of making more precise measurements, but they take more work -- but that's why I haven't posted these numbers, since they're preliminary and subject to change. It's also possible that I mistyped some of these since I'm copying by hand.)

I think people who judge a skater's chances of doing a 3A based on comparing that skater's 2A with Asada's 2A isn't really doing a good comparison. Asada's 3A is significantly higher than any other skater's any other jump for ladies. Not only that, she rotates significantly faster in her 3A than she does in her 2A; I think I've mentioned elsewhere that Asada's 3A rotates even faster than Lipnitskaya's jumps. She really expends a lot of energy doing that jump. Basically, Asada "relaxes" significantly to do her 2A compared with her 3A.

Anyway, yeah I can do it for the men as well, in fact I can do it with any video where the frame rate is known (and as long as I can clearly see when the skate touches the ice). I generally focus on the ladies though because I'm more interested in them. It doesn't require any special skills, really, just the patience to sit down in front of the computer and count the number of frames. I think it's more accurate though (and hence more useful) if there is video that are (in order of usefulness):

1. 60 FPS (rare)
2. 25 FPS interlaced (means I can convert them into 50 FPS for measuring)
3. 30 FPS
4. 25 FPS (typical video)

But yeah, that's why I collect as many different videos as much as possible, to find which once I can do the most accurate analysis for different aspects. Hmm maybe I should make a separate thread about it. I was going to put jump height analysis along with my analysis of jump rotation (i.e. amount of pre-rotation and landing underrotation) but that's going to take a long time. Looking at jump height is much easier to do if people would be interested in it.

adelia said:

Euros will be Liza/Elena +1. The third person will either be Anna/Yulia (if they finish within the top 2 at Nats + whoever of the two finishes higher) or Adelina (if neither Anna/Yulia finish top 2 at Nats and Adelina has regained fitness).

Edit:
This is how I read it. Of course the Fed can always change their minds. But I think this makes the most sense.

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I think that is a pretty good prediction.

I could see Yulia gets bronze going to Euros over Adelina if the former does well and the later is less than perfect.

I actually could see Liza taking Euros off, and Yulia and Adelina going to Euros with Elena. Highest place gets the ticket to worlds.

StitchMonkey said:

I think that is a pretty good prediction.

I could see Yulia gets bronze going to Euros over Adelina if the former does well and the later is less than perfect.

I actually could see Liza taking Euros off, and Yulia and Adelina going to Euros with Elena. Highest place gets the ticket to worlds.

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Barring some injury (touch wood), Liza won't be taking Euros off. She has never won gold at Euros. And even if she finishes out of the top 2 at Nationals (touch wood again), I don't think Rus Fed would dare to take her off the Euros team if Mishin wants her to go. They may say top 2 get to go to Euros but realistically, I think Liza and Elena have already booked their places for the Euros team.