- Joined
- Mar 17, 2015
What a sexist hypocrisy. Raf contadicts himself here:
at 20:05 he talks about how hard is to win Olympics for 10 y.o. girl now - since for Beijing she can't compete due to high enough age limit and for next one she is too old already
at 48:46 she talks about raising the age for senior skating due to health concerns of course (despite coaching Nathan jumping quads when he was kid too) - which will make much harder to win any given Olympics for any given junior girl
As an experienced coach he should know perfectly well that girls have much shorter competitive career age window - they peaks earlier and retires earlier as well. So, increasing age will diminish chances of participating in at least one OG at competitive age and especially in two OG - from pretty low to almost zero. The same can be said about learning quads - if you don't learn them early - you may very well don't learn them at all. So raising age can't prevent learning quads - Raf is concerned not about health here - he just don't want his pupils to compete against russian girls )
Actually if you listen carefully to what he says, he doesn't advocate for the young girls not to learn quads/3A at all. He even says "you can do it once" at one point because we all know that it's the skaters who have tried those jumps when young that can regain/keep them when older.
what he advocates against is the pounding of drilling those jumps every day in practice to include them in a program at age 13 or 14. Was Nathan competitively jumping quads when he was 13? no
As for the small age window for ladies, and peaking when young, well that's actually created by the fact the older ladies have no chance in the jump department against teenagers with no mature bodies. It's not that the older ladies can't jump at all, it's that they are competing with girls that do not belong to the same categories at all and the things that they gained like better presentation, maturity, artistry etc. isn't taken into account as much as the jumps.
Raising the age doesn't necessarily prevents learning the quad but it definitely would put more pressure on preserving the bodies of the young athletes and thinking long term so they can actually last enough to reach seniors instead of winning everything for 1 year at 15 and then being put aside forever.