It's interesting cause i think Serafima and Maria results are very different.
Serafima was trained for the season, she did well at early Cup of Russia events, you can see it in her stamina, in her spins,... unfortunately her trip to Canada was not very successful, because she made mistakes but that can happen for many reasons: lack of experience on an international stage or just a bad day.
It wasn't a complete bomb, 175 points is not a great score but not terrible either, and to be fair her chances to medal on that tough event were almost none anyway.
Were the other skaters who didn't get the assignment really that much better?
Considering Tarusina retired for too many injuries, you have Nugumanova, Gubanova, Guliakova and frankly they were all on a similar level or even worse.
While Sotskova showed up at all the events with not enough runthroughs, not enough training, almost old-school soviet thinking: you train during the actual event, which is an absurd way of thinking under the IJS system in such a competitive field.
You can clearly see this with the lack of stamina and speed on the jumps, spins, everything.
It's different even from someone like Konstantinova who i believe trains the single elements well, she just struggles to bring it together in competition.
I guess RusFed or the coaches sent her to the events anyway in hope that after one meltdown or two she would have understood that more work is needed to achieve better results, but it has been more than a year like this.
It's hard to point fingers without knowing who is really pushing this: is it the skater who is giving up but still compete because money and other benefits, is it the coach who can't work with skaters without spending the whole day on ice, is it the club who forces skaters to show up anyway just to not lend these spots to other competing clubs.
What's important here for her is to set goals, even if she doesn't want to reach her old form, at least work on a schedule aimed at bringing improvements.
