Late to the party, new upgrade for the forum in the meantime too.
Medvedeva switching to Tutberidze -> i think she did the right move. It wasn't going well with Orser (similar trajectory to Tursynbaeva), last outing was really rough and yes i can understand the injury, but not the level 1 spins, that seems lack of training which is understandable considering the situation. This move will help her both competitively, they'll try to make this work getting the jumps more consistent, and politically as Tutberidze skaters tend to get inflated marks especially in Russia.
Cup of Russia -> The calls here were very inconsistent and i don't agree with some of the decisions.
Shcherbakova won deservedly, i think she looked the strongest out there, smart switch (btw predicted at Test Skates, when some user here defended that underrotated quad flutz) to go for quad flip, at least for the edge, the full rotation is still missing to me. But overall she was skating better than the others, bigger, she was holding her spirals (except the skid spiral with no speed, that was a little awkward), unlike the others, she was performing a bit more too, and her spins were the best. TES a bit too high perhaps.
Frolova again looked very nice to me, i like her new free program, i like her balletic posture, she did very well here, second place, very consistent skater.
Khromykh above Talalaykina i don't agree, especially in the free. In general i could see Khromykh being a stronger skater, but here in the performance, in the free program Talalaykina did her job, yes there were some underrotations (as the others except they forgot to call!) but overall she kept it together, while Khromykh was a hot mess: all 3 combos were scrappy and forced, step-out on the 2a, fall on a 3ltz some of these other girls could land in a sleep, extremely off axis on the quad sal. Outside of Russia placement would have been different in this case, i'm pretty sure as we saw last season at JGP.
