She didnt even try. Scherbakova does the same with her lutz/flip.
This is the attitude that I consider to be really gross. “She didn’t even try”. Do you know that?
It’s the attitude of people who don’t understand how sport works, how athletes are trained and drilled into certain things since childhood.
listen, I’m not going to pretend that Maiia is an excellent jumper. Her jumping leaves a lot to be desired.
I’m pretty sure when a kid is enrolled into his first figure skating classes at 3-4 years old, when the kid starts learning singles and doubles, not every coach that takes them is thinking “I’m coaching a future Olympic champion, I have to diligently correct every mistake or imperfection they have”. Most coaches of those beginner levels don’t care as much about the canonical technique, and they don’t think this might an issue, because 99% of the kids they teach don’t end up ever competing at such high level, where it is an issue. “The kid’s jumping is a little weird? He doesn’t take in my advice the first time I said it? Well, whatever, don’t want to repeat it again, it is what it is.”
Have you ever taken any classes ever? I have, and I can tell, that most teachers aren’t very dedicated to correct everything you do wrong, they just let it happen. When learning piano, my teacher used to correct my fingers at first (since I didn’t follow what’s in the book as a kid), but she quickly gave up, and I kept playing with wrong finger placement for a long time, which became a problem in higher levels for me. But fixing that is not comparable to trying to fix various technical issues in sport.
Later on, for jumping specifically, those issues become a lot harder to fix, practically impossible because of muscle memory over 10 years of jumping a certain way. There are very rare cases where significant changes happen, but saying it is a change that is easy and could happen for everyone is false.
Here is where a coach at a high level and an already elite athlete have to make a choice: spend years and invest a lot of time into something that isn’t even punished by the rules simply because of fans on the internet or for aesthetic purposes, put your career back several years and risk everything, knowing this adventure might not even lead to any success
OR
work with what we have and try to make the most of it, fix what it is possible to fix without putting other elements of their skating into detrimental state.
P.S. side note, even if coaches are super dedicated to teach a kid that canonical technique, it still might not happen. Depends on physical and mental factors, depends on raw talent and connection between an athlete and a coach. Good example of this is Alferova, mom of Veronika and Aliona Zhilina. These girls don’t have the same jumping technique and Veronika’s is superior, but you could hardly blame the mother that she didn’t try enough for her other daughter. Clearly she did, and it still didn’t help.
I can’t stress enough how wrong it is to judge athlete’s character and personal qualities or motivations based on their technique. There’s no malicious intent or an attempt to “cheat” behind their techniques. Maiia is clearly a very hardworking girl, she had so many upsetting performances over the years, even humiliating words thrown at her by journalists, but she never gave up and kept going. She’s one of Russia’s top ladies precisely because she’s a hardworking girl. She’s not perfect, and further from perfect than some other athletes, who have perfect technique. But it isn’t fair to put blame and character flaws on her for “not trying”.
