2 seasons after Gumennik, Mozalev and Danielian graduated from juniors, I haven't yet seen a successor with a similar balance of technical content and well-rounded skating... Some impressions of the Russian junior men at JGP Kosice:
Kirill Sarnovsky: Strengths are in musical interpretation and performance, transitions, spins and consistency in the jumps that he is comfortable with (up to 3A). Skating skills are quite good. Next main challenge is adding quads without compromising consistency (could be complicated by future growth spurts).
Ilya Yablokov: Makes up for weaknesses in transitions and skating skills with power and buckets of idiosyncratic charm. Jumps are big but sometimes crooked, luckily he has a knack for saving them.
Andrei Anisimov: Smooth deep edges, skates big and fast, but not a lot of transitions. Needs to work on projection and mentally recovering from mistakes early on in the programme (in the FP, after the first missed combo, he rushed then noticed and slowed down, found himself behind the music and again rushed to catch up - hence why Ted thought he had bad stamina and musicality).
Alexander Golubev: Decent spinner but worst skating skills/transitions of the four boys here, so not a lot of scoring buffer if the jumps fail. Moderate-sized jumps but very fast rotation - unfortunately, like Anisimov, early mistakes seemed to get to his head.
By the way, we have five (5!) Russian boys at JGP Krasnoyarsk!
