When I checked the start orders about 24 hours before the competition and got a surge of butterflies, I realized that yeah, Adam Siao Him Fa has become a favorite skater for real
I did travel to see him last season already, so that should have not come as a surprise...
This really was his 6th competition of the season and he had back-to-back GPs with theoretically some of the hardest lineups in men so far, and so it was amazing that he was able to do the programs so well. The fall in the 4T combo was understandable - mistakes have to come in at some point - and he was admirably cool about it in the press comments. But what he did in the free was somewhat jaw-dropping. He was able to turn the shaky start into a rock solid performance... That the judges gave him a positive GOE for the 4T combo is just some compensation for the low PCS he still keeps getting. I hope that he will get to 93,55 by the end of the season...
This was the 8th time Adam has done a 2+4 quad layout in his career and he has now 4 free skates with all the quads in the positive side. Nathan has the highest number of frees with 4 good quads - 9 out of 14 competitions. Shoma has tried 21 times and has 2 with all quads clean. Hanyu tried 13 times and got 3 times all quads clean. Malinin has now 7 times with 3 times with clean quads. These numbers cover all kinds of competitions, domestic and international. (And just in case someone's interested, Nathan is the only one to get 2+5 layout with the free quads clean, 5 out of 11 competitions.)
It was interesting to see Shoma for the first time this season. I have never liked him very much - I think he has always been an utterly predictable, manneristic and boring skater and these two programs were more of the same. Though the short was slightly more interesting - here the tech panel showed love to him giving no calls for the 4F (in slow mo looked at least q, maybe even <).
After the comp, I did my quads stats collection and looking at the program layouts, I suddenly realized (really, for the first time!) that Adam does 6 jumps at the start of his free program. The other guys had more common layouts with the 3-4 jumps at the top followed by spins/steps and then second jump passes and so on. I rewatched just to understand why 6 consecutive jumps did not seem like a jump drill to me (and apparently to a lot of other people as well, because I have not seen any complaints about this). He really does put in a lot of variation of pace, movement etc. to the transitions between the jumps.
My main comparison here was Shoma, who has more variation in his free layouts, but in my eyes, looks really "tasapaksu" - a word in Finnish that really has no good translation, but literally 'of equal thickness', and also more generally something being the same all the time. He is like a steam engine on level ground, moving forward at a steady pace with a huff and a puff every 20 seconds (the jumps). There is no variation is pace until the end of the program when, this year, the music actually slows down. There is really no variation of intensity at all and with his not very nuanced movement and expression in general, this was not great to watch.
Gabriele Frangipani getting two good programs after an apparently very challenging summer and poor performances in the early comps was lovely to see! Magri quitting the YGA in the spring really left his students in a limbo that has been difficult to get away from...
Shaidorov was ok. If they had not included O Fortuna in the music cut, it would have been a credible Carmina Burana program - that bit showed his weaknesses in skating skills, speed production and creating intensity and power into his performance.
www.goldenskate.com
.
to Adam for the win.i didn't think Adam could skate two great programs a week later. He had scratch landing on his jumps. He wasn't as exciting as in France.
wow.
