If she can make the effort to fly to Allen, Texas from Moscow to watch her Georgian skater, then she can make the short flight to Samara to watch and coach her best in the world skaters.
Standards have completely fallen away. I'm now seeing that Valieva in addition to the photoshoots last week and Medvedeva's party on weekend, has an appearance scheduled in Ulyanovsk tomorrow. Would this ever have happened in the past? She'll probably still score close to 80 in the short program operating at 70% of her capacity which is impressive, and motivation has probably been chipped away given what she has endured (all her effort last season and this might be for nothing in the end that has to play on someone's mind especially a child's).
I won’t speculate on what may or may not be going on at TT, but I will just repeat something I said years ago: dynasties don’t last forever. Other schools were bound to catch up.
The standard was set so high that it was impossible to maintain infinitely.
And when you win as often and as convincingly as they did, complacency isn’t out of the equation.
You also won’t get Anna and Kamila every time either. Getting one world class skater is hard enough, having 5 or 6 isn’t commonplace. That era, very possibly, won’t ever be replicated.
I’ve always been a TT cheerleader as is well documented, but even I always advocated for more schools to develop top class skaters. It makes for better competition and makes it better for the viewer.
I don’t follow non Russian skating currently in any way, but I saw a post on one of the Russian skating site that a ISU GP was won with a score of 205ish. If that’s true, then the state of Russian ladies isn’t as dire as people think.
We went from a Legend of Legends in Anna to the good/great that we have now. The level is still pretty damn high, but it’s not the highs we got accustomed too.
That’s part of sports. When Novak and Nadal finally retire, those left behind are still solid tennis players, but it won’t be the same until the new legends emerge.
As a viewer, it’s been good to see so much parity and wide open fields even if the skating hasn’t been as good or exciting as it was a few years back.
And anecdotally, other people also feel the same way. The buzz in the arenas isn’t like it was, the stuffed animals on the ice are significantly less, as are the banners the fans display to name a few. Go back a few years and see the noise that was made not even during competition, but during the warm ups.
Compare the number of posts here to its peak. I remember that it was rare to go a few hours without something being posted.
Major rule changes, like the age being raised, need a few years for the great coaches to figure it out. And they will, there will be 20 plus year olds landing quads in no time.
The previous major rule change ushered in a new era in this sport, as it become way more athletic, faster and more technical than ever before. There was a bigger technical jump the last 10 years than there were the last 40 before.