Now, even the top pairs can't land SBS triple toe/salchow cleanly. What do pairs need to do to move the sport forward?
Well, to be fair, most pairs aren't made up of an eventual Olympic and World champion and a World bronze medalist.
And for perspective, Jill Trenary won the World Ladies singles title not long afterwards with two triple toes, a sal and a flip. And Gordeeva and Grinkov won the 1994 Olympic gold medal without even an attempt at a triple jump. Yamaguchi and Galindo were a quantum leap above all the other pairs as far as singles skating skills were concerned, then and now.
On the other hand, Yamaguchi and Galindo did not have the pairs skills that other pairs had. They had a major size disadvantage in Galindo who was not nearly as big and strong as guys like Sergei Grinkov, they were not nearly as fast as most of the other top pairs, and the "mirror" skating held them back as well. They were hitting a plateau at 5th in the World when Yamaguchi retired from pairs, and who knows if they would have broken through if they'd kept at it.
I also think part of the reason most pairs aren't able to do the more difficult SBS jumps, though, is because of the size issues. There's a definite advantage to have a size difference in pairs from a pure physics perspective to get those eye-popping pairs elements usually with a (relatively) big, strong guy and a tiny woman, but at the same time the bigger a guy gets and the more muscle weight he packs on the harder and harder it's going to be for him to reliably knock out a triple jump. I distinctly remember Galindo talking about having to lose a bunch of muscle weight when he went back to singles.
Pairs evolves, but it can be slow at time. It's hard to imagine any pair competing year in and year out with just a double axle as Meno and Sands did for many years now. At the same time, just a handful of couples have ever successfully a split quad twist, and that was first performed in (gulp!) the 1970s.
