That’s not exactly true. Nobody is “sent home”, but only top 6 from nationals becomes the team and receives maximum funding. However there are are clubs that have maximum funding anyway, such as Sotskova and Tsurskaya club CSKA .
The first reason for Russian success is making it affordable at crucial stage-Novices and pre-Novices, and in Russia before 2011 they recioved little to no funding which made many 10-11-12 olds end their careers prematurely.
Thanks for the information.
Questions:
Do skaters only get accepted into the beginner training at young ages, and are they expected to keep up with some minimum expectations for their age?
E.g., is a 10-11-12 year old expected to already be working on at least double axels if not triples? Are they expected to train at least X hours per week?
If they're doing less than that, but they still love skating, are there opportunities for them to train fewer hours per week and to enter competitions with only double or single jumps?
What if they first fall in love with skating at 10-11-12? Are there opportunities for beginner skaters at those ages? And then for double-jump-only skaters as teenagers? Even if they get no funding and have to pay for it all from their families' resources?
Second reason is relevant to USA: encoaraging triple-triples. How many years ago USA started to do that? Isn’t that interview with USFSA president was last year or something?
Yes, the US bonuses for harder jumps have only been around for a couple of years.
I remember that Russia started giving bonuses for harder jumps at senior level (e.g., quads and triple axels, and triple-triples for ladies) in the early years of IJS. Are they still doing that? Did they also have bonuses for solo triples and double axels at lower Russian competitions?
But also important is underrotation control, as there are no notion in Russia like in USA that skate without falls but with URs is clean.
Officially there is no notion that a skate without URs is "clean." Because there is no official notion of "clean."
Underrotated jumps get called as < and get lower GOE, usually on the negative side. So if a skater can land rotated triples there's a higher upside to consistently rotating and sometimes falling than to aiming to always underrotate.
More often, jumps that skaters fall on are also underrotated.
However, where US is now offering bonuses at the lower levels where skaters are first learning higher level jumps, they can qualify for the bonuses even if they underrotate
and even if they fall. The lower base values (for underrotation), GOE reductions, and fall bonuses still apply. The bonuses is for attempting and rotating or almost rotating the harder jump.
If the Russian bonus system went away by 2011 (when the < vs. << distinction was introduced) then Russia may not have had to make a decision about whether to apply bonuses to underrotated < but non-downgraded jumps. If the bonuses were/are still around, then what were/are the criteria for earning them?
As US skaters move up the levels, they no longer earn bonuses for at all for jumps that are now more common at those levels. E.g., juveniles and intermediates earn a bonus for double axels, novices don't. Intermediates and novices earn bonuses for triple-triples, juniors and seniors don't. (As of the last year, juniors earn bonuses for triple axels and quads; seniors don't.)