Just wanted to ask a question about Russian domestic competitions before Worlds starts and the thread gets flooded.
It seems like Russia doesn't use the same age cutoff date for competition categories as the ISU, which uses 'before the 1st of July' of the previous season. So what cutoff date do they actually use?
Because some people have said that there is no season cutoff and they use the exact age of the person on the day of competition itself, which doesn't make any sense imo - there's just no standardisation and it doesn't make much sense that you could have to start your season as a junior and then suddenly become senior eligible in December, for example.
From the fact that they always seem to list birth year in the skater info ribbon that pops up (and in the competition entry lists), it looks like they could be using birth year to determine age - ie their age cutoff is 1st January instead of 1st July. That makes a lot more sense to me. And the fact that the competitions list birth year seems to support that, so is that how it works?
And if that's really how it is, is it maybe borrowed from something - like the age cutoff for schools maybe? Idk, I thought that they must have a reason to purposely make a different age cutoff than ISU's, so it might be used in other sports or the schooling system or something. School age cutoffs in my country are also determined by birth year, so I was wondering if it was the same over there and that's why they use the same cutoff for sports or something.