A free skate with a terrible song/choreographic/image choice???
Let me point out a few reasons why Sasha’s programs didn’t work out last season (not that I think they did in the previous one too):
1. Short program: first half with good music, a lot of effort to make her look more mature and musical; it works. Second half with a too fast music, which her skating skills not allowing her to follow it. She looks clumsy, the choreo is bad and doesn’t help her. She ends the program exhausted (that’s why she said right after she moved to Pluschenko that she wanted SLOW music).
2. Choice of dresses: her short program dress before the revelation is hideous, and I’m usually a fan of Olga’s work. The dress makes her look even more clumsy and the white part underneath the skirt looks like a diaper when she jumps, it’s just terrible. During the revelation, the mechanism doesn’t work, it’s too obvious how she changes the dress and it’s done in an ugly way, along with the ugly dance moves. Those moves could work wonderfully for a very accomplished dancer like Baryshnikov, but not for our Little Sasha. The free skate outfits weren’t good, but weren’t nearly as bad as the short program one.
3. Free skate: “Let’s make a Daenerys program with the Night King’s theme song, and try to emote with the music, right, Sasha?”. If the image they were trying to go for was the Night King’s, then they made an excellent choice, because he ends up falling and losing too. How confusing it must have been for her trying to impersonate power/strength/femininity with The Night King’s Theme. What were they thinking!???? I wouldn’t be able to interpret it either, because that song showed up in the series whenever we were supposed to feel FEAR. Make your skater emote in a frightened way and your skater will fall off quads. Simple like that. Lack of choreography. Lack of interpretation. Terrible concept, trying to use a character with another character’s soundtrack. I could spend a whole day talking about the many reasons why that program didn’t and could never work.
4. Sasha believed she could only beat the other girls with 5 quads. She put all her faith and confidence in her quads since at least 2 seasons before. That’s the way her belief system was raised. Once she realized her quads could not be enough to win every competition, she lost confidence in herself. She looked to the side and saw Anna and Aliona with beautiful dresses, beautiful programs, and what did she feel like? Like the Ugly Duckling among the three of them, the one who couldn’t dance, who couldn’t interpret and whose entire confidence came from the ability to jump quads, something that, in that moment, wasn’t even allowing her to win. There was already tension between her and Eteri and it started to grow with the poor results. She lost confidence in Eteri and in herself, and it just wouldn’t work, because if you tell a girl who believes she’s all about quads that she cannot jump as many quads as she believes she needs to, you break her belief system. Was Eteri right to prioritize stability with less quads? Absolutely. But somehow, the way it was done made Sasha lose her ground, because she lost the one thing that was hers: the power of her quads. Sasha herself said - she doesn’t want to break records, she wants to land all her quads clean. She said herself she didn’t feel as sad for being in 3rd place, she felt the saddest for not being able to land all her quads.
