I made the trip to Grenoble and it was sort of worth it. Liked seeing the junior singles live particularly. I agree what was said above about a dingy rink - it is indeed not great. It was supposed be at Orleans (don't know if that would have been better?), but then switched to Grenoble for some reason. It was sold out on Saturday, pretty well attended on Friday and not so full on Thursday, but that has been the case with short program and mainly junior days before.
But the men? Well, I would have loved to see Adam but was ok with the skaters that we had. No great passions for me apart from hoping that Kevin could deliver in front of his home audience.
The men's tech panel was pretty strict and I like that, it is better that way than actually seeing all the qs and carrots in slowmo and not on the score sheet.
Entertainment-wise, Kevin's programs were absolute top of the range even with the mistakes he made. He is always good to watch and he put everything into the performances (and a bit too much also which led to being a little careless). My only criticism is that he has to give a bit too much dead air before many of his more difficult jumps (though not the 3A so much) that the difference between performance and jump prep is too obvious. I wonder if they could mask it a bit better.
Grassl had improved in the time he has not been competing. He skates better, he even has a posture now. His jumps, however, are still mediocre. He is not really able to deliver a good variety of combos which is perhaps getting a bit problematic. He has no quad combo (tries yes, but nothing has worked so far), the 3A ones do work and he has an ok 3Lz+3T for the short, but in the free probably cannot use it because the 4Lz might turn into a triple... The complete absence of all kinds of flips is also interesting. And he has finally had to learn the 4S which IIRC he didn't wanna do when he was a kid coz it was too common and boring. I am waiting for the 4T to appear soon enough. The short is ok, the free almost unwatchable.
Shaidorov is a skater whose seemingly enormous popularity I find difficult to understand. He has tolerable quads and 3A but the triples don't shine brightly (and he still needs quite a few to make up 7 jump passes). The entry to the second part 4T in the short is glorious, though! The spins are so and so, but his greatest weakness is the poor skating skills. The bits between the elements and step sequence were not great viewing at all. He has some potential, I think, but as it is, I agree with what the judges are giving him. I can only hope that his team looks in the mirror, analyses the results, and gets on working remedying the situation (instead of blaming the ISU, judges, politics, and what not).
I still get nothing from Shun Sato. He has basically it all, good technique, ok choreos, but it just does not look great.
Yuma's short is good. His free has its moments, but I would still like to see sharper, stronger upper body and arm movements to match the style. I love the switch in tempo and intensity in the middle of the steps, gives me goodsebumps every time. IMO he has still some work to do before I would consider him really a great performer, as he looks a little cautious, tentative and nevers really lets rip. They have choreographed glances to the judges when he is passing them, but they tend to look nervous or shy glances instead of demaning attention (here, they could learn some lessons from Javi...). His jumps are beautiful and was happy to see a good 4F!
Ilia kind of made my trip to Grenoble worth it. Even on the not so great days, his jumping is good to watch. They've also done a bit of work hiding his weaknesses in lack of flow, complexity, and clarity in his what his feet do. The short has a lot of body movement and choreo that I like - the new costume was great, too. The free has maybe a little bit too long slow start, but the end rises quite high. He does let it rip.
It was thrilling to see the 4A in practices and I did wonder what he was going to do in the free. He also did not jump at all in his runthroughs so no one could really know what would come. His planned content was thrashed in the performance, so the tech panel really could not have calculated it all in advance (as suggested above)... I did think that he might be doing more than the 4 quads in the planned content based on the hints he was dropping about some surprises, but I did not expect to see ALL 6 different quads emerge in one program.
That was the first time ever anyone has tried to do that. Also, the first ever 7 quad free. That was really the biggest bit of FS history made in this competition. I was incredibly happy to get to witness these first times in person! It was messy, no doubt about it, but pretty good for a first time ever. He must have been dead already by the midway point. Nathan never got the 6 quad free right, but Ilia already did that in the Worlds in the spring. Now I am just waiting for him to get this layout all spot on...
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As an antidote, my all-time favorite audience was one time I was sitting behind a group of school children who had carefully prepared for their excursion by researching all the skaters who were slated to perform and making a celebratory banner for each. After each performance they jumped up with with the banner, shouting and applauding, and waved the national flag of the competitor.
