I know. She seemed kinda out of sorts.
She really had to fight through her performance today.
Not just the jumps, but some of the spins too.
Ironically - her steps seemed much sharper!
She is really starting to "sell" the program.
I say ironically, because I think of the choreography suffering most when a skater has to "fight" for a performance.
Maybe she was just being extra cautious today because of the SP yesterday?
The big highlights today for me were the triple salchow on the music and the double axel - same thing.
And the blossoming footwork sequences were a nice touch too.
BTW - I didn't see the 3Lz as UR - so it couldn't have been too severe. The 3Lo - another story
The 3F lacked its usual oomph today. A sure sign (to me anyway) that she was fighting tooth and nail for this program today.
I was going to write the same thing, that she seemed tense when she first took to the ice (same as yesterday btw), she clearly couldn't get outside her head. Later at the press conference she said so herself, that she spent the night thinking about that mistake in the short program.
At yesterday's press conference, after the SP, she kept looking and fidgeting with her hands so much (can't remember the last time I saw her avoiding eye contact at a press conference, maybe never), from that action alone I could just see the wheels cranking away in her head.
This is clearly not the result she was looking for (and of course I don't mean the win, that she loved and I bet wanted), she knows she is a better skater than this and she is super tough on herself. Quite a change from before. She was always super sad with mistakes but now she wants to put on a great performance on top of being clean. And she was clean today.
Nebelhorn: There she was super tense before the SP (like here, even more than here maybe), had a great SP, let out that big sigh of relief afterwards, started to smile at the K&C, next day at the FS she was less tense (still a little bit) put on a great show at her FS and smiled the rest of the way through. Japan Open she was smiling at the galleys even, not tense at all, then had a great showing of her FS.
Today she couldn't smile afterwards, not really, because she knew she was lacking in some spots. So the tension couldn't really dissipate.
That 3Lz wasn't under rotated (the Lo obviously was) but to her it is not about the protocols, like she said herself, is about feeling good and feeling that she gave it her all. Maybe in these moments, yesterday and today, she did give it all her fight, but she doesn't want to fight through it. She wants to just do it great.
I hope tomorrow she feels really happy at the Gala, has fun, and that process starts to put her mind at ease and she's able to go back to training and move on to a better place.
Silver lining on that UR call, this is the season of the UR so she's better off with that on her radar now when she can really work on it than getting called later on (this combo in particular is being looked at with binoculars, because being UR is it's most common problem, we can see that from the results of the others doing it). So I say "once bitten twice warned" in this case. This is not the JGP and people are being looked at really hard, unless they get lucky, and Alina is not a girl to go by on luck, she wants to get by on having true impeccable skill.
