Are the old-school Russian pairs all gone now?

[antmanb]

I had exactly the same impression at these worlds. Up to this point I was thinking that Julia was the talented one and Sergei had to catch up. I was fairly impressed with Sergei at worlds; he has improved his posture and his overall presentation. He seems to almost always land the jumps. He may never become Sikharulidze or Dmitriev but he can be a very solid partner. Julia on the other hand did not impress me at all. She no longer appears like that incredibly talented skater. I wonder if Tamara could bring in a jumps coach for her? Her mistakes are killing any chances this pair may have of making it to the podium. I also heard that Julia is tough to get along with. That's a bad combination. Unless she starts fixing her technical problems this pair is not going anywhere. Afterall, Tamara can only do so much.

Another question is- why are they not going for the quad twist?

Vash

I think that like a lot of the other pairs - with the levels being assigned to the twist lift now you get more points for doing less rotations with level enhancers - like Pet&Tik doing the double. I think there was also something about an injury too. Given that the quad always looked so crashy they might be better to do a high clean big split triple than the quad which didn't split, i doubt they can add level enhancers to the quad and is often probably only worth a -1 GOE.

Ant

 

[antmanb]

G and G actually did a quad twist-but few noticed it! Katia said it was too much energy for too little reward in the marks--so they dropped it. Their triple twist was so huge that I wasn't surprised at all.

I thought the ISU had banned the quad twist after G&G performed it?

Ant

 

[Vash01]

AFAIK the quad twist was never banned. It was just a rare move.

Vash

 

[Jane2]

From the fluffs, it seems that the Chinese pairs skaters seem to live in a cocooned world, also, totally isolated from the rest of the world -- and the government picking up the expenses. Could the next team with that "old school Russian style" be Chinese?

Attyfan, this is exactly what I was thinking.....

 

[Ladskater]

I don't know Petrova & Tikhonov's history or where they were trained, but watching them skate, I couldn't help but think, They just look Russian. I don't know enough about skating to put it into words, but they just seemed to have a certain style that looked like old-school Russian, to me.

Now they have retired, and T&M have retired. Oleg Vasiliev and Tamara Moskvina are still coaching, but they don't have the resources and environment like they used to.

Will we see a pair with an old-school style of Russian skating again? I'm not talking about whether we'll see Russian pair skaters again, I'm wondering about an old-fashioned style and perfection. It seems like a huge statement to say that an era has come to a close, but is that the case?

I think you may be right. I was not not impressed with Julia Obertas and Sergei Slavnov who Barb and Paul were dubbing the future of Russian pairs during the Worlds competition. They just do not have that Russian polished pair look. Barb and Paul also made the comment that "T&M were the last of the classically trained Russian pairs." So there you go....the end of an era.