From the interview Artur gave after the SP to me it looks like he kind of persuaded his coaches and we all know how stubborn he can be. Artur may change two or three more times his coaches, if he does not understand that getting his tech back needs time and that pushing himself to do unready content in competition will not foster his confidence, bring no results and what’s even worse seriously harm his component score, he will just end up with disappointing results.
The most annoying thing of the interview after the short to me was that he mentioned he was sick before this event and even home and not at practice for two days as he had temperature. Let alone this would be a reason not to go for a still unstable quad, as of course this did affect his shape.
I compared the PCS Artur got at last year’s Nats with yesterday’s LP scores: he received 84,72, so scores well above 8 back then. Here he received 78,42 (all marks below 8) with a much better program yesterday. Now at RN scores might be a bit inflated and the PCS-marks’ system changed, but putting Artur scores into relation to other skaters e.g. Luftullin (81,01) and Anisimov (72,80) had lower scores at RN, but they scored 85,41 and 80,59 at Panin Memorial. Which means Artur is also losing in artistry marks compared to more and more skaters. And while you can question the PCS scores as quite a few people who were live in the arena pointed out how artistic and musical Artur skated and questioned his PCS-scores Russian Fed looks for quads and consistency and this is unfortunately also reflected in PCS.
If Artur wanted to try the quad before the Russian GP, I’m sure his team might have found a very little local competition where he could have done this without danger to fall behind others in PCS. What he did was unfortunately really unclever to put it mildly. And it’s a real pity, as it looks like RF was willing to give him another chance with putting him on the reserve team.
