Oksanafan, thanks for this hard work! I'll watch them as I'm able to. I've never seen Dijkstra skate and have no idea as to her pluses and minuses. Schuba I've heard a lot about, what with her overwhelming advantage in school figures, but have never seen. I do remember Potsch very vaguely, and I kind of liked her style. As I recall, I preferred her to her East German successor, Witt.
As far as skaters who were good free skaters and not great at figures, I don't know enough about the technical aspects of skating to understand the reason behind it. I do remember hearing that the European skaters tended to excel in figures. Someone likened them to a toy being pulled along on a string because they were so precise. I don't know what Janet Lynn's problem was, but I doubt it was lack of application. Her coach was Slavka Kohout, who doesn't give the impression of someone who would put up with slipshod training. Were the other American skaters of the time better than Janet? (I know Peggy Fleming was superb at figures, but I mean from 1969 to 1973, Lynn's peak.) Maybe the Europeans just had special training techniques. I'd love to hear more about this from other posters.
As for Ito, I suspect the Japanese coaches weren't especially good at training figures at that time, and besides, Ito was such a phenomenal jumper that they probably concentrated on that aspect of her skating. I can't blame them! I'm still getting over the video someone here linked to, where Kurt Browning and Midori Ito (in their eligible years) both practiced a triple axel at the same time, and hers was as high as his. And she's about four foot ten! Simply mind-boggling. Who cares if she could do a rocker or a bracket better than anyone else when she had that?
