On the contrary! Rachael's skating is mature beyond her years.
I think "maturity" like "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder -- we all clearly have our own different standards for what constitutes maturity. Obviously different posters here feel like different skaters deserve to be called "mature beyond her years." Caroline was referred to as such many times by commentators in the last couple of years, too. We are never going to change each other's opinions.
For me, Rachael's skating looks like a kid trying so hard to look mature, it just looks a bit affected -- her costumes and even her hairstyle (especially at National's SP) all were part of this concerted effort, and her coaches talked a lot about it in interviews too. In contrast, Mirai & Caroline skate more like their natural selves.
BTW, Caroline's FS was not perfect---she got deductions for two flutzes and an underrotated 3L.
Well, it had no obvious imperfections -- no fall outs, no hands down, no tight landings, no wobbles at any point in the skate. In the old day, before we had CoP and all these 'e' and '<' deductions, most people watching the program would have thought it was pretty much perfect.
The loop call could have gone either way, no one remarked on it until the scores came out. Over at FSU, which really doesn't like CZ for whatever reasons, most people thought Caroline won before the scores came up. People there were even saying that she looked like she was skating really carefully to make sure that she fully rotates every single jump, and while that concentration showed, they thought she did fully rotate the jumps.
Anyway, I don't want to argue the loop downgrade, but it was definitely close. It's not like she lost any speed or balance due to it, it was not an obvious under-rotation to the naked eye like Mirai's were.
ISU already has a review article:
http://www.isu.org/vsite/vcontent/c...-3787-4771-layout160-129898-news-item,00.html
Apparently Caroline sprained her back among other minor injuries coming into the competition. Also considering that she had to put in a different jump and learn a new spin (forward flying sit) for the SP, and shorten the LP and cut out a spin -- all within the few weeks since National's despite her various little injuries -- I think she did remarkably well here. Mirai & Rachael both have been skating the same junior programs all season after all. I didn't even notice where Caroline cut out the 30 seconds, the adaptation to the junior LP was seamless!
. Here, at least Rachael got one flutz call. At Nationals, she flutzed on every lutz attempt (although the technical panel overlooked them) and she likely did so here. Her flutzes were a bit less pre-rotated than Mirai and Caroline's, so perhaps that's why see she gets less flutz calls. Still, Mirai's edge control (at Nationals) was the best of the three with Rachael and Caroline being the same. Rachael just hasn't been under the same scrutiny as Caroline and Mirai as the expectations were less.
