Maxim Beliavsky: triple and quintuple jumps? | Golden Skate

Maxim Beliavsky: triple and quintuple jumps?

Ana Raquel

Rinkside
Joined
Nov 22, 2005
Is he still competing and practicing quintuple jumps?? Is he injured? Are russian kids practicing those jumps with a harness and without the harness on the ice?? How old are the ones doing them? Will their quints be allowed in competitions in Russia and abroad along with triple jumps?? Are there now 6 year old little girls doing triple jumps with or without the harness in Russia and in other countries?
 
Is he still competing and practicing quintuple jumps?? Is he injured? Are russian kids practicing those jumps with a harness and without the harness on the ice?? How old are the ones doing them? Will their quints be allowed in competitions in Russia and abroad along with triple jumps?? Are there now 6 year old little girls doing triple jumps with or without the harness in Russia and in other countries?
I understand the subtext of your post ;).

Figure skating is a dangerous sport and always has been. The female winner of Europeans had a broken leg this time last year (from jumping triples). Hendrickx out with a bad ankle requiring surgery, Levito out with a long term injury. Even skaters who have barely rotated triples have traumatic, long term injuries as you can see. I really don't think that extra rotation is the difference between this sport being safe and being traumatic. Lipinski was retired in her mid-teens requiring an immediate hip replacement. Adam Siao skates on a bad ankle (still slams on the ice with his backflip likely worsening it). I feel like people have another agenda when they talk about these jumps and suddenly show concern for the Russian juniors ;).

In terms of winter Olympic sports, luge, ski jump, snowboarding, ice hockey, alpine skiing are all much more dangerous, much higher injury rates. Are parents and coaches who enable children to participate in these sports immoral because there will be inevitable injury even deaths? High school football players have full contact, children playing rugby tackle each other, skateboarding and BMX are extremely dangerous summer Olympic sports for children, children participate in sports like motocross and other forms of motor racing.

Given that traumatic leg, hip, back injuries, concussions have always existed in figure skating from days of jumping doubles and triples (I just gave examples of skaters with triples who have traumatic, long term injuries), given this is a precision sport that requires years of training as a child to become successful as a senior, there is not an ethical way to conduct this sport if traumatic injury is someone's concern. Biellmann spins cause trauma to a skater's back, do we start banning them (probably makes sense than banning quads). Ban lifts in pairs? There is always ice dance and synchronised skating for skaters who want to participate in less traumatic forms of skating.

These are kind of rhetorical questions of course. I completely understand your post ;)

I don't think any child or parent gets involved in figure skating thinking it's going to be as safe as ballroom dancing. Different people have different risk tolerances.

To lower injuries in figure skating, it would be better to look at improving boot technology, to mandate that the skaters wear safety equipment. It is pointless to talk about safety when they go out onto a rock hard surface wearing protected by a sheer piece of fabric.
 
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Is he still competing and practicing quintuple jumps?? Is he injured? Are russian kids practicing those jumps with a harness and without the harness on the ice?? How old are the ones doing them? Will their quints be allowed in competitions in Russia and abroad along with triple jumps?? Are there now 6 year old little girls doing triple jumps with or without the harness in Russia and in other countries?
Belyavskiy never really competed with huge elements that excited a lot of comment, that video of his attempt with a harness was hyped up at the time when Shoma Uno mentioned quints in relation to over-rotating his 4F, and he (along with Kondratyuk) showed attempts at quints after Olympics.

Malinin and Dikidzhi are the only two male athletes who succesfully landed 4A. Both are out of their teens. Malinin seems to be interested in reopening discussion on quints that died down since the last Olympics.

There are junior skaters in Russia who compete without 3A and quads. 15 yo Lev Lazarev attempted a competition program with 5 quads yesterday, other junior men ranged from no no quads/3A to 1-2 quads and generally landing 3A. Some Russian 13 to 16 yo junior women attempted 3A on the same day, much fewer tried quads. Others didn't. Usually, the earliest attempts are at age 11-12 in competitions.

You will have to go through the protocolas of the competitions from every country to gather statistics, but there is a poster on this board, @eppen who provides all the statistics on quads every year, so you might want to search for that.
 
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I have not seen any mentions of Belyavsky training quints apart from what he apparently did as a 12-year-old, around 2019 (I guess). He has been attempting quads in competition since January 2019, 4S and 4T with low to mediocre success (64 attempts, 19 fully rotated, 15 with positive GOE = 23%, best ones have that percentage in 60-70s). The last time October 2024. As far as I know he has not trained any other quad types.

Most of the times, the first info of anyone training quads comes when they're doing them without harness. I would imagine they do harness at some point, but we son't get to see that very often. But then it does not necessarily mean much more than that they're maybe training even just to get rotation for triples. The last quint I saw was Finland's Iida Karhunen, who is training for a quad and was using harness in the process...

There are at the moment 177 Russian skaters who actively compete and have attempted a quad in competition at least once. The average age for the first attempt is 13,8 years - men (99 of them) 14,8 and women (77) 12,3 years. Majority of them have started to do quads in the 2020s, so a comparison to skaters who have started before that (starting 1983): 101 skaters and average age at first attempt for men (total 84) is 16,8 and women (total 13) 12,9 years. The youngest ones are 9-11 year olds, mostly girls.

So women have always been early starters, but boys are also getting younger. Boys are able get over changes caused by puberty, but might not be as good as they were as pre-teens/early teens. My working theory at the moment is that getting the quads at about when they start to be in/close to their adult height is perhaps the best. For example, Lazarev looks pretty small for a 15-year-old, so we have to wait and see when/if he gets a big growth spurt and whether he will be able to recover his quads.

For women, the propects are less favorable. There are 106 who have attempted quads in competition and the start age is 13 and the age of last attempt is 14. For the retired ones (18), the age at first try was 14 and the last 15,4 years. There are 17 women who have attempted quads at 17 yeard old or later and 7 of them have been able to jump at least one good quad, and 3 more than that...

I would imagine the prudent skater and their team would work on quints/risky new elements mostly during off season to avoid injury and missing important competitions. At the mo, not a whole lot of news on them.

As for declaring Dikidzhi's 4A landed? I would wait until he gets one in program in a proper competition with a strict tech panel. Most of the ones he did in the jumping comp looked pretty suspicious in slow-mo.

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As for declaring Dikidzhi's 4A landed? I would wait until he gets one in program in a proper competition with a strict tech panel. Most of the ones he did in the jumping comp looked pretty suspicious in slow-mo.
Unlikely, because according to Dikidzhi, he is not going to compete with it in traditional programs, because he can't do both 4A and any other quad after that, the way Malinin does. He landed it in a jumping tournament so it's kind of in between. I mean, tech panels calls range widely in strictness between competitions even in trad format.

Also, thank you for the exact and comprehensive data set.
 
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Thanks for the Dikidzhi tidbits! I have been wondering whether he would be able to get into a program since he has been getting more consistent with his other quads. But. alas, that will then remain "could have been"...

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