Nordic skating (FIN, SWE, NOR, DEN, ISL)

[TT_Fin]

Well, the Finland's "bigger competitions' statistics" after weekends' comps has been updated. Nationals play big role this time. By two clean skates Janna can go ahead of Emmi, she gets but if Emmi also skates cleans then Janna must beat her by ~3 points. The other have no real chance, only Oona but she should skate 100 % clean in both Zagreb and nats and little bit over her skills maybe, too as her technical content is easier than Janna's and maybe a little bit easier also than Emmi's. Emmi has the PCS, Janna has the TES. So Nella will go to Euros, nats show if the other spot goes to Emmi or Janna, Oona being a black horse as she still has one challenger comp before nats to improve her scores. The subsitutes' list behind this ladies is very tight also.

In men Makar must skate clean, then he gets 200+ points and can get the spot. It is possible. As said before, I have no real favourites in any disciplines, but I am interested and I like statistical math.

 

[TT_Fin]

I have started a thread about Finland's nationals at nationals thread. There is a link to result page. Interesting situation between men who gets the spot in Euros:

Arttu is not competing about the Euro's spot unless he scores almost 250 at nationals. I think it is not realistic. Between Makar and Valtter is is tight. Personally I don't know whom to prefer, because making it to top ten demands from both 110 % success in both programs. I like both, also I like Arttu. I like all Finnish men, I just hope they will learn to jump quads or 3as as it is needed in men today. But as there are now six men in juniors and seven in seniors competing and I know some lower ranked are going to 3as, there is really competition about the medals and there are black horses outside of the national team, in both men and women are some who could be able to make it to podium.

I also noticed it is realistic Finland may get it to in World team trophy. Already last year Finland was at place 12, but there was yet no pair to send.

 

[norwegianfairytale]

There isn´t much battle between the Euros spot for women in Norway, Mia Risa Gomez participated at a National competition this past weekend and won with a score of 158, the highest score so far this season for her. Even with the lower scores this season around the range of 129-146 she had the best total score before this weekend. Linnea Kilsand in third with 133 points was even bet by Kaia Kleven with 134 points, the last years national junior silver medalist who moved up to seniors this season. She only jumps 2A, 3S and 3T so her BV is not high. Linnea still pops too many jumps, since Mia didn´t start the season off as strong as last season, Linnea did actually have a decent chance of the Euros spot if she skated to her potential, but it seems to be a mental game for her.

I´m guessing the Euros spot will be confirmed soon.

As for JWC spot for women it´s very out in the open what will happen. The situation in juniors now is a bit unusual. I think only Mia and Pernille With has the minimums. I felt very sure that it would be Pernille this season, but she has been injured with a ankle injury and hasn´t been competing since early JGP, and I have the impression that she has been off the ice because she hasn´t been seen at the gatherings for the Nationals team either, so I think her injury might be serious and holding her off training for a while. It´s hard to imagine that she will be ready for JWC, but there is still some time. I guess if Pernille isn´t at Norwegian Nationals in the end of January it´s very clear she is not a likely candidate.
Oda Havgar who did go to JWC last season, does not have the FS minimums anymore, and she hasn´t been competing all season. I have seen her on the gatherings for the Nationals teams, so at least she is in training, but I think it must be injury related also since WD from the competition last weekend. However, since she is training, I think she will be at Nationals, but it doesn´t seems likely she will get the minimums in time if she is not in shape.

So then the only candidate left for now is Mia, she is still young enough. I don´t think she meets the criteria usually used because she would normally need two junior scores in the same season to be considered, but with the situation like this i´m sure they would look past it. The Fed usually don´t send the same skater to both JWC and WC either, but I think they can make an exception if there is special circumstances like this. I just checked the calendar and JWC and WC is actually a month apart this season so it would actually not be as bad as last season. It would be very sad if we did not use the spot.

There are some competition lefts to get minimums though, Ida Vamnes and Elea Rustgaard are candidates who can possible get them, but Elea has low BV and needs to be at her absolute best and Ida seems not to do well in competition, she jumps both triple lutz and flip. She has been out with a lot of injuries the last seasons so I think she struggles with competition experience.

 

[TT_Fin]

So Makar got the EC spot in men, Nella and Emmi in women. Iida K. is clear leader in junior women for JWC but in junior men it is as interesting as it was on senior men for Euros. Arttu Juusola is leading only by 0,51 points before Matias Lindfors. One score can be also from seniors decreased by five points, another must be international juniors.

 

[norwegianfairytale]

I just posed it in the retirement thread, that Maia Sørensen from Denmark is retiring because of hip injury



Really sad, since she was training for the new season this summer I hoped to see her.

 

[norwegianfairytale]

Great summing-up of the successful nordic weekend

Yes Milla and Nikolaj are awesome. LOL, I bet you would have wanted them to be a norwegianfairytale. I don't watch much dance, but to me Nikolaj looks like a born dancer. I mean after not even a year of training he's this good. For how long did Milla do dance? I know she trained at the Luleå summercamps and made friends with Nikolaj there. Was she competing in singles then? Would be interesting to know her history.

I think a lot of young Finnish girls were competing this weekend. Good for them that the federation sends them

Also Julia Sylvia Gunnarsdottir (ISL) was 8th at Volvo open. She’s only 18 so I hope she has the motivation and support to continue. She’s like 3 points away for Euro minimum tech in both short and free. I think she is closer to make it for junior worlds. Way to go Julia!

I´m sorry I did not reply to your post before, I simply read it earlier and wanted to give a proper response later, but I forgot it.

I really don´t mind much Nikolaj and Milla representing Sweden, it feels like they have very good support from the Fed and I feel very proud of them regardless of what country they represent. I always had very much care for Swedish skaters. A Swedish-Norwegian ID team feels like the perfect match. Only thing that worries me is if the SOC is going to repeat the unrealistic requirements again with a score that is impossible for them to reach and that they will be repeating what happend with big brother Majorov in 2018. Was it equal a score top 8 at Worlds? Looking at last season Worlds that score would be 196 in ID. I do not think that would be possible for them even with scores from senior B-events. And ID scores are also based more on politics so it would really be unfair as a fresh team to be compared with top scores for OG selection. I mean it´s really difficult to qualify for OG in first place, if they do it, it should be good enough reason to go.

I got the impression though from last OG that they changed it or started changing the requirements? Maybe you can fill me in there. It would be really stupid if the SOC to not send them with the development they had already. Milla needs to apply for Swedish citizenship before OG so I rather not she did it for nothing. At the time they decided to skate for Sweden, Sweden had no team and it was the only sensible thing to do, where Norway still had a team. Also Milla hadn´t competed internationally in a long time and could start competing for Sweden right away, if Nikolaj changed country they would need to wait until end of November since he last competed internationally at GP Espoo.

Nobody could have predicted Maria and James would need to retire because of health reasons, and i´m not sure if Milla and Nikolaj was aware about the other new ID team in Sweden. Not that it matters, because they are ahead of them, but in retrospect if they had teamed up together after the other team and the retirement of the Norwegian team, I wonder if they would have considered representing Norway instead to avoid competition for Championships. However, I do think it´s easier for Milla perhaps to apply for Swedish citizenship. I do think Nikolaj has rather good understanding of Norwegian, Milla does speak Norwegian and Nikolaj Swedish when they communicate, and that is not always the case between Norwegians and Swedes. If they have to do a written language test to get citizenship I think perhaps it´s easier for Milla. In Norway you learn two written languages in school, Nynorsk and Bokmål. Nynorsk is more similar with written Swedish, and Bokmål is more like written Danish. Maybe you know something about the requirements to get citizenship as well. And I do think i´m not mistanken that Norwegians are a litter better in understanding Swedish then the other way around.


You are right, Milla and Nikolaj did know each other from camp in Luleå, but back then they were both single skaters. Milla moved to Germany in 2020 to switch discipline to ID and teamed up with Nikita Remesvskiy and represented Germany. They only competed once internationally in juniors in 2021, apparently Nikita struggled with injury. Nikolaj always wanted to try ID, and he randomly asked Milla to skate with him for fun while he was in Oslo last spring to just try ID. Apparently they both felt they were a very good match on the ice, and since Milla did not know what would happen with her partnership because of Nikitas injury, it was really a no brainer when Nikolaj asked if they wanted to skate together. Milla and Nikolaj talked more about this in an interview at SVT recently, maybe you have access?

Anyways, it´s really a good match. I did remember reading something about them both coming from family of athletes, and they both like to work very hard. The hard work shows. They communicate very well and trust each other, which is why they are already so good at lifts.

PS: I made a fan thread for them already, there is additional information there with articles about them and so on

 

[norwegianfairytale]

I came across an article from a Finnish newspaper yesterday that wrote about Oona O. I could only translate it with Google Translate. She talked about her difficult year, particular money issues with skating, she is still living with her parents. Apparently also, she and Roman broke up this summer because Roman and Gubanova started dating together, and Gubanova is now engaged with him. Gubanova and Oona seemed to be good friends last season, I guess they are not anymore? This most really be difficult for Oona. I wonder @TT_Fin if you could confirm that this is real? The article doesn´t say directly they are not friends anymore, but the translation says "they used to be friends".

Here is one the articles.

 

[TT_Fin]

I came across an article from a Finnish newspaper yesterday that wrote about Oona O. I could only translate it with Google Translate. She talked about her difficult year, particular money issues with skating, she is still living with her parents. Apparently also, she and Roman broke up this summer because Roman and Gubanova started dating together, and Gubanova is now engaged with him. Gubanova and Oona seemed to be good friends last season, I guess they are not anymore? This most really be difficult for Oona. I wonder @TT_Fin if you could confirm that this is real? The article doesn´t say directly they are not friends anymore, but the translation says "they used to be friends".

Here is one the articles.

Thank you for sharing this. I follow Oona on Ig but she has not (at least yet) shared this. You are right. Exact translations is "Gubanova had been Ounasvuori's friend", and yes, the reason to break is Roman started to date Gubanova - and yes, they are now engaged. She says the break up was a shock to her, but now she thinks it a good thing they broke up and she has gone over it" Google translator does nowadays quite good job from Finnish to English so you probably got almost everything as it is. Oona does not have any sponsors though she is listed as commercially 62th interesting athlete in Finland and is most followed Finnish skater - the main reason to her followers is she shares her skating on outdoor ice.

I hope Oona gets sponsors now after medalling at nats and after this article as Helsingin Sanomat is the biggest newspaper in Finland. She is beautiful but does not make any number of it and this is one reason she is one of my local favourites - I also like late bloomers which we could say she is. She is also not afraid to post after disaster comps while many skaters keep quiet on situations like it. On the article she says she had an injury and had been ill for several times this season and she has had problems in practices. She says her skating has been financially difficult to her family from the beginning of her skating career.

Edit: The same article is also at one of the evening posts, too, which are widely readed, so she gets quite a lot attention after this.

 

[norwegianfairytale]

Thank you for sharing this. I follow Oona on Ig but she has not (at least yet) shared this. You are right. Exact translations is "Gubanova had been Ounasvuori's friend", and yes, the reason to break is Roman started to date Gubanova - and yes, they are now engaged. She says the break up was a shock to her, but now she thinks it a good thing they broke up and she has gone over it" Google translator does nowadays quite good job from Finnish to English so you probably got almost everything as it is. Oona does not have any sponsors though she is listed as commercially 62th interesting athlete in Finland and is most followed Finnish skater - the main reason to her followers is she shares her skating on outdoor ice.

I hope Oona gets sponsors now after medalling at nats and after this article as Helsingin Sanomat is the biggest newspaper in Finland. She is beautiful but does not make any number of it and this is one reason she is one of my local favourites - I also like late bloomers which we could say she is. She is also not afraid to post after disaster comps while many skaters keep quiet on situations like it. On the article she says she had an injury and had been ill for several times this season and she has had problems in practices. She says her skating has been financially difficult to her family from the beginning of her skating career.

Edit: The same article is also at one of the evening posts, too, which are widely readed, so she gets quite a lot attention after this.

Thanks for checking. It´s good to hear she feels now that the break up is a good thing. One thing is a break up, another thing is that your ex of 5 years starts dating your friend that happens to be an European champion, and propose to her after only a few months. On top of that, since they are all in the figure skating community, it´s hard to avoid them.
But, those things will make one stronger eventually...

I really hope she will get sponsor, she deserves it. Did not know that her year had been so rough with all this sickness. It would be really good for her if she could actually get one of the World spots this year.

 

[TT_Fin]

I think Oona maybe a little bit shy and she would need some help in marketing. Between lines is easy to read her family is not rich. As some skaters who have about 3000 followers and have not reached much success have some sponsors, compared to this I would guess is about how hard you work to get them and do you have people in background who help or know how to help with it. While following her on ig have noticed she is very polite to everyone and young skaters seem to like her.

 

[Lyyli]

I saw that HS article earlier and at first thought I should share it here because there is a lot of important content in there and probably this is the first large article of Oona, not sure about that though. However I got stuck and hesitated cause I don´t think the engaged couple has made their relationship public themselves. The tabloid that @TT_Fin mentioned published the same article but with a very inappropriate headline in my opinion. Otherwise the article was factual and hopefully will bring sponsors to Oona and help her to continue her career easier. Knowing that figure skating itself as a sport is seldom is a priority to media here, probably HS got interested in her because at the moment she has the most followers on Instagram of all Finnish female athletes, now 152K. I think that is a surprise as she has not been in publicity that much here. The article says that her outdoor skating videos have gained a lot of popularity. For example Kiira Korpi has 96K and Emmi Peltonen 21K followers so the difference is huge.

A piece of fun news: I was really surprised when I started to watch a Finnish TV drama series called Munkkivuori some time ago. Matias Lindfors has a role in it, he is Tapio there and appears in all 10 episodes. I found out now that he has previously acted in two other series as well. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9789628/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t43

 

[norwegianfairytale]

I saw that HS article earlier and at first thought I should share it here because there is a lot of important content in there and probably this is the first large article of Oona, not sure about that though. However I got stuck and hesitated cause I don´t think the engaged couple has made their relationship public themselves. The tabloid that @TT_Fin mentioned published the same article but with a very inappropriate headline in my opinion. Otherwise the article was factual and hopefully will bring sponsors to Oona and help her to continue her career easier. Knowing that figure skating itself as a sport is seldom is a priority to media here, probably HS got interested in her because at the moment she has the most followers on Instagram of all Finnish female athletes, now 152K. I think that is a surprise as she has not been in publicity that much here. The article says that her outdoor skating videos have gained a lot of popularity. For example Kiira Korpi has 96K and Emmi Peltonen 21K followers so the difference is huge.

A piece of fun news: I was really surprised when I started to watch a Finnish TV drama series called Munkkivuori some time ago. Matias Lindfors has a role in it, he is Tapio there and appears in all 10 episodes. I found out now that he has previously acted in two other series as well. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9789628/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t43

Wow, no wonder Matias is such a good performer on the ice, it all makes sense!

About making Gubanova and Galays relationship public. I do think it´s more then fair to share the article since Oona was involved in the whole thing (I can´t say anything about the title though as I don´t understand it), and she has the right to tell about her feelings. I would think the only sensible reason for them to not tell about it earlier, was to protect Oona because of the circumstances.

IMO, if they wanted it to still be a secret, I do not think Gubanova should have shared her engagement ring in such a happy social post weeks ago. Eventually people would figure it out, I suppose a lot already knew when she posted it, and rumors were swirling. It does not make it better to tell A but not B. Honestly i´m thinking if it was their choice to keep it secret and not to protect the other part, it was because of all the negative reaction people would have because of the circumstances. Waiting to tell the rest of the world about it is not really helping when you show off your engagement ring a couple of months after a nasty break up.

 

[Lyyli]

Wow, no wonder Matias is such a good performer on the ice, it all makes sense!

About making Gubanova and Galays relationship public. I do think it´s more then fair to share the article since Oona was involved in the whole thing (I can´t say anything about the title though as I don´t understand it), and she has the right to tell about her feelings. I would think the only sensible reason for them to not tell about it earlier, was to protect Oona because of the circumstances.

IMO, if they wanted it to still be a secret, I do not think Gubanova should have shared her engagement ring in such a happy social post weeks ago. Eventually people would figure it out, I suppose a lot already knew when she posted it, and rumors were swirling. It does not make it better to tell A but not B. Honestly i´m thinking if it was their choice to keep it secret and not to protect the other part, it was because of all the negative reaction people would have because of the circumstances. Waiting to tell the rest of the world about it is not really helping when you show off your engagement ring a couple of months after a nasty break up.

Yes, I know it is complicated and it is possible that you got it right. After all, I was not criticizing Oona at all, but the media, which mostly focuses on off-ice things and scandals and maybe even persuades interviewees to tell private things that they might not want to tell in the first place. You rarely see articles focusing on the content of figure skating itself and that it what I would like to see more.

 

[norwegianfairytale]

Yes, I know it is complicated and it is possible that you got it right. After all, I was not criticizing Oona at all, but the media, which mostly focuses on off-ice things and scandals and maybe even persuades interviewees to tell private things that they might not want to tell in the first place. You rarely see articles focusing on the content of figure skating itself and that it what I would like to see more.

I get what you mean, it´s very typical media. Norwegian media loves to focus on scandal as well, particular in figure skating. It´s so annoying.

 

[TT_Fin]

The title is clickbait on the tabloit. I am sure Oona herself does not like it. The article itself is good and also some people write in comments that the title has very less in common with the article.

 

[TT_Fin]

It is quite interesting situation now as there are so many who dream about the spot at worlds. At the moment Nella, Janna and Olivia Lisko have both SP and FS TES. Oona has SP, not FS and Emmi has FS, not SP. If Oona and Emmi have two clean skates the selection will be very tight. There are still competitions left so everybody can increase their scores. I would also count Minja Peltonen as a black horse, she has had some highlights for example the FS at nats and her bronze at nats last season. When she skates clean, her TES is maybe the most demanding of all.

 

[Jeanie19]

The title is clickbait on the tabloit. I am sure Oona herself does not like it. The article itself is good and also some people write in comments that the title has very less in common with the article.

I feel for Oona. But she is better off without him.

 

[TT_Fin]

Some people write in comments that Oona has not got sponsors because she has not got markable success worldwide. But that is not true that she would need success at that level. She needs just somebody who asks for sponsors. For example company I work for sponsored one year an alpine skier, who just went to small international comps and not even medalled at national level. The reason is his father was my company's co-operator and he, the father, asked for sponsors everywhere he could. Usually my boss does not take part in these things, but in this case he knew also the boy and made an exception. The money was not high, something like 200 euros whole year, but when there are many of who pay something like that, it makes more possibilities. Oona would be a good model to for example any clothes company, but she just should ask. Hope somebody will contact her now.

PS. Oonas's spirals are one of the best at world, IMO.

 

[elektra blue]

Oona is absolutely better of without a guy like Roman and a friend like Nastya. also a man isn't really worth it...girls, don't spoil friendships because of a guy.

 

[NaVi]

Some people write in comments that Oona has not got sponsors because she has not got markable success worldwide.

She has 152K instagram followers. She should be able to get sponsors.

But there are plenty of European skaters who likely have difficulty finding sponsors because they lack high achievements they can point to. European federations should be thinking about how to reorganize figure skating in ways that would allow their skaters to appeal more to sponsors.

And I came up with a proposal here that I think does just that. The TLDR; is to have the Grand Prix replaced by 3 tournaments that are somehow differentiated from one another. The qualifiers for the finals would take place in conferences and Europe sans Russia would be one of conferences.