Figure skating expert Anuliisa Uotila is unfamiliar with the ways in which the Russian group operates, but recalls that doing quadruple jumps at the age of 15 has required tens of thousands of repetitions. It inevitably means that the child has little time left for anything other than practice.
A 15-year-old Russian skater Kamila Valijeva has been one of the most talked about athletes at the Beijing Olympics, first because of his historic quadruple jump at the team competition and then because of his doping cart during the Games.
Valijeva received permission from the International Court of Appeal for Sport (CAS) to participate in the women’s competition. According to CAS, preventing an athlete from competing would cause him irreversible harm. The reason was also that Valijeva is a protected person at the World Anti-Doping Agency, Wada, because she is under 16 years old.
A similar problem would not be faced if the minimum age for the adult series were in figure skating. Now the minimum age is 15 years.
An experienced figure skating coach and Sport Sports expert would have to raise the age limit, Anuliisa Uotilanaccording to many other criteria, all of which culminate in Kamila Valijeva and her pre – Olympic winners.
– The age limit of 18 would be a change that would affect structures. We should strive to change the structure of children’s sports. Allowing a person to grow into an adult and take responsibility for themselves. That would be a human right, Uotila says.
– As an adult, you are responsible for your own affairs. The whole hassle arises from having a child here who is not responsible for himself. This is a problem in children’s sports.
There has been talk for a long time about raising the age limit. According to Uotila, the chief judge Location Abbondati is in favor of raising the age limit. Representative of the Finnish Olympic Games Jenni Saarisen coach Minna Järvinen has expressed public opinion that 15-year-olds do not participate in adult competitions.
– In the adult series, the age limit should be higher. If not 18, then at least 17 years. The coach of these skaters has also publicly admitted that adults cannot do those tricks, Minna Järvinen told Sport a couple of years ago.
Finnish top Emmi Peltosta piloted for a long time Sirkka Kaipio has hoped to raise the age limit by at least a year, maybe even two.
– Raising the age limit would make sense from a physiological point of view. The body changes with it, especially with 16 years of growth. It’s much harder for a woman’s body to spin hard, Kaipio said in 2019.
There is no change in the age limits, at least in the near future.
– The agenda for the next ISU (International Figure Skating Association) congress is presumably ready and can hardly be changed. It will take a year or two for nothing to happen, Uotila says.
The 15-year-old has been training from an early age as a top athlete
Kamila Valijeva of the Russian Olympic trio, Anna Shtsherbakovan and Aleksandra Trusovan coach Ether Etherberidze has become known over the past decade as a manufacturer of young supertalents.
The previous gold piece of the Moscow coach was Alina Zagitova, who won gold at the Pyeongchang Olympics at the age of 15 four years ago. Also ranked second at the time Jevgenia Medvedeva was one of Tutberidze ‘s coaches.
Russia has extensive skater material, from which only the most promising individuals are selected for the best coaching groups. Valijeva has said that she moved from her hometown of Kazan with her mother to Moscow for figure skating when she was only six years old.
Valijeva was accepted into Tutberidze’s group in the spring of 2018, at the age of 11. He soon won the Junior World Championship and, at the age of 13, made a quadruple in the race.
Training for the top needs to start very early, and there is little time left for training. Fitting tens of thousands of repetitions in a few years is time consuming.
– Although I am not familiar with Tutberidze’s school and coaching methods, I can imagine that there are a lot of unethical methods that limit the rights of the child. The child does not have time for normal social development or making friends outside of sports. He has little time for school, family and parents, when there is only time for daily work, Uotila says and continues:
– All this is a prerequisite for you to try several quadruple jumps at the Olympics at the age of 15.
Working with children is familiar to Uotila, as he is a physical education teacher by profession.
According to Uotila, similar child stars have been seen in music, among other things. There is a wild amount of training in the background.
– I am terribly sad that we admire childhood. Why do we admire it? I would like to raise that issue.
Pyeongchang’s top duo Zagitova-Medvedeva has already ended her career due to chronic injuries. According to coach Tutberidze, Zagitova’s decision to quit was also motivated by a lack of motivation.
According to Uotila, new jumps are practiced with traction harnesses and fast rotation on pirouette boards before moving to the ice.
– Then we come to the hard ice where these jumps are made. There will be quite a few injuries, Uotila says.
The importance of quadruple jumps is overemphasized
Tutberidze’s current trio Valijeva-Trusova-Shtsherbakova has revolutionized the species. Alina Zagitova became just the first woman a few years ago to succeed in the triple plug combination. Trusova was only 14 years old when she was the first woman to compete in the Neloislutz.
Zagitova, who ended her career at the age of 17, never did four jumps, but was the best figure skater in the world for a while.
Anuliisa Uotila does not like the fact that figure skating has only gone into star jumping. In the short program, only triple jumps are allowed, but in the free program, the point differences are torn because the jumps rise to such a big role.
– The importance of jumps is definitely overemphasized. Jumps solve everything. They’re starting to get bored of me. I think the frames of the sport are way too tight and they just drive skaters to try these jumps. It takes coaching to a level where there is a health risk, Uotila says.
Uotila would like to see new innovations in top skating. One of the skaters who defied the boundaries of the sport is the United States Nathan Chenwho, in addition to great jumps, presented a series of freestyle-style steps in their free program that brought Olympic gold.
The whole of Chen had been carefully thought out in order for the required elements to materialize.
– We need to get to the beginning of figure skating, where it would be the job of skaters to create new tricks. One could take the example of snowboarding, where athletes develop the sport forward. Today, all creativity is forbidden in figure skating, Uotila regrets.