Proposal to raise minimum age for senior events brings figure skating back to the future

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Proposal to raise minimum age for senior events brings figure skating back to the future

Jeroen Prins long has been deeply involved in figure skating, with a wide range of expertise.

Prins, 54, was a national-level skater in the Netherlands who now is an international referee and technical controller in singles, a technical controller in pairs and a judge in ice dance.  He holds several positions in the figure skating section of the Dutch Skating Federation and is a candidate for membership on the International Skating Union’s singles and pairs technical committee.  He is a figure skating commentator for Eurosport Netherlands.

And Prins had been thinking long, hard and deeply about the issue of minimum age in senior figure skating before writing the urgent proposal to raise it to 17 that the Dutch federation submitted to the ISU Congress that begins June 4 in Seville, Spain.

“I has this idea in mind already at the start of this past Olympic season, but I wanted to see how everything unfolded,” Prins said in an email.

What unfolded was the second youngest women’s Olympic champion in history, 15-year-old Alina Zagitova of Russia.  And the top two women (girls?) at the World Junior Championships, also both Russians, were 13 and 14.  And the top three women at the Junior Grand Prix Final, all Russians (the top two were the same as at junior worlds), were 13, 14, 13.

One of those three, world junior champion Alexandra Trusova, did two quadruple jumps in her winning free skate at the world juniors.  Since then, video has been posted of another Russian – Anna Shcherbakova, 14, who did not compete in the 2017 world juniors or the 2017 Junior Grand Prix series – doing a clean quad lutz-triple toe-triple loop combination in practice.

So Prins decided the time was right to ask that the ISU raise the minimum age for seniors in all disciplines from 15 to 17 as of the 2020-21 season, with the two-year wait designed to prevent any 15- or 16-year-olds already in seniors from being forced back to the junior level.

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With gold, silver and a rich vein to mine, Russian domination of women's skating has just begun

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With gold, silver and a rich vein to mine, Russian domination of women's skating has just begun

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - On the day before Alina Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva made Russian history by taking the gold and silver ladies medals at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games, video began circulating of what one of their younger compatriots had done thousands of miles away.

In Thursday's free skate at the Cup of Russia junior final in the western Russian city of Veliky Novgorod, a 13-year-old, Alexandra Trusova, landed a clean, impressive quadruple salchow -- and Trusova did not even win the event.

The confluence of those skating achievements within about 24 hours of each other is evidence enough that no matter what you call them, be it Olympic Athletes from Russia or anything else, the Russian domination of women's figure skating has just begun.

"It is the beginning of a wave, and they are going to be good for years to come," 1992 Olympic silver medalist Paul Wylie said.

Four years after Adelina Sotnikova became the first Russian woman to win the Olympic title, the country has two women on the Olympic singles podium for the first time.

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Talking point: Nagasu suddenly in singles medal conversation

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Talking point: Nagasu suddenly in singles medal conversation

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - Before the Olympics began, the idea that Mirai Nagasu would be in any discussion about potential women's singles medalists was fanciful, even a bit preposterous.

That all changed last Monday.

"I've had her in the conversation for a week," said Robin Cousins of Great Britain, the 1980 Olympic gold medalist and BBC commentator.

A history-making triple axel jump in the team event free skate put Nagasu's name on the Olympic sports world's lips -- and on those of entertainment world celebrities like the Big Bang Theory's Mayim Bialik and Modern Family's Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who have congratulated her about it on Twitter.

"What Mirai has done is absolutely amazing," said teammate Karen Chen, speaking of the triple axel. "I think she will inspire many younger skaters that the impossible is possible."

But it was the 3 minutes, 45 seconds of near-flawless performance following her triple axel that convinced the sport's observers she was not a one-trick pony but a skater with renewed mastery of overall skills to match the resolute will that has generated one of the most endearing comebacks in figure skating history.

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No way to sugarcoat this: Nathan Chen has been awful in his first Olympics

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No way to sugarcoat this: Nathan Chen has been awful in his first Olympics

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - There is no way to sugarcoat this, to find a silver lining or a saving grace, or to think that the light at the end of the tunnel is anything but an oncoming train.

Nathan Chen has simply been awful in his first Olympics.

As poor as Chen was in the team event short program a week ago, he was significantly worse in the individual short program Friday.

"Honestly, it was bad," Chen said. "I made as many mistakes as I possibly could have."

The most gifted jumper in U.S. men's skating history did not have a clean jumping pass among the six he completed in the two short programs. The three in the individual short produced a fall, two step-out landings and failure to do a required combination.

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Quad revolution Chan helped start swept away his medal hopes, but not his legacy

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Quad revolution Chan helped start swept away his medal hopes, but not his legacy

GANGNEUNG, South Korea - In his 12 years at the senior level of figure skating, Canada's Patrick Chan has been a transformative athlete.

"I am never going to look at Patrick as anything but a three-time world champion who was the first man to do beautiful skating and multiple quads," said four-time world champion and fellow Canadian Kurt Browning. "He was alpha dog for a long time."

What Browning could not include in that encomium is the one thing missing from Chan's much-decorated career: an individual Olympic gold medal. He let it slip from his grasp in 2014, and it seems out of his reach in the men's competition that begins with the short program Friday morning.

When Chan got his first Olympic gold medal Monday, it was for the team event, in which he had two mistake-riddled performances. That could have made it seem a bittersweet prize, but he refused to see it that way.

"At the end of the day, a medal is a medal," Chan insisted. "I'm going to hold this medal tight to me. That's how I am going to see it. That's how I am going to enjoy it."

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