Alina Zagitova takes a break: what does that say about figure skating?

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Alina Zagitova takes a break: what does that say about figure skating?

All the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the potential end of Alina Zagitova’s competitive career at age 17 has had enough time to die down that everyone can take a less emotional look at the situation.

And what better time to do that than just before the Russian National Championships? Had Zagitova, reigning Olympic and world champion, been competing in Krasnoyarsk this week, she would have been hard-pressed to improve on her startlingly poor fifth-place finish of a year ago, when three junior skaters swept the senior podium. Those three are likely to get all the medals again.

Yes, Zagitova insisted in a clarification Instagram post two days after announcing her plans that she is only taking a competitive break, while performing in ice shows and continuing to train. Wait until she sees how much better it feels not to be beating herself up and down – trying to contend with skaters in just her own Moscow club like the current top three in the world and the 11-year-old girl who just landed a quadruple toe loop.

And this is a lot bigger story than whether one skating champion like Zagitova can no longer keep up with the competition.

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Grand Prix Final results show how fast women’s figure skating revolution is progressing

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Grand Prix Final results show how fast women’s figure skating revolution is progressing

The revolution in women’s figure skating is being televised.

That’s a turn of phrase on an admittedly dated reference (Google it). The point is we all have been able to witness, from TV broadcasts or live streams, a season with the most radical change in the sport since child prodigy Sonja Henie, then age 11, began doing jumps in her programs nearly a century ago.

What we watched other child prodigies do at last week’s Grand Prix Final boggled the minds of even those who saw it coming, because no one imagined it coming this soon and to this degree.

This essentially Russian revolution, which has taken maximum advantage of the scoring system and youthful body types to overthrow longtime technical norms of women’s skating, has split the discipline into haves and have-nots.

There are those who have the high-scoring quadruple jumps or multiple triple Axels to seize all the medals. And those who do not have those big jumps and, as of now, no chance to regain the podiums from which they have been summarily ousted.

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"Trouble in paradise" between Yuzuru Hanyu and Brian Orser? Coach says no

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"Trouble in paradise" between Yuzuru Hanyu and Brian Orser? Coach says no

It looked strange, to say the least.

There was Yuzuru Hanyu, the world’s most acclaimed active figure skater, waiting by himself in the Kiss and Cry to get his scores after a disappointing short program performance at last week’s Grand Prix Final in Turin, Italy. At that moment in a competition, a coach is almost always at the skater’s side.

Once one of Hanyu’s coaches at his Toronto Cricket Club training base, Ghislain Briand, eventually showed up two days late, there would be a simple explanation for why Hanyu had been alone.

And yet even that would not explain why Hanyu’s primary coach, Brian Orser, had not gone to Italy for the second most important competition of the Japanese superstar’s season.

Was there a rift between the skater and the man who had coached him to two Olympic gold medals, two world titles and four Grand Prix Final titles in the seven seasons since Hanyu came to train under Orser?

“I know it looks like there is trouble in paradise, but there isn’t,” Orser said Tuesday via telephone.

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More tests - and harder ones - for Nathan Chen after winning Grand Prix Final in rout

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More tests - and harder ones - for Nathan Chen after winning Grand Prix Final in rout

Over three days last week at the Grand Prix Final in Turin, Italy, Nathan Chen passed with honors his first big test of this figure skating season, the usual two-part exam of short and long programs. And he did it with very high marks – his sport’s equivalent of A and A+.

This week in New Haven, Conn., Chen faces what he has found to be the progressively harder tests in the other programs of his two-part life – studying at an elite university and competing with his sport’s elite. They are the four final exams for the first semester of his sophomore year at Yale.

Then Chen returns home to California for what could be the sternest test of all – a month meeting the face-to-face expectations of Rafael Arutunian, his coach.

Arutunian’s pleasure in how brilliantly Chen performed to win a third straight Grand Prix Final gold, especially in a Saturday free skate with exceptional execution of five quadruple jumps, was fading into the past even before the coach left Italy. He wants Chen to be even better with even tougher programs.

“It’s a process, but I think we’re getting there, especially the five quads, which is difficult,” Arutunian said via telephone from Turin. “I’m looking forward to making it even harder.”

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At Grand Prix Final, Nathan Chen's brilliance nearly defied description - again

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At Grand Prix Final, Nathan Chen's brilliance nearly defied description - again

What Nathan Chen did in winning the 2019 World Figure Skating Championships was something I never had seen before and wasn’t sure if I would ever see again.

That explains the headline on my nbcsports.com story about Chen’s victory: “By any measure, Nathan Chen’s performance at Worlds matches standard for transcendent greatness”

So it’s no wonder I was left goggle-eyed at what the 20-year-old Chen did in Saturday’s free skate at the Grand Prix Final in Turin, Italy.

It was even better than what Chen had done some six months ago at the worlds in Japan.

Not only did Chen decisively beat his rival, two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, for a second straight time in a major event, Chen did it on a day when the competitiveness of both figure skaters also was transcendent.

That led me to embark breathlessly on a tweet storm that is the best way to describe all of the brilliance Chen displayed to win a third straight Grand Prix Final title - and the first victory in when he had competed in the event against Hanyu, who missed the last two with injuries.

The tweets cover it all. Here they are:

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