Empowering Excellence: How Our Female Athletes Lead the Olympic Team to Victory
Empowering Excellence: How Our Female Athletes Lead the Olympic Team to Victory
While team competitions are a collective effort, our figure skaters had to work hard to overcome the critical mistakes made by their male counterparts. The Russian team secured an early silver medal in the team figure skating event at the 2018 Olympics. The female single skaters’ lead was so substantial that by the final day of competition, it was clear that the gold and silver medals were out of reach for the USA, Italy, and Japan, with the Canadian team taking the championship.
The Champions: Evgenia Medvedeva and Alina Zagitova
Russian athletes Evgenia Medvedeva and Alina Zagitova won the gold medal in women’s single skating. Despite falling ill just before the competition, 18-year-old Evgenia set another world record, scoring 81.06 points in the short program. Her previous record of 80.85 points was set at the World Team Championship in Tokyo the previous year. In the Olympic team competition system, her result equates to 10 points in the overall standings.
Fifteen-year-old Alina skated her free program with a score of 158.08, which also translates to 10 points in the team standings. Additionally, this performance marked her personal best! As a result, the performances of the female single skaters alone increased the gap with other teams by 20 points!
The Driving Force: Eteri Tutberidze
Both champions are proteges of Eteri Tutberidze. According to the choreographer of the women’s team, it is her strong character that has cultivated an excellent generation and the most formidable women’s team in history:
In general, the boys lack character; they grow up in more sheltered conditions than our generation. We used to make things, fight – for fun and for the girls. Our parents worked from dawn to dusk; they didn’t have time for us, and this toughened our character. After 10 years of working in Tutberidze’s group, I have come to the conclusion that girls are now stronger in character. Eteri herself is a person with a very strong inner core, and this is passed on to the athletes.
Challenges and Setbacks
The team’s result could have been even better, but Mikhail Kolyada made a mistake in the free program, performing a triple toe loop with a two-foot landing instead of a quadruple jump and a full cascade. This serious miscalculation cost the team 12 points. Olympic champions Alexei Yagudin and Oleg Vasiliev commented on his performance as overly risky and unjustifiably ambitious:
The main reason is that he is too pampered and coddled on a daily basis. When you are pampered, it prevents you from showing what you can do and what you have in your arsenal in stressful situations.
Other Notable Performances
The Russian figure skating pair, Natalia Zabiiako and Alexander Enbert, took third place in the free program of the team competition. Olympic champions in Sochi, Ekaterina Bobrova and Dmitri Soloviev, secured third place in the ice dance and 8 points.
For the Russian team, this medal was the second at the PyeongChang Olympic Games. The individual tournament for women’s single skating will take place on February 21 and 23. We hope that our three athletes – Evgenia Medvedeva, Alina Zagitova, and Maria Sotskova – will be able to occupy the entire championship podium. This would only emphasize the strength of Russian women at these Olympics.
For more information on the achievements of Russian figure skaters, you can visit this authoritative source.
