SOTNIKOVA STEPS UP
National champ skates near-flawless program
For a time, after the Russian skating mite Julia Lipnitskaya fell on a triple flip, which was just after the Russian hockey team had crashed out of the Olympic tournament, it appeared there would be no joy in Ekaterinburg or anywhere else in this enormous country.
But wait, as the infomercials say — along came Adelina Sotnikova, who is after all the Russian national champion and who skated as if to say, with wagging finger, “Don’t forget about me.”
With a near-flawless program, Sotnikova finished .28 points behind defending Olympic champion Yuna Kim of South Korea, and that, going into the women’s free skate Thursday, is just a fraction of a hair.
Lipnitskaya ended up in fifth spot, still potentially within striking distance of the podium — and she plans to do just that.
“I wasn’t good enough on the jumps,” she said, adding smartly, “Tomorrow, I will go out there and fight.”
Sitting in third after the short program is Italy’s elegant Carolina Kostner, who at 27 is an aged crone by the cruel standards of figure skating.
Qualifying for the free dance — only the top 24 of 30 in the short program move on — were the two Canadian entries, Gabby Daleman of Newmarket, Ont., and Canadian champion Kaetlyn Osmond, who is originally from Marystown, Nfld., but now trains in Edmonton.
For both, teenagers still, Sochi is a first Olympics, and both turned in gratifying performances.
For Daleman in particular — who at just-turned-16 is the youngest member of the Canadian team and in fact just two months older than Lipnitskaya — it was a very big deal.
“I was a little nervous — this was my first senior international — but once I started skating, I just told myself do the best you can, you do this program every day,” she said afterwards. “Even though this wasn’t a perfect skate (she bobbled a triple Lutz a bit), I’m still really happy with it.”
For Olympic rookies, there is little that compares with being on the huge ice surface, in front of a packed house at the Iceberg here, for the very first time. “Pretty much my opening pose,” Daleman said with a grin, “I was just, ‘Don’t turn on the music yet’.
“But it was great,” she said, and “as soon as the music started I just felt at home.”
She finished 19th, while the 18-year-old Osmond sat in 13th.
The merciless march of time is never more evident than in skating, where four years can feel like 20 for those who dare return to defend their Olympic titles and find themselves, as South Korea’s Kim did, facing a giggly-girl gaggle of fresh faces and hungry challengers.
That would be especially true for Kim, now 23, her country’s firstever skating champion and a megacelebrity at home who after Vancouver had a painful and public split with her former coach, Canadian Brian Orser, and took about two years off from major competition, during which she pushed forward her country’s successful bid to host the 2018 Games.
She returned to win the world championships last year, but then was out of the Grand Prix series with an injury and had to claw her way back to qualify for Sochi.
Yet skating to the mournful strains of Send in the Clowns, she was anything but, proving again why she’s known in South Korea as “Queen Yuna”.
Should she win gold, she would be the first woman to successfully defend an Olympic singles skating title since the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, when Katarina Witt did it — only 52 years after Sonje Henie did the golden triple.
The paucity of repeat champions shows just how difficult it is to accomplish the feat; in skating, you turn your back on the sport for a few minutes, and there’s a near-child nibbling at your heels.
Russian coach Eteri Tutberidze may dispute that characterization — she said Lipnitskaya made “a technical mistake” on her triple flip but asked about the pressures on her narrow shoulders, snapped, “She’s an athlete, not a child” — but the fact is, her charge in blue looked decidedly tiny on the ice, and far younger than 15.
Thus the stage is set for the only significant battle, now that the hockey is done for the home country, that Russia has left: Will one of its two dazzling youngsters knock Kim off the top of the podium or will the queen still reign?