| Two Russian couples are in the lead after the short program The World Championships in Moscow are gradually gaining momentum. Yesterday afternoon the dancers demonstrated the obligatory dance. After its execution, the winners of the gold medals of last year's world championship, our Tatyana Navka and Roman Kostomarov, are in the lead - 45.97 points. This is the best result in the world since the introduction of new rules for determining ratings in figure skating by the International Skating Union (ISU). Americans Tanit Belbin and Benjamin Agosto are 3.79 points behind the Russians. And in the evening the men took to the ice at the Luzhniki Sports Complex with a short program.
The day before, the performances of sports couples in the short program unexpectedly ended. Two Russian duets at once, Tatyana Totmyanina - Maxim Marinin, who scored a total of 70.12 points, and Maria Petrova - Alexey Tikhonov (66.94), managed to bypass the strong Chinese duet Xu Shen and Hongbo Zhao (66.00), displacing him to third position.
However, this is only an intermediate result, and after the free program the picture may change. Moreover, before the start of the world championship, many experts gave preference to the skaters from the Middle Kingdom, since their free program is more difficult than that of the two Russian pairs. For example, in the Grand Prix final, the Chinese were almost 20 points ahead of second-place finishers Petrova and Tikhonov. (Totmyanina and Marinin did not participate in these competitions due to their partner’s injury.) And after the European Championships in Turin, Maxim Marinin said that, having won this tournament, he and his partner had currently “reached the ceiling” technically and had no plans for the championship world to complicate the program.
Xu Shen and Hongbo Zhao skated their short program in Moscow with obvious errors. The rotations were not synchronized, and to top it off, the partner tripped while exiting the triple toe loop. After the performance, Hongbo Zhao explained that the reason for his misses was a leg injury. “But we hope that we will skate the free program better,” the athletes assured.
Unlike their rivals, Tatyana Totmyanina and Maxim Marinin started the Moscow tournament on a positive note. In terms of the sum of points in the short program, they improved their previous result. When asked by a Vremya Novostey correspondent what explains this, Maxim replied that he and Tatyana flew to Russia from Chicago ten days ago. And, apparently, this allowed them to easily cope with acclimatization and calmly prepare for the championship. Moreover, all these days the skaters trained very intensively. Marinin also added that they made their short program a little more complicated, focusing specifically on spins. “We did not experience any complexes towards the Chinese couple. Having become world champions in 2004, we, frankly speaking, felt the taste of victory,” Totmyanina assured after the program.
Another Russian duo, Maria Petrova and Alexey Tikhonov, seeing the result on the scoreboard, at first did not even believe that they were second. “To be honest, I was very nervous before the competition,” said the 33-year-old skater. - The hardest thing for me was to perform last on the first day, I had to wait a long time, and somewhere in the depths of my soul I was afraid of “burning out.” However, figure skater coach Lyudmila Velikova added that the result of her players did not come as a surprise to her. “In my opinion, this is their best short program of their entire sports career,” she explained.
Be that as it may, the results of the performance of sports couples will be known late on Wednesday evening. For first place, couples will receive prize money in the amount of 67.5 thousand dollars for two, for second place - 40.5 thousand, for third place - 27 thousand. The luckiest singles will earn 45, 27 and 18 thousand dollars, respectively. Rewards are provided for almost all athletes who qualify, up to 12th place. The total prize fund of the championship was 710 thousand dollars.
In Russia, the world figure skating championship was held twice - in 1896 and 1903. Moscow is hosting the World Championships for the first time in the history of figure skating. However, despite this circumstance, there was no spectator excitement on the first day of the tournament. This is most likely explained by ticket prices that are quite high by Russian standards. “I wanted to watch the competition live, but when I found out the price—1,700 rubles—I realized that I couldn’t afford it,” one Moscow student admitted to me at the box office near the exit from the Sportivnaya metro station. Purchasing tickets through various offices is even more expensive - prices reach up to 4 thousand rubles. By the way, even many Russian athletes complained that they were having problems with tickets for their parents. “I personally did not receive any tickets or invitations to the competition from our figure skating federation, and therefore I had to buy a ticket for my mother at an incredible price,” said Tatyana Totmyanina. Olga ERMOLINA |
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