No quadruple jump has ever been completed by a woman in an Olympic competition, but that’s about to change. sstodola writes on this extraordinary leap forward for the sport
From left to right: Kamila Valieva, Alexandra Trusova, Anna Shcherbakova. Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images At this year’s Russian national figure-skating championships, Alina Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva, the gold and silver medalists from the 2018 Winter Olympics, sat near the edge of the rink, one in a blue pantsuit, the other in a snowflake-patterned sweater — civilian clothes — consigned to retirement at the ages of 19 and 22.
The American skater Mirai Nagasu, the only woman to land the difficult triple axel in the 2018 Olympics, shares in the sense of disbelief at how the sport’s expectations have ballooned. “To look at the field now compared to four years ago,” she told me, “the expectation that the women who are winning medals will have, at a minimum, one quad, is a little bit unfathomable.”
Over a generation of chasing higher base scores, skaters and their coaches gradually discovered the new techniques that would eventually enable quads. Nowhere has this technique been harnessed to greater effect than at the Sambo 70 training center in Moscow, where the severely glamorous coach Eteri Tutberidze oversees a seemingly bottomless well of young skaters capable of perfecting quad jumps, ever since Trusova and Shcherbakova began performing them on the junior level in 2018. Tutberidze coaches all three of this year’s Russian Olympians.
Given Russia’s history with doping at the Olympics, the possible involvement of performance-enhancing drugs bears mentioning, although there has been no evidence of it in the current skaters.
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