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Alena Kostornaya and her husband Georgy Kunitsa took penultimate place at the Russian Championship in Chelyabinsk, but again became the most talked about sports couple of the tournament. Sport explains how the popularity of an entire type of figure skating is in Kostornaya’s hands.
Alena and Gosha pay off their debts
It’s incredible, but true – with two cosmic pairs of skaters and scores higher than world records, the fate of the sport depends on the “remakes” Alena Kostornaya and Georgy Kunitsa, and not in terms of results. At the Russian Championship in Chelyabinsk, the guys took second to last place. And if we imagine that the ISU right now unexpectedly allows us to enter the international level, they will not go to get quotas for the national team. And they won’t perform under existing licenses. In the near future, most likely, they will not travel anywhere – it is still too early.
Even in Chelyabinsk, where Alena and Georgy did a great job in the free program, but failed in the short program, the conclusion is clear – the season for the guys will be spent entirely in work. While the current leaders are using their accumulated record, Kostornaya and Kunitsa have to, so to speak, pay off their debts. We are talking here more about the media weight of a whole type of figure skating – incredibly popular outside of this island of greenhouses.
There was only one question – will the guys have enough strength to hold out the strap to the end and not “drop out” along the way? The results shown by Alena and Georgiy in the first half of the season inspire cautious optimism. Moreover, they have to restrain themselves artificially, because if they slightly plastered the small technical thawed patches, which were probably now impossible to avoid due to the “age” of the couple, the skaters could score very decently.
Let's say, 70 points in the short program and 140 in the free program – a milestone that Kostornaya and Kunitsa are nothing short of now – would allow them to directly enter the main team six months after the formation of the pair.
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The results depend entirely on Kostornaya
In the context of the guys who took 9th place out of 10 participants, this sounds somewhat strange. On the other hand, in Chelyabinsk they already received 136 points for the free “for growth”, and at their debut stage of the Russian Grand Prix a couple of months earlier, where they made a serious start for the first time in their lives, they received 68. This is already changing things, agree.
With criticism of Alena’s decision to leave single skating, one can go into some completely dense jungle. There is a lot of it – and the legendary short program “Angel” returned in the form of a simplified remake, and wants too much, and why does it need it anyway? And they seem to be right – indeed, she could really make noise in single skating now.
Alena herself has repeatedly repeated – no, this is impossible. Hip surgery deprived her of the chance to painlessly continue her singles career, and left her in pairs skating with Georgy Kunitsa in the sport. And Georgy was right when he reminded that many of those with whom Alena competed before no longer compete. And she's here! And it will increase. Moreover, in the long term, the results of the couple depend entirely on her, or more precisely, on her mood.
It’s unlikely that anyone will be surprised if I say that Kostornaya is a storm in a teacup. A bubbling fountain of emotions that is insanely exciting to watch and probably just as insanely difficult for anyone to deal with. At the start of the season, Alena expressed her dissatisfaction with the judging in a rather harsh and uncompromising manner – they say that there is not enough justice, although if you look impartially, other debutants are often rated worse than her and Georgiy. Moreover, the dissatisfaction was so bright and powerful that thoughts arose – will she give up on everything by the end of the season?
After the free program in Chelyabinsk, Alena gave an unequivocal answer:
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“I've accepted that this season I won't get the high marks I would like.”
And that's very good. I don’t mean that the desired points won’t happen, but that Alena is coming to terms with the wait. For our figure skating, losing Kostornaya as a single skater would be no less painful than losing Kostornaya as a single skater. So far, purely in media terms, but who knows what will happen in a year or two?
Probably only herself.
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors
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