br>
On the tenth anniversary of the victory of the Russian team in the team figure skating tournament at the Olympics in Sochi Sports remembers , how a little girl in a red coat with brilliant spins and phenomenal stretching made the whole world fall in love with her.
In those days, figure skating was not shown on TV all year round, as it is now. There were no Grand Prix stages in the public domain, show program tournaments did not exist in nature, and even about twenty people came to the Russian Championship — and those were relatives of the skaters. So for the vast majority of fans, the first opportunity to see Yulia Lipnitskaya was the Olympics.
About Women's skating in Russia then they knew that it was somehow painful in our country. The times of Slutskaya are behind us, the new girls are not encouraging with stability, and one cannot expect guaranteed results from them. Actually, they didn’t expect anything.
But in the end it was love at first sight. It all started with the composition “Loving Do Not Renounce”, which is understandable without words to the entire Russian-speaking world — a short program by Yulia Lipnitskaya in team competitions. The swift girl with ponytails did something incredible — she easily jumped, spun, gracefully glided and generally looked more like a young gymnast than a figure skater.
Moreover, her rotations were sometimes even more surprising than her jumps — due to the enormous speed, the rotations and difficult positions looked like astronauts training. At the end of the show, she gave the audience a heart, drawing its outline directly on the ice. It captivated me with its childish naivety and directness.
The free program finally convinced everyone — this girl is the best thing that could happen to us. She knocked on the heart of everyone who was at the stadium that day, in front of the TV screens, and who later read about her in newspapers and on the Internet. A striking combination of fragility and strength, detachment and soulfulness, brilliant music from the film “Schindler’s List” and the sacrifice of Yulia, who gave herself all for the team gold, formed a formula of people’s love.
The magic of the red coat affected everyone, including those who were difficult to touch. Lipnitskaya was given a standing ovation by the top officials of the states, and the director of the film, Steven Spielberg, even wrote her a letter with words of admiration.
Love is almost impossible to decompose into molecules; it always works as a single whole. So in Lipnitskaya there was all the wealth at once. A kind of country's pride for export — ballet, space, Russian soul and strong character. All this is also contained in the body of a 15-year-old child who spent more than half his life in hard training and strict discipline, so that the audience and judges would one day say in amazement “Ah!”
< br>
Yulia Lipnitskaya’s performances look outstanding even in 2024, time does not devalue them in any way. Her contribution to Russian figure skating is limitless — newborn girls were named after Lipnitskaya, in her footsteps more than one thousand children came to the skating rink, and she herself became the most important building block in the foundation of the future long-term dominance of our figure skaters on the world stage.
< br>On the level that Yulia set with her talent and performance, Evgenia Medvedev, Alina Zagitova, Alexandra Trusova, Alena Kostornaya, Anna Shcherbakova and Kamila Valieva grew into champions. Others will grow up too — we just may not know their names yet. But we will never forget the look that the girl in the red coat cast simultaneously into the void and into our souls at the end of her Olympic free program.
Свежие комментарии