At the World Figure Skating Championships in Montreal In the very first medal draw, a sensation took place: 40-year-old Canadian Deanna Stellato-Dudek won gold in pair skating together with her younger partner Maxime Deschamps. The sport is figuring out whether this is a unique record or a degradation of the discipline in the absence of Russian figure skaters suspended for no reason by the International Skating Union (ISU)?
I don’t want to remind myself once again about my age, but there’s no escape — there are people who remember Deanna Stellato, who performed on the ice even without the prefix “Dudek,” and the author of these words is among them. At the World Junior Championships back in 2000, she won silver in single skating. To feel how long ago it was, let us recall: at the same tournament, future world champions Brian Joubert and Stéphane Lambiel were just beginning their journey, Alena Savchenko won gold in pairs with Stanislav Morozov — when holding hands with neither Robin Szolkowy nor Moreover, Bruno Massot was not even in the plans, and Maxim Shabalin was far from meeting Oksana Domnina.
In order not to spread the thought further down the tree, we will limit ourselves to the wording that Deanna Stellato’s single career did not work out after that, and a year later she disappeared from the public sports space. But eight years ago I suddenly returned – to pair skating. At first she competed for the United States with Nathan Bartholomew — without much success, and then teamed up with Canadian Maxime Deschamps, a skater eight years younger than her. The new duo began performing at international tournaments from the 2022/2023 season — the first without the suspended Russians. On their first attempt, Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps qualified for the World Championships, where they finished fourth. From the second — namely on the evening of March 21, Montreal time — they became champions.
The famous American journalist Phil Hersh was the first to publish information that Deanna Stellato-Dudek won the laurels of the oldest world champion in figure skating in any discipline. They didn’t win at such a respectable age even more than 100 years ago, when the essence of this sport was drawing figures on ice. Panin-Kolomenkin took gold when he was younger. Not to mention the more or less modern period when multi-rotation jumps appeared. And this is certainly a unique achievement. Deanna Stellato-Dudek, of course, deserves all those excellent epithets with which the Western media is now replete.
But at the same time, these same Western media are trying once again not to talk about where Deanna Stellato-Dudek and her partner would be, or the rest of the World Championship medalists in pair skating, if they competed with the strongest — that is, with Russian duets. And we'll tell you. If the world champions of this season had competed in Chelyabinsk at the Russian Championship, they would have fought for fourth or fifth place. And if the top three of the Russian national championship had gone to Montreal, they would have easily taken the podium.
And this is not just an absentee comparison of scores, but the essence of what is happening with world pair skating. And this essence is called the word “degradation”. While we have Anastasia Mishina with Alexander Gallyamov and Alexandra Boykova with Dmitry Kozlovsky teaching quadruple elements, in America, Europe and Asia no one even remembers any ultra-si. For example, the most difficult triple throw — Lutz — was attempted by only one (!) pair in free programs at the World Championships. For comparison, at the Spartakiad in Magnitogorsk this element was performed by purely three Russian duets. And for other components, such comparisons will be in favor of the Russians.
Of course, there are no fools in the International Skating Union, so they are trying to cover up what is happening as best they can. Can, for example, the ISU allow two Russian figure skaters to win a World Championship medal, who in their own country did not even qualify to be included in the national team? Of course not.
So, at yet another tournament, Maria Pavlova and Alexey Svyatchenko, who compete for Hungary, are being bullied — one of the few duets on the world stage that demonstrates not archaic, but modern pair skating. The students of Fedor Klimov and Dmitry Savin training in Sochi time after time produce high-quality clean skates — and judges at international tournaments time after time shamelessly cut their scores for components and do not allow them to mount podiums. They will drag anyone out there, with double jumps, with a trippy jump — but not the Russians. Or, if there is absolutely no one else, as happened in Montreal, at least a Russian paired with a German. We are talking about Nikita Volodin — by the way, he also changed his sports citizenship due to the lack of any prospects of fighting for top places in Russia.
The saddest thing is that, apparently, the world figure skating community is happy with this situation, and no one is going to change it. There are no Russians — the medals are ours. What's bad? Yes, because a few more years of suspension — and pair skating will slide to such a level that when the Russians are finally returned, Tatyana Volosozhar with Maxim Trankov, and Elena Berezhnaya with Anton Sikharulidze, and Irina Rodnina with Alexander Zaitsev will be competitive. Thanks to the World Championships in Montreal: now we know for sure that the impossible is possible.
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