ADVERTISEMENT

Zagitova wins Russia's first gold medal

Technically, Russia did not win its first gold medal at these Winter Olympics on Friday.

At a medal ceremony later Friday, she was to see the five-ringed Olympic flag raised instead of the Russian flag and to hear the Olympic hymn played instead of the Russian anthem.

But a nominal barring of Russia from the Olympics for operating a systematic doping scheme at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, was more of a semantic prohibition than a complete ban. One hundred sixty-nine Russian athletes were permitted to compete here. And there was no question which country Zagitova represented in winning her gold medal with a score of 239.57 points as fans chanted her name and waved the Russian tricolor.

“In our souls we know,” she said recently.

ADVERTISEMENT

Her friend and training partner, Evgenia Medvedeva, took the silver medal with 238.26 points while skating as Tolstoy’s tragic Anna Karenina. Kaetlyn Osmond of Canada won the bronze with 231.02 points.

Medvedeva, a two-time world champion and consensus favorite to win gold before she broke a bone in her right foot last fall, was forced to confront a sobering reality at age 18: Experience and emotion and expressiveness did not prevail against mathematics.

Zagitova became the second-youngest women’s skater to win Olympic gold with a program of shrewd design, remarkable stamina, precise jumping and inevitability that comes from youthful certainty. What she lacked in the full elegance that comes with maturity, Zagitova compensated for with a keen understanding of skating’s current rules.

In her balletic “Don Quixote” routine, she landed all 11 of her jumps in the second half of her four-minute free skate. This is known as back loading and is meant to gobble up a 10 percent bonus awarded for each jump beyond the halfway point of a routine, as skaters’ legs begin to tire.

Meanwhile, Medvedeva landed three of her 11 jumps at the beginning of her program and repeated two triple jumps — the flip and the toe loop — while Zagitova repeated the more difficult and higher-scoring lutz and flip.

ADVERTISEMENT

After a shaky landing on her first triple lutz, Zagitova did not add a planned triple loop to finish the combination jump; assuredly, though, she added the triple loop to her second lutz, which was worth about 6 points.

Some find the beginning of Zagitova’s routine — limited to spins, footwork and choreography — to be a somewhat tedious preamble. But she and her coach have cleverly taken advantage of the rules as currently written.

“If I had the tenacity to do all my jumps in the second half, I think I’d get that done,” said Mirai Nagasu, the American who finished 10th.

A year ago, Zagitova was the world junior champion while Medvedeva, her training partner in Moscow, was the senior world champion and heavy favorite to win Olympic gold. Then two things happened. Medvedeva broke a bone in her right foot last fall, missed training time and two important competitions and perhaps never regained her full stamina. And Zagitova came into her own, defeating Medvedeva at the European championships last month and again in Wednesday’s Olympic short program.

Zagitova has sometimes clashed with Eteri Tutberidze, who coaches her and Medvedeva in Moscow. Several years ago, Zagitova admitted she did not train hard and nearly quit. But now she skates with a seriousness of purpose and a whispery inevitability. At practice on Thursday, Zagitova landed five consecutive triple jumps with effortless pogo-sticking.

ADVERTISEMENT

The skating world has seen a similar changing of the guard before.

At the 1998 Winter Olympics, Michelle Kwan of the United States was widely favored to win a gold medal. But Tara Lipinski, then 15, entered those games as the senior world champion and skated with a technical mastery and joyous inevitability while Kwan displayed the slightest caution. Lipinski won and remains the youngest Olympic champion by a few weeks at a comparable age to Zagitova.

“She was literally a junior last year; it’s even hard for me to understand that,” Lipinski said Friday. “What sets her apart is she has this fearlessness and the technical brilliance. I think she knows in a confident way that she’s the best.”

During the Soviet era, women’s skating produced only a single Olympic bronze medal. The prevailing theory is that the top skaters were placed into pairs, an event that the Soviets and Russians long dominated until recent games.

But Friday’s victory by Zagitova was the second consecutive gold medal won by Russian women, who operate in a centralized training system in which the top skaters challenge each other daily in practice.

ADVERTISEMENT

After the Soviet Union fell, a number of rinks closed and some top coaches moved to the United States. But there are dozens of rinks in Moscow now, some private, some state-operated. Many of the top women’s skaters are funneled to Tutberidze.

“I would say that the girl who is beyond the top 10 is just as strong as the top three in the world,” Tutberidze said in Moscow last fall.

According to Evgeni Plushenko, the 2006 men’s Olympic champion who now has a skating club in Moscow, there are about 15 Russian girls who can land four-revolution jumps. At a competition in Russia this week, one of Tutberidze’s junior skaters, Alexandra Trusova, 13, boldly attempted two quads in her routine, landing a quad salchow and falling on a quad toe.

Meanwhile, women’s skating in the United States — once dominant — continues to edge toward irrelevance at major international competitions. Bradie Tennell finished ninth here, just ahead of Nagasu, while Karen Chen was 11th.

The U.S. women have not won an Olympic medal since 2006 and have won only a single medal at the annual world championships since then. Lipinski has criticized U.S. officials for not adjusting to the current scoring system, which rewards the most difficult jumps.

ADVERTISEMENT

George Rossano, the editor of the website Ice Skating International, said, “The timeline for developing U.S. skaters is four years slower than the rest of the world. If you don’t have triple-triple” combination jumps “by 14, you’ve missed the boat to be a world-level competitor.”

Russia is not without its own issues, including the health of its young star skaters.

Adelina Sotnikova, the 2014 Olympic champion at age 17, is not competing this season because of injury. Yulia Lipnitskaya, who won gold at 15 in the team competition in 2014, has retired after battling anorexia.

“It is a concern,” Alexander Lakernik, a Russian who is vice president of the International Skating Union, said in a recent interview.

But it is a concern to be addressed on another day. For now, Russia is celebrating its first champion at these Olympics. Officially, its athletes are stateless, competing as neutrals. But a gold medal is still a gold medal.

ADVERTISEMENT

JERÉ LONGMAN and VICTOR MATHER © 2018 The New York Times

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!

Unblock notifications in browser settings.
ADVERTISEMENT

Eyewitness? Submit your stories now via social or:

Email: eyewitness@pulse.com.gh

ADVERTISEMENT