This is the translation of a text that I have already published. I hate writing in English because I’m forced to concentrate on finding the right word, hoping it means exactly what I have in mind, on remembering to write the “h”, on understanding what tense the verb should have… I think of so many things that have nothing to do with what I want to write and that have to do only with how I can write it. It is difficult, and also frustrating because I know I make a lot of mistakes. Unfortunately I don’t see my mistakes and can’t correct them. Now a friend has decided to give me a gift. She really knows English, and she translated a post for me that I had already published a few days ago. I therefore propose to you the translation of her.
Artur Dmitriev Jr. tried the quadruple Axel (4A) at US Nationals 2022. Dmitriev is Russian skater and competed for Russia for many years, eventually he changed citizenship and is currently competing for the USA. That is why he has not competed for a while; when a skater decides to change nationality he/she has to miss a season, so Dmitriev has just gotten back to competition after this “rest” period. In the free skate at US Nationals he tried the 4A, the jump was called underrotated, with a base value of 10.00 and -5 GOE, he obtained 5.00 points. This is a higher score than Yuzuru Hanyu’s attempt on his downgraded 4A at Japanese Nationals. Hanyu’s jump was given a base value of 8.00 points, therefore it got 4.11 points.
Is it worth to jump the 4A? If you look at the score it is not. Hanyu obtained 6.86 points for his triple loop, a jump with a base value of 4.90. Last year, instead of a 4A he jumped a quad loop and received 14.10 points. The difference between the two scores is enormous. So why are skaters trying the 4A? For Hanyu this jump is a dream he had since he was a child. Of course, he does want to win competitions, he has never skated just to participate in a competition and not trying to be first. When Hanyu does not win, he accepts his placement and works towards improving his performance. However, after achieving all he set out to do since his childhood, to win the Olympic gold in 2014 and 2018, he is now focusing on his other big dream: the 4A. As he mentioned in an interview though, Hanyu wants to land a 4A that will work within the flow of a program, a jump with artistic value. Artur Dmitriev instead is trying to emulate Vern Taylor. Do you remember him?
Vern Taylor was not the kind of skater skating fans remember. He participated in three international competitions in the span of three seasons and in only two world championships, where he placed outside the top ten. He was not even the best placement for Canada at worlds, both times Brian Pockar did better than him. So how did he get into the history of figure skating? Because at 1978 Worlds he landed the first 3 axel.
Artur Dmitriev knows that his only chance to get in the history of figure skating is to land a 4A. Without that, he would remain the son of a two-time Olympic champion pair skater Artur Dmitriev. Here are his competitive results:
One gold and three bronze medals in the Challenger Series competitions, which are not top-level competitions. I edited his Wikipedia page to include his scores, which are not very high. At US Nationals he placed 11th, no one has included all his results on the page but his free skate scored 120.61 and the total competition score was 183.01. Out of curiosity I went looking for when was the last time Hanyu scored less than 183.01 points. So, I went backwards looking through years of results. Here are his scores, actually just a selection of his scores because a full list of all Hanyu’s competitions will be too long for a screenshot.
In the season 2008-2009, which started when he was thirteen and ended when he was fourteen, Hanyu scored less than what Dmitriev scored at Nationals. From the following season on, Hanyu’s scores climb significantly and in thirty different free programs he scored higher than Dmitriev’s combined scores.
Let’s look at the protocols of the Nationals. These are Hanyu’s, I used a red line to show the elements that received a negative GOE and I used a red oval to show the lowest PCS scores. I used green to show the highest GOE and PCS scores, and also to show the amount of quad jumps presented in his programs.
We can easily notice that there is only a missed element, while he achieved all other elements perfectly in a program that technically is really difficult. Hanyu knew his 4A would score lower than any other quad he could do, or even a triple, before attempting it at Nationals. However, if we focus on the full score with that missing element, we can see that Hanyu received a massive score. With the new scoring system, he scored higher than the 211.05 points he got with this free skate only two times: at Skate Canada 2019 and at the national championships last year. The total score, 322.36, is only lower than the one he got at Skate Canada, and not even by that much. Neither Shoma Uno nor Yuma Kagiyama have ever come close to such scores. Hanyu dominated the competition.
I did the same kind of check on Dmitriev’s protocol.
Only two quads and not four, only one combination and not three (ending with a double, not a triple). Four elements failed in several ways, a fifth one with no understandable reason to be in the program. The double salchow was invalidated because Dmitriev had already performed seven jumps, one more wasn’t allowed. So why did he do it? I have no idea, and I guess he didn’t really know himself, otherwise he would have not included an element that couldn’t be considered valid. An element added in such a random way could raise suspicion that the choreographic aspect is quite optional for Dmitriev: if jumps have a precise position in the choreography, it is unlikely to accidentally perform one more. As for the components score, there is no comparison. Hanyu’s program is a masterpiece, despite that wrong landing. Dmitriev’s program is a way to get people to talk about him. I checked the elements he performed on SkatingScores. With the change of nationality you have to remember to check both his Russian and American data. I chose a couple of details, if you want to see all the elements please refer to SkatingScores.
In his career Dmitriev has performed a number of quad toe loops (when he skated for Russia), even in combination with the triple toe loop, but for that jump he got negative GOEs (39) more often than positive GOEs (19). He never tried the quad salchow. Data on other jumps are the following:
I have a vague impression that on quadruples other than toe loops Dmitriev struggles to complete the rotation. He completed it quite often when he jumps a 4T; and yet, judging by his GOEs, he must have had some other problem. When he attempted other quads he never managed to complete the rotations; moreover, he took part mostly in national competitions, where technical panels are theoretically more favorable. There are only two international competitions, one being the 2018 Rostelecom Cup, so still at home, although the panel was international (for feedback, ask Kvitelashvili and Kolyada if having an international panel at the last Rostelecom Cup had some relevance) and the call couldn’t have been worse because the Axel was downgraded. This makes me suspect that he missed a good chunk of the required rotations. The other competition is the Golden Spin 2017, the jump is a quadruple flip; for this jump, Dmitriev had a call not only on the missing rotation, but also on the edge: he had the worst possible call.
In his previous 4A attempts Dmitriev always fell, this time he somehow stayed on his feet. In his past layouts there is also a peculiar combination: triple lutz-triple flip. Peculiar because a flip can be performed only after an euler because of the foot used for the take-off… unless you land the first of the two jumps left-handed, meaning on the left foot instead of the right: that’s the correct position for the flip’s toe-pick. This is exactly what Dmitriev did. I have no idea how much Dmitriev trained to complete this combination, certainly a lot, but if he had thought about points he would have been better off making the other jumps more solid, as his marks are never so high. Anyway, if you only have a 4T with a +3 GOE no one notices you, if you have a combination 3Lz+3F people talk about you for a while, if you jump a 4A you get into the history of figure skating. No problem, everyone sets his own goals, maybe he will succeed. At the moment, he was the first skater who ever tried to jump a 4A, the one who has tried it more times and one of the only two skaters who have ever tried to jump it. To actually jump it is yet another story, and so far no one has succeeded. Every now and then, however, you come across confusing comments, like the ones under this tweet:
That’s my screenshot. It isn’t the whole discussion, I cut something (where I drew a red line), but the comments sequence is this:
We will talk soon about the rotations, but let me first take a look at the rest. Grace isn’t wrong, Dmitriev didn’t put a hand down, he put two. Letter A talks about 2 to 3 visible errors, as if it didn’t make any difference to make two or three different mistakes on the same element – but it does. As for the components, the maximum limit is the same no matter if you make two or three mistakes, but if you post the rules, as Letter A did (you can’t see it in my screenshot, but she posted the charts with mistakes, related deductions, and initial indications too), you should also read what you post. I already posted that chart, anyway here it is:
Our screenshots are slightly different, I inserted the bullets, Letter A didn’t, and I highlighted how much the deduction for q is, because that was what I was interested in at the time; in this case it is irrelevant though, and I cut the three lines of explanation that she included instead. This is what those three lines say: In case of multiple errors the corresponding reductions are added. This means that if an element contains more errors, all the deductions add up, not only two deductions add up and then stop. So, what score did Dmitriev deserve?
Is bullet 1 there? I can’t understand it from the video, I judge in favor of the athlete (but maybe the judges, who are on the place and have a better view, have a different opinion) and I assign it. Bullets 2, 3, 4 and 5 aren’t there. I’m also generous and give to him bullet 6, so let’s start from + 2. However, we should remember that, with a step out, the starting score cannot be higher than + 2, so I’m starting from the maximum possible for this jump. I’m also generous about the left foot: I do not call landing on two feet, but touch down with the free foot and I assign the lowest deduction, as in all the following cases: – 1. So we go down from +2 to +1. The jump is underrotated, with that -2 we go down to -1. There is a huge step out that is worth -3 (actually, for such a big step out I would assign -4, but I’m generous), so we are at -4. Then there is touch down with both hands: -2, The score becomes -6. With -1 for long preparation it goes to -7. All this wanting to be generous with Dmitriev, because if I was strict I would have not assigned any bullets, and I would have started from 0. We must remember that we do not start from +5, nor from + 3 or +2 to assign marks, we start from 0: then we assign positive bullets, if there are any, and finally we calculate deductions.
As I explained, from the video I can’t understand how wide the jump is, maybe it’s not wide. As for its relation with the music…. the highest score Dmitriev got for Interpretation is 6.75, the lowest is 4, so I wonder how much attention Dmitriev pays to the music. How much attention Dmitriev pays to the music while he is doing his most difficult element, performed after a very long preparation? In the video I saw, you cannot hear the music of the program because it has been replaced by another one that has nothing to do neither with Dmitriev’s program nor with Hanyu’s, but the doubt is legitimate and probably that bullet is missing. Assigning landing on two feet and the highest deductions (-4 for landing on two feet, -4 for step out, -3 because the jump is underrotated, -3 for both hands on the ice, and -3 for long preparation), we obtain -17. -17 does not exist, nor does -7 exist. Dmitriev’s jump is worth -5. Any other GOE (a judge awarded him with -4) is a mistake.
Regarding Hanyu, I haven’t heard anyone say that -1 was a fair mark. We joked abundantly about that mark, even saying that the judge was actually Roman Sadovsky in disguise, but no one, as far as I saw, dreamt of saying that Hanyu deserved a -1. I have already analyzed Hanyu’s jump, this is a part of the previous text:
Bullet 1 is there, we also know the official measures of the jump, 3.10 meters long and 75 centimeters high. Numbers that are abundantly higher than the quadruple with toe pick of several top-level skaters. Bullets 4 and 6 are also there. Counting the bullets, we would be at +3, but, currently, the maximum positive starting in the presence of a set of errors clearly listed by the ISU is a +2, and among the errors with this limit there are downgraded jumps. For any downgraded jump there is also a deduction from -3 to -4. I would have given this jump a -3, trying a 4A takes considerable courage, and I would have awarded it; however, both marks are correct, we go from -1 to -2 depending on the severity of the judge. Poor rotation isn’t the only mistake made by Hanyu, he did land on two feet, and for the landing on two feet in a jump the deduction goes from -3 to -4. I would have assigned a -3 again, my final score being -4, but -5 is also correct, and that is how seven judges out of nine marked the jump. All marks between -4 and -5 fully reflect the rules. There is only one -4, and it is included in the final score because judge 9’s -1 was excluded.
Considering the type of jump and the way it was executed, I would have awarded a -3 in both cases, to get to a final -4. Assigning a -4 to Hanyu could have been possible, to give it to Dmitriev was not. And the comment that Dmitriev does not have Hanyu’s privileges, who according to Letter A received marks that he did not deserve from the judges, is one of the most ridiculous things I have read. Among strong skaters, the one who gets treated with the most severity, an unjustifiable severity in comparison to what he did on the rink, is Hanyu.
On YouTube I found this video that compares the two jumps side by side:
I took a few screenshots. I won’t analyze Hanyu’s rotation, that’s not the important thing here. The jump was downgraded, and that is something we did not dispute. It was impossible for the technical panel to be more severe on that jump, so we can’t say he was helped by a panel of countrymen. One of the marks he received was wrong, but it did not enter in the final score. And anyway, I have some questions to ask that judge. All the other marks were correct.
Dmitriev’s 4A was judged underrotated, so the technical panel judged his jump to be more rotated than Hanyu’s. We must remember that they are two different technical panels, so it’s not the same people to judge the two skaters differently, and they could not have the same standard of judgement. That’s why we need a technology that can really tell us if a jump was rotated or not. Until ISU does not deign to use it, we have to rely only on human eye, and human eye was rightly strict with Hanyu, but not so strict with Dmitriev, maybe another panel with Dmitriev would have opted for a more rigorous call.
Music starts and Hanyu begins skating. Steps, not just a run-up. He does a few crossovers to pick up speed, but he doesn’t just do crossovers. To be on the safe side, I asked someone who knows skating better than I do, since they still participate in international competitions: after the last crossover, Hanyu does a mohawk to turn, a double three with a clockwise rotation in the opposite direction of the rotation of the jump, which greatly increases the difficulty, then he changes edge immediately before the take off. The three screenshots show the beginning; to tell the truth Hanyu’s music starts a second earlier, so at 0.22 and not 0.23 as you can see in the image. I ignored everything in between, but if you watch the clip, you can’t miss the steps, and right after the three (0.39) he turns and takes off. A second after finishing a step, he is clearly ready to lift off the ice in a unique movement. This is, according to ISU definitions, a jump preceded by step.
I won’t repost the initial screenshot, but if Hanyu started his program at 0.22, Dmitriev starts his at 0.23. After a few not particularly difficult choreographed moves, he begins the preparation at 0.33 of the video. He starts doing crossovers, then takes a curve and skates all along the short side of the rink; at the end of it (00.39) he takes a simple step to turn forwards and to have not too many consecutive crossovers; what he does it’s not more difficult, though: he’s obviously focused on speed, not on steps. It lasts only one second: at 0.40 he’s already skating backwards again. Hanyu is now taking off, Dmitriev is still preparing the jump. They don’t have to jump in the very same moment, each of them can put any jump wherever they want; anyway, while Hanyu takes off, turns in the air, lands and launches himself into a new series of steps, Dmitriev is still taking momentum: actually, he started his run-up way before Hanyu’s three-turn, crossing diagonally the whole rink. Short side + diagonal of the rink: Dmitriev’s jump is ISU-textbook too: jump with a long preparation. He takes off at 0.44. His run-up lasted 11 seconds.
As I said, I’m not paying any attention to Hanyu’s rotation: he lands forward, the call was absolutely fair. I’m paying attention to how he lands. There’s a tough moment: the jump is underrotated and he completes the rotations when he has both his feet on the ice; he moves on quite quickly though, and he’s already straightening up in the third screenshot: he’s visibly off balance, of course, but not too much. His jump counts up to two mistakes, and the judges score it correctly, between -4 and -5. After this jump, Hanyu’s program is perfect.
While Hanyu was jumping, on the right the video editor let us see Dmitriev preparing his Axel. How did he land?
Below you can see two details taken from the entire photo. I chose to put them side by side so that it’s easier to see how Dmitriev’s skate changes its inclination. In the first screenshot, his skate is still in the air; in the second one, it’s not. If we look closer, we can also see kind of a “snow” raised by the landing. The spray of snow around the left foot is particularly visible – therefore, the landing was on two feet – but there’s some snow around the right foot too. Now the question is: which is the direction of Dmitriev’s landing? Forward or backward? If forward, the jump should be downgraded. And if someone thinks that it deserved a q, at school they were probably not paying much attention to their geometry teacher. As for the rest, this is surely a big step out, with both hands on the ice:
Will Dmitriev succeed and complete a 4A? I have no idea, but the success rate of his others quadruple jumps isn’t encouraging: he got some positive GOE only for his toe loop. So far, he got a positive GOE for 19 out of 71 attempts to jump a quad, meaning the 27%. Hanyu was successful in 153 out of 225 attempts to jump a quad, meaning the 68%. So far, he tried and jump the 4A only once, he didn’t succeed, so the rate for it is negative; for each of the other quads, though, his success rate is equal or higher than 60%. If we consider the 3A, Dmitriev got a positive GOE for 69 out of 105 jumps, meaning the 66%. Hanyu got a positive GOE for 163 out of 184 jumps, meaning the 89%.
Why are there people saying that Hanyu is obsessed and blaming his decision to try and make a ridiculous dream come true, while I heard nobody say that Dmitriev is obsessed? I read comments where people were praising him for taking a risk and progressing after such a turning point as a new nationality, and it’s totally okay for me, but I’d like them to show the same respect to every skater. Hanyu is twenty-seven and he’s been often considered old for figure skating. Dmitriev was born in 1992, September the 7th: he’s twenty-nine, but I never heard anyone telling that he’s old.
Two skaters tried and jumped a 4A in competition. None of them was able to complete it, both of them were able to land on their feet. One of them on two feet, the other one on two feet and two hands. I don’t know if there’s some other skater who’s currently trying to jump the 4A. Years ago, Keegan Messing jumped it during training, using a harness; I don’t know whether he’s still practicing this jump or focusing on something else. Messing was born in 1992, January, so he’s going to be thirty very soon, and on February he will be at the Olympic Games for the second time: I never read that he should step aside for the sake of his younger fellow skaters, as someone said about Hanyu. Will we ever see a good 4A in competition? I don’t know. Only time will tell us. In any case, no matter which name will be written down in the Book of Records, what these two skaters did at their national championships is not even slightly comparable.
