Fourth look at in-between, at those movements that skaters make within their programs. Movements that do not have a specific base value, but which are made because the program is not, or at least should not be, a simple run from one side of the rink to the other to prepare a jump. As in posts one, two and three, I watched the short programs skated in Beijing by Jason Brown, Donovan Carrillo, Nathan Chen, Yuzuru Hanyu, Yuma Kagiyama, Shoma Uno and Deniss Vasiljevs. From time to time I continue to watch Roseline Winter’s and Elisa’s analysis.
Getting down
In this section I have brought together lunge, knee slide and any other movements in which the skater has lowered is body. The division is not rigid, a movement that falls into one category can also fall into another, just think of this gesture made by Carrillo:
Carrillo lowers himself, works on space, but at the same time, despite being on two feet, works on balance, so I have already looked at the gesture in the previous post. Rigid divisions are impossible, and the only reason I have made these divisions is to be able to make some comparisons.
Here Brown makes two movements in a row, first jumps and then lowers in a lunge. I will watch the jumps later. I took a screenshot of both moves just to see the flow. Brown has no problem switching from a movement that takes place above to one that takes place below, also combining choreographed arm movements. The only thing he’s out of place is that butt out at the end.
Lunge followed by a knee slide on which Brown changes direction. Brown has a bad habit of bending while hunched over, then extends his leg well and gets into a nice position. Immediately afterwards he switches to a knee slide, a simpler movement both because he has an extra point of support and because he doesn’t have to keep his leg straight. However, he complicates the whole movement a bit with the rotation and the movement of the arms.
I had already inserted this screenshot in the previous post, when I had looked at the spread eagle. We see the flow again, with the lunge, enriched by the head turned completely upwards, in a position that is anything but comfortable and is choreographically effective, followed by the spread eagle.
Brown closes the program with another knee slide on which he bend his body. At first he leans forward, then shifts his weight back, putting his hand on the ice for support. A good conclusion to the program.
Carrillo begins with a lunge with a leg that is not perfectly stretched, then bends, extends first one leg and then the other, even if he has never perfectly extended them at the same time, and lowers himself in a split. The movement is original, and even if the exit is simple, aided by the knee and hand on the ice, the glide phase is good.
Carrillo lowers, both with the back and with the legs. The center of gravity is central, he does not do something particularly risky. What he does is give variety to the program. Carrillo played a lot on the high/low movements within this program, I didn’t shoot them all because some were very short, but they were there. This denotes great energy. And then, in the end, Carrillo also works on balance, because he shifts the weight of the body forward and makes a hop, reversing the position of the feet.
A lunge with the knee bent. The straight leg, and the position as low as possible, are the greatest difficulties of the lunge. Carrillo lowers himself, but giving up the straight leg simplified his move. At the same time, he doesn’t rest his knee on the ice, it’s not a simpler knee slide. For this movement he can only rely on his muscular strength, which he uses well. I also notice a straight back, which other skaters don’t seem to know what it is.
Let’s start with the negative aspect: the butt is a little too low, a little saggy. The position certainly cannot be defined as elegant. Let’s move on to the positives. The movement is original. Carrillo continues to play with high/low. Plus at some point he lifts one foot, so he tests his sense of balance. I doubt that a glove normally slides at the same speed as a skate’s blade, so Carrillo has to be very careful with how he controls the movement to prevent his hand from remain behind and he ends up lying flat on the ice. Both the phase in which he lowers himself and the one in which he gets up are good, the gestures are performed naturally, without simplifying the final phase with a short stop that would make it easier to get up but would remove fluidity from the movement.
Lunge. Since the image of Beijing is not very clear, I checked that of the National Championship. Chen lower himself very little. So little that it is difficult to call this movement a lunge.
Chen has just finished his jumping elements and has given himself two pushes. In the screenshots we see a hop half turn, at the end of which he plants his legs very wide on the ice, makes a two-foot glide in the curve, and I let you decide how beautiful the position is that we see in the top row, in the third screenshot from the right. Even in the next two it is… beautiful, but in this screenshot Chen reaches heights that are difficult to overcome. Then he turns around and does a knee side. With really stiff shoulders, check out the third screenshot from the left of the second row. I know, the still image gave a slightly strange effect, but we can understand the same the stiffness of the shoulders and the hunched body. When he gets up, Chen has a straight back, he works correctly with his legs, but his head continues to be encased in a rigid body.
A knee slide is usually the simplest movement a skater can use to do something in the low position. I’m not saying there can’t be complicated knee slides. It all depends on how you make them.
I know, this is not one of the Olympic programs. It’s just a reminder of how a difficult, and beautiful, knee slide can be done. For the record, Hanyu had turned 22 the day before of this program. I haven’t taken screenshots from the World Championship because the TV camera is worse, but the movement is the same. Hanyu was the same age as Chen was in Beijing. And, while I’m on this knee slide, the way Hanyu gets up, his fluidity, is also remarkable.
Another… lunge? Chen added the positions in Beijing, at the National championship he didn’t do a lunge. But does Chen know the meaning of the expression lowering the body?
Just to understand, I watched the start of the men’s short program. Not even the first two groups. For each skater I stopped at the first time they did something that can be defined a lunge, thus excluding the too short movements or the entrances of the spins.
In components these skaters got scores ranging from Jin’s 39.36 to Lee’s 35.94 (with a fall). The components are not done only by the lunges, of course, and a skater can choose not to make a movement, or to make it very small, if he inserts something else in his program. Did Chen include anything else in his program? Did he include enough for a 47.99? Does he have the correct carriage? Did he have flow? We feel that what he did was apparently effortless?
Another knee slide. Ok, here he lowered himself. With the knee bend. Perhaps for him it is impossible just to get down while keeping the leg straight.
Last knee slide. Really elegant when he is again on two feet…
In Beijing they decided it wasn’t necessary to see Hanyu’s lunge, so I took a screenshot from the National Championship program. Leg straight, body low.
Very short lunge performed after a tap jump. In this case Hanyu doesn’t go down too much, he prioritizes the flow, so much so that immediately after he does a mohawk and a twizzle.
Last lunge. Sometimes Hanyu with lunge reaches lower positions, in this case he gave priority to other things. It is a choice. As I already wrote, not all movements must be present, both because the movements must be linked to each other, and therefore choreographers and skaters think about which is the best whole, and because there are precise time limits. But if Hanyu in his program did something other, it’s ok. Did he do something else? We’ve already seen enough to deserve his scores in previous posts, we’ll see more moves down below.
Good lunge done by Kagiyama.
Side lunge. Kagiyama chose to do a lunge in both positions, giving variety to the program. Good position, not extraordinary. Just to understand, this is the demonstration of how much it is possible to get down on a side lunge (at 18 and 26 years old).
Comparisons between different competitions must always be taken with great caution. Probably in the case of the front lunge, the one done by both Hanyu and Kagiyama, the quality is the same, even if Hanyu’s framing on the first lunge does not allow us to understand anything and we can get an idea of his movement (which he could have performed better, but even worse) from the National championship. As far as we can see, the best lunge is that of Brown (aside from Jin, since I have not analyzed his program). Carrillo also lowered a lot, because he chose to bend his back leg. The only side lunge that we see, in these seven programs, is that of Kagiyama, and this is the reason why I have inserted the two old images of Hanyu: to provide a reference to the quality of execution of the movement by Kagiyama, something that judges should know (non necessarily Hanyu’s lunges, even if Hanyu’s programs are really famous, but the possibility of a side lunge). As said, good but not great. Elasticity does not seem to me one of the main qualities of Kagiyama.
Uno lowers as much as Chen, and with that I said it all.
Vasilievs is on two feet, but he lowers himself to a position where his center of gravity is outside his body. The position does not excite me, but this is in personal taste, he still does something for which he must have good body control.
Non listed jumps
Remember that
Unlisted jumps, independent of their number of revolutions can be included in the
step sequence without a deduction or any other consequence.
Listed jumps with more than half revolution will be ignored in SP as an element, but
will force the Judges to reduce GOE by 1 grade for “Listed jumps with more than ½
rev. included”.
And also that
An Euler, when used in combinations between two listed jumps, becomes a listed
jump (1Eu) with the value indicated in the SOV.
The rule refers specifically to the step sequence, but is valid for the entire program, including transitions between one element and another. Non-listed jumps can be done without any problems, as can all half turn hops. The euler is also fine because it is a listed jump only when it is the second jump of a combination of three jumps (the first and the third listed). This allows skaters to indulge themselves with various types of jumps.
We had seen this image before, bunny hop followed by a lunge. The hop is high, and there is also a choreo move of the arms, but the position is not particularly beautiful.
Split jump with half turn. In this case Brown makes a nice move. He has great leg extension, and the result is almost always remarkable. Among other things, he performs this jump just before starting a spin, so he add difficulty to his program.
Bunny hop.
Split jump with half turn. Really good extension of the body. Too bad for the back at the end and for the butt before and after the jump.
First Brown extends his leg practically in arabesque position, then, thanks to the toe pick, he pushes himself into a half turn jump with high kick. Brown has variety, does jumps of different types, and almost always with excellent leg(s) extension.
Hop with the slip of the blade immediately followed by a more simple hop half turn. If someone choose to let the blade slip, he must have an absolute confidence in his ability to control the slip, which I don’t think they all have.
Another bunny hop, with a different use of the legs. I said variety?
Split jump. Since the Beijing shot doesn’t allow us to see Brown’s legs opening well, I take a screenshot from the national championship. Great movement.
Butterfly, just to remind us that Brown has no problems with non-listed jumps even when he has to shift his body weight during the flight phase.
Euler. At the end Carrillo deliberately tilts his back for that backward glide with high free leg I looked at that position the first of this series of posts.
Carrillo’s sequence of movements is besti squat-glide with sideways inclination (post 3, you can check the seconds in the screenshots if you want) and, now, backward slip hop. Good movement.
Carrillo has just stopped after a backward bunny hop not in my screenshots. He pauses for a moment on the toe picks at the beginning of the sequence of screenshots and starts again with a couple of forward bunny hops.
Hop, half turn, with a leg bend for choreographic reason.
We had already seen this series of screenshots in the second post, when I focused on the positions where it is difficult to maintain balance. Carrillo does a death drop, a jump simpler than a butterfly, which however requires to the skater to shift his body weight from one foot to the other, with the torso horizontally during the flight phase. And then does a little glide in a difficult position. As always, Carrillo is not particularly elegant, but he tries to enrich his program.
Half turn hop. Forget what I just wrote. Compared to Chen, Carrillo is very elegant. Carrillo makes a more difficult movement than Chen, and is much more relaxed than him. Chen is contracted in everything: neck, shoulders, back, legs. I have no words.
Chen did another half turn hop after the combination and before a knee slide, again this is a series of screenshots we have already seen. The carriage is better than the previous one, Carrillo continues to be more elegant than Chen.
Bunny hop. We could talk at length about the elegance of Chen’s shoulder position, but maybe not. Since it is not clear from this shot how Chen performed the jump, I watched the National Championship, even though in that competition the dark stands make it difficult to see the upper body of the skaters.
Ok, in practice he is running. He could not do less even if he committed himself in the search of the void.
Hop. With the other skaters I ignored such small movements, I didn’t consider them significant. With Chen I tried my best to find difficult moves – without considering the seven technical elements – in his program, so I looked at everything. Chen is moving backward. At a certain point he makes the right blade slip infinitesimally. His left leg is already ready in the best position to have a stable balance, so he just has to land on it, in a hop in which I believe he has lifted himself from the ice of 2 centimeter…
Euler.
Bunny hop. The change of camera does not help us to see the movement well. Hanyu is going backward. This is the preparation of the triple axel, assuming that can be said that Hanyu prepare the triple axel. The take off is at 2:19, ten seconds later. In between there are a crossed step, a chasse, a crossover, but also two threes, a mohawk, three backward cross rolls and a counter. And here, before all these steps and turns, he makes a bunny hop.
The movement is not simply hinted, as is sometimes the case. Hanyu reverses the position of his feet, and doing it by going backward is not very comfortable. Not only. He moves. When I commented on Chen’s last hop, I noticed that he comes off the ice very little. Hanyu’s hop is much more high, even if the bad shot makes the estimate very complicated. And he fly for a greater distance. Chen’s flight phase is from the second (he is lifting) to the fourth screenshot (the left foot is fully on the ice). Hanyu’s flight phase goes from the third screenshot (but actually the second is comparable to Chen’s second) to the last one, when his blades are firmly placed on the ice. Look at the marks you see on the ice from the moment the shot changes. I cut the photos in this way on purpose, keeping the marks on the ice in order to make you understand how long Hanyu’s flight phase is.
They are details, of course. For skaters able of doing quadruple jumps, a hop is something simple. The difference is that someone does difficult quadruple jumps but giving up everything else, because he doesn’t have the mental energies, maybe even the physical ones, and the control of the skates and the body, to do both jumps and transitions. Someone may opt for simpler quads, but he does both jumps and transitions. This difference must be recognized in the PCS.
Variation from the National Championship, where Hanyu limited himself to a toe push before the lunge. Here are two hops on the toe picks, because actually a simple push isn’t nice, it’s better do something more. Maybe simple, after all he has completely stopped and needs speed because immediately after the lunge there is the first difficult turn combination of the step sequence, and it is a combination that starts with a twizzle, something on which usually a skater lost speed. So yes, Hanyu pushes himself because he needs speed, but instead of a simple toe push he does two toe hops, because they are more beautiful. And he knows how to vary speed in his program, a clear request in PCS.
Choreo jump. Hanyu raises the leg, perfectly stretched, beyond the height of the pelvis. I don’t know why, but I think that, if he wanted, Brown could do this move (but I don’t know if he is able to do it while he rotates), I have strong doubts about the others. And while Hanyu lifts his leg, he completes a half turn. Do you remember, do you, that the more open the body is, the more difficult it is to reach a high speed in rotation? Beyond the difficult position, to do a jump half turn in this way, compared to a simple hop half turn, you need a lot more energy, a lot more speed. And Hanyu jumps quite a lot (otherwise he wouldn’t have enough time to rotate), as can be seen from the position of his body relative to the background.
Butterfly. With Brown I remembered that one of the difficulties of butterflies is linked to the need to shift the weight of the body from one side to the other during the fly. The only ones to make a butterfly, among the skaters I watched, were Brown and Hanyu, but since the impression I got from watching the two videos was not the same, I took a closer look at some screenshots. I post the same images twice, first the simple screenshots and then the same images with the addition of four lines.
The shots are slightly different, but not so much. An important difference is in the initial screenshot. Brown is on the ice, albeit a bit leaning, Hanyu is not. If you look at the other series of screenshots, the one entirely dedicated to Hanyu’s butterfly, you can see that in the first line, in the screenshot in the center, Hanyu is on the ice. His legs are bent, what will be the support foot, the left one, is lower than that area of ice that appears clearer to us. In the screenshot immediately on the right the right foot is off the ice, but the left foot is also already on the toe, and is under the light area. In the next screenshot Hanyu is already in the air. In the series of screenshots where I made the comparison between Hanyu and Brown, I redid the screenshots. I looked for the most precise moment possible, but it’s not easy, because the movement is very fast. The tip of the blade is exactly at the height of the lightest ice zone, which means that Hanyu is already in flight (and we see his skate clearly tilted). In my opinion, considering the perspective, he has already detached himself from the ice by several centimeters.
The lineless images above allow you to see for yourself, if you feel like it, what has been hidden by my lines below. The two yellow lines have no importance with respect to the gesture of the skaters. I draw them to show that the shot doesn’t change. The background changes slightly, because the skaters move to the side, but if the drawings on the ice remain at the same height it means that the only movement is lateral. And luckily for us, the skaters made their butterflies on the same line. To confirm this, you have to watch the videos. In that area of ice there are writings, and both Brown and Hanyu run through them, staying on them. The displacements in depth are minimal, so we can observe the movements of the skaters, and compare them, with relative simplicity.
It is impossible to say for sure who lifts the pelvis the most. My impression is that Brown lift it at chest height, Hanyu, considering that in the first screenshot he is already flying, lift the pelvis at shoulder height, but we can’t say for sure. Maybe someone can get the correct measurements from the screenshots, I can’t.
The red line marks the highest point reached by the pelvis, and it’s interesting. Brown raises only the first foot above the red line, the second remains well below. Hanyu raisess both feet over the red line. At his best, Brown’s head is level with his pelvis, his back is straight. Hanyu’s head is more upright, his back is arched. Not bent, arched. Head and pelvis (and feet) are high, stomach is low. Hanyu’s movement is more elegant, and of course more difficult. Hanyu is special in all moves, even in something, as a butterfly, that judges don’t consider so much.
Hop (really high) with half turn. Before he is bend, after he does a lunge. Hanyu makes full use of the space, not only the extension of the rink on all sides. but also the space below, near the ice, and the space above, reachable only by jumping. Id you remember, among the criteria listed by Jenny Mast for a high score in composition there is
Multi-dimensional use of space and design of movements.
Hop, half turn. Considering all the other things Hanyu does, this is nothing. I don’t even know why I bothered to take screenshots. Of course, it is nothing for Hanyu, for someone other the situation changes. Okay, since I’m here I highlight a detail. In the previous hop he rotated clockwise, in this he rotated counter-clockwise, and as Mast reminded us, in skating skills the expression “use of multi-directional skating” means, among other tings, that the skater must rotate in both directions, clockwise and counter-clockwise, backward and forward.
What he had done so far was more than enough to say that no one has a complex program as Hanyu’s. But with Rondò he decided to prove that he really is a skater of another level, and therefore here is a saute de basque. He had already done it in the past, but in a somewhat simpler program at the transition level. Simpler compared to Rondò, not to the program of the other skaters. Here… I gasp for him, I have no idea how he find the strength to gets to the end of the program.
The take off is that of the axel, we see it. However, the landing is on the same foot as the take off, which for Hanyu is the left foot, not the right, so this is a non-listed jump and Hanyu can do it without problems. Hanyu did a turn, which means he lands forward, something skaters aren’t used to. I don’t know how to skate, but I think it’s risky to land forward. If he just misses the move and implants the toe picks in the ice, the fall is assured. The movement is borrowed from classical dance. The dancers, however, wear very light shoes, the skates weigh a little more. I don’t think lifting the right leg like that is that simple, he probably need strength. But the movement is really beautiful, so he does it, then lands and walks away with much more elegance than the other skaters on simpler movements.
Can we petition the ISU and ask for the televisions to be fined every time they take an overhead shot? To see Kagiyama’s bunny hops I moved to the National Championship, where the framing is much better. The program has just begun. Nice movement, nothing special.
Another bunny hop. I don’t know if I can explain myself in English, I often can’t understand the different nuances of words with similar meanings. That is, I understand when I read, but when I write I don’t know which term is better in that particular context. And this without considering my typos and my grammatical errors. In the first case, Kagiyama just jumped a little. Hopped a little? Saltellava. Here he reverses the position of the feet, the movement is a little more complex. Similar to a hop made by Hanyu, but Hanyu’s was backward, was more complex than Kagiyama’s, which is forward.
Hop, half turn. Nothing special.
Kagiyama has just landed the combination. After a push he did a side hop on the toe pick.
More than hops, these seem like steps on toe picks. All these hops and little steps give liveliness to the program, they are on theme with each other, but Kagiyama is not doing anything difficult.
Hop with half turn.
This is a series of screenshots I had previously posted talking about equilibrium positions. Kagiyama moves backwards on the right foot only, in a position of deliberately precarious balance, then puts down the left foot, finds the balance, lifts the foot again, jumps with only the right foot and lands first with the right and then, spreading it a lot to have a stable balance, with the left. He makes a scene, but putting his foot between the backward glide and the jump simplifies the whole movement a lot.
Choreographic jump, one turn. The body is tilted in the direction of rotation, so the tilt is not something that disturbs the balance axis.
One half turn hop followed by two toe hop. Cute, sure. Lively choreography. When does she stop hopping and start doing something difficult?
Once again the Beijing shot does not allow us to see what the skater is doing, and I moved on to the National championship. Side glide on two feet and side hop, with the two feet very wide so there is no risk of losing balance. Here Kagiyama varies the speed, a specific request of the components, but does it with simple movements.
Choreographic jump with the body open. This is the most difficult of the non listed jumps or hops done by Kagiyama. No split jump, or high kick, or butterfly, or death drop or any type of really difficult jump.
Click jump at the end of the program.
Waltz jump. This is the first jump learned by skaters. The take off is that of the axel, but the skater only stays in the air for half turn. Uno complicates the jump a little by tilting the head back and extending the arms forward. Even though we’re not at the 2 centimeters high of one of Chen’s jumps, Uno’s jump isn’t very high.
Hop, half turn. Nothing special, but I put one done by Hanyu, it seemed right to put one done by Uno too.
Euler. Only to me does the moment of the take off give the impression of a great effort?
Hop, half turn.
With Vasiljevs I took far fewer screenshots than with the other skaters. Looking for a precise point in a long video is much more complicated, so I ended up ignoring the small movements, while with the other skaters I also focused on details. Vasiljevs didn’t make many jumps or hops, but there is one that is interesting: the one with which he closes the program.
Vasiljevs is one of only three skaters – the others are Kevin Aymoz and Konstantin Milyukov – who closed the program with the step sequence. The other 27 (I am also counting Vincent Zhou, who did not participate only because of really bad luck, but who should have been in the competition and whose layout is known) concluded with a spin. True, many after the spin still do a few steps for choreographic reasons, but concluding with the step sequence gives a different effect. Especially when it comes to a conclusion like this.
Vasiljevs is doing a series of complicated steps. Not that we understand the difficulty, made by him all moves seem simple, and we see a single flow. At one point he jumps. The jump is very high, and I already reminded you that skates are heavy. In listed jumps, the feet are always under the skaters. The jump can be difficult, but the weight remains below the skater’s body. If in a choreographic jump the skater lifts his feet, he struggles. Here, Vasiljevs lifts both feet a lot. Then, it is true that he lands with his feet wide to keep his balance better, with one foot on the blade and the other on the toe picks. But he freezes in place. He lands, and all the speed he had a moment before disappears, frozen in place. It takes a lot of body control to do this.
With these screenshots I have finished the categories in which I have divided the movements made by the skaters. I will focus on the scores next time.
