Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin won the highest points both with the public and the judges.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov, Kommerant
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Short and Outstanding
// World Figure Skating Championships
Yesterday, the World Figure Skating Championship started at Moscow’s Luzhniki arena. The main event of the first day was the confident victory won by world champions Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin in the short program.
The championship began with an alarming rumor that Evgeny Plushchnko may withdraw from the competitions because of a trauma. However, the most popular male figure skater, opened the Moscow championship, although afterwards confirmed that he did have a backache and a leg trauma.
In spite of the health problems, his far from best skating in this season, and his having excluded quads from the routine to The Godfather, he still led his qualifying group showing a result inferior only to Switzerland's Stephane Lambiel, from another group. Last year's silver medalist Brian Joubert of France, who was thought to be Plushchenko’s main rival, was left far behind.
The most interesting event in the pair skating competitions took place in the second round. The bid was opened by two strong Chinese duets - Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo and Qing Pang and Jian Tong, supposedly the main competitors of the Russians. Both the bronze medalists and the silver showed precise skating, judges awarding some high scores for their complicated elements. Although, they still must have noticed several insignificant mistakes such as imprecise landings after jumps and rotations out of sync.
Naturally, both pairs received high scores, although the 66 points received by Xue and Zhao Hongbo is not exactly a shocking figure – they have had better scores. The second pair from China was passed by their junior compatriots - Dan Zhang & Hao Zhang.
One had to wait only a few minutes to see what scores would be awarded to Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin, who opened the next round. Their routine to Ave Maria was not only splendid, it was outstanding. There was not a single fault to be found in their performance. The ease of their skating and the amazing flow of elements made it one whole dance… When they finished the public roared in delight. It was no surprise the judges had similar sentiments, which they expressed in the 70.12 points they awarded. Our pair passed the first Chinese skaters with all their high style and tricks by more than four points! Indeed it was a major blow to all rivals.
The end of the day brought another pleasant surprise to us. Veterans Mayia Petrova and Aleksey Tikhonov skated their routine better than all Chinese pairs and scored second with 66.94 points.
Alexei Dospekhov
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 15, 2005
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