#eteri tutberidze when i catch you

[levelofyoureye]

the tutberidze girls.

[skatingonlove]

Skating Through Life – Meryl Davis/Eteri Tutberidze  

A/N: So this is... so not smutty but it was written from a prompt on the @smubbles-etc discord server, so enjoy?

It starts almost accidentally. They meet after being brought in for an interview, the assumption that they are dating one they both run with the moment they understand this is the only way they can keep their chances to work at the school alive. It starts accidentally, but the longer they fake date, the harder they have to fight to keep it fake. They had talked only a little at first, just enough to understand they both had not planned what to do after they were successful, but now Meryl can see more, read more, of the feelings Eteri hides so well. They teach, they skate… and they date, not entirely faking it. It’s only later, when, finally, Eteri’s voice shakes, that Meryl understands what is happening. Meryl has never been afraid of attraction, but she was never raised to fear being found out. Eteri had. Eteri had always been afraid, deep down. Nobody could be allowed to know… before.

Neither of them really knows when things change, but Meryl knows when Eteri flinches that there’s a reason. It’s easy to slip in front of her, face the man down and, when the man makes a comment in rough Russian, she responds fiercely. “Teper ona moya…” Eteri’s breath catches and Meryl barely hides her laugh when the man replies. “Ona nikogda ne smozhet vernutsya domoi...” Silence falls before Eteri finally speaks. “Ya ne khochu... nikogda bolshe.” The man snarls, Meryl’s hand clenches and Eteri feels her heartbeat skip a couple times. He’s gone before Meryl turns, her eyes flickering from Eteri’s eyes to her lips and back again, then, finally, she leans to kiss her, firm and slightly roughly. “Ya immel vieu vidou... te moya.” Fake dating becomes real and Eteri, finally, lets herself want more. Translations: She’s mine now She can never come home… I don’t want to… ever again I meant it... you are mine.

[freifraufischer]

Okay, the Russian quad evolution for dummies:

A major Russian figure skating club Sambo 70 in Moscow and their powerful head coach Eteri Tutberidze start producing many very young skaters producing high difficulty technical content involving jumping that few to no other people in the world can match.  Her female skaters have an incredibly high injury rate and tend to retire within 2 years of turning senior.  

The 2018 Olympic Gold medalist was one of her students who did so using a program that was back loaded, that is almost all of her jumping content was at the very end of the program when most skaters are tired and so the jumps there received an extra bonus.  It required monster amounts of stamina.

Meanwhile quad jumping became very important building points in men’s skating and there was a push for it to become part of women’s as well to build those unbeatable scores and the Tutberidze skaters were leading the way.  They weren’t the only quad jumpers, there were other quad jumpers in Japan and from other Russian coaches that tended to be older but they didn’t do as many quads and many lacked the consistency.

Tutberidze is a monster.  She said in 2014 that an once of weight in a skater was an once of laziness.  She churns through these girls like they are replaceable and many have been skating on injuries.  One of the stars from 2018′s back is fused and can no longer turn to one side.  John Weir sings her praises and calls her a genius.  He has a obsession with Russian culture and skating boardering on the fetishistic [he does not speak very good Russian].  Tara Lipinski the American 1998 gold medalist turned figure skating commentator herself retired in the same age range as the Tutberidze skaters and had to have hip surgery at 18.  She is very defensive about the careers of athletes who rise young and retire early.  A perfect pair to be reporting on this period of figure skating.

So even if you leave out the question of doping to raise stamina, allowing for the ability to do more repetitions and train longer... what is behind the Tutberidze “Quad Revolution.”

First of all you have to understand how they took advantage of figure skating’s broken rules.  Say you do a quad jump, you take off, do 3 and a half turns in the air and finish the last half turn on the ice after you land.  The technical judges will downgrade that to a triple and you get the base points for the lower difficulty jump plus a negative grade of execution on that now lower point value element.  But if you rotate before you take off, called pre-rotation, the jump doesn’t get downgraded and in theory you are supposed to be punished in the grade of execution of the jump.  In reality they aren’t.

All the Russian women are rotating at least one rotation before they take off.  There are other skaters from other countries that have some degree of pre-rotation but no one is doing it to the degree that Tutberidze’s skaters are.  It’s a bit hard to catch in real time but if it fell under the technical panels preview they could see it in slow motion.  

They’ve broken the code.  I don’t blame them for that.  That is on the ISU for allowing this loophole to exist.  

The second thing going on is that the jumping technique being taught to these young women depends on them essentially being prepubescents with narrower hips and a lower center of gravity.  These girls are losing their jumping ability within a year or two because the technique (besides being extremely injury prone) does not work for adult women.  There have been rumors about puberty blockers for years but it may also be the systematic malnutrition that is keeping them from going through puberty earlier.  Because that’s a cheery thought.  Again, not technically against the rules just deeply horrifying and frankly should have been punished by the grade of execution judging but wasn’t and isn’t.

As it stood before the news of the doping positive broke there was no clear path for anyone to “catch up” with the Russians because very few places in the world would tolerate that technique.