Welcome to the second part of my round-up of my favorite performances from the 2018-19 figure skating season! As always, I had approximately one zillion favorites, which I have narrowed down to one competitive program per skater or team. Instead of dividing things up by discipline, I’ve sorted the programs into five broad categories, which I’ll reveal one by one as these posts go up. The first category, which I posted last month, was Breakthroughs.
This installment focuses on the Ingenues of 2018-19. One of the wonderful, maddening things about figure skating is that new talent is emerging all the time, and it often peaks early. Fans light prayer candles for promising teens to survive puberty with their jumps intact. It’s impossible to tell which of the athletes featured in this post will go on to long and decorated careers, which will fall prey to injury, and which will simply fade away and move on from the sport. That great unknown is what all of these skaters have in common: their time is not quite yet, and their potential is infinite.
Kseniia Akhanteva & Valerii Kolesov, Russia
Junior Grand Prix Ostrava Short Program
If you’re having trouble keeping track of the many exceptional Russian junior pairs teams, you can’t be blamed. With this tinfoil sci-fi short program, Akhanteva and Kolesov made a play to stand out, and the program’s placid strangeness highlights their finest qualities. Akhanteva’s rotation in the air is dizzying; in their throw triple salchow, she looks like a whirring helicopter with a ponytail for a blade. They also synchronize their moves with a calm precision seldom seen outside of ice dance. The program ends with an intricate step sequence that makes them look like two moons in orbit, an element difficult enough to produce their only technical error – a human flaw in an otherwise otherworldly performance.
Calista Choi, United States of America
Egna Spring Trophy Free Skate
Choi wasn’t on anyone’s radar until she ran away with a novice-level national title in January. A couple of months later, she made her international debut and junior debut simultaneously at the Egna Spring Trophy, where she blew the competition out of the water yet again, performing an almost flawless free skate and winning a gold medal. Choi will face more challenging fields in the future, for which she’ll have to amp up her jump difficulty as well as the intricacy of her choreography. Both goals look like they’re well within her grasp. Choi times and controls her jumps expertly, and she knows how to build energy and intensity through a program. She skates like she hasn’t figured out how to fail yet, and that’s the perfect mindset to start an international career with.
Ting Cui, United States of America
World Junior Championships Free Skate
The Russian ladies seemed poised to sweep the podium at Junior Worlds this year. If anything, there was a slim chance that one of the Japanese or Korean skaters could spoil for the podium. As predicted, Russians took gold and silver, but the dark horse bronze medalist was someone that most fans had counted out. We shouldn’t have. Sure, Cui hadn’t been the model of consistency earlier in the season, but her best moments proved that she had plenty of technical ability – and more importantly, the grit to put forth a confident program at an event where her competitors were crumbling. Her free skate at Junior Worlds wasn’t perfect, but she nailed all the difficult elements. The best part of her performance, however, was her growing glee as she landed each jump. Her bursts of emotion – unchoreographed, but somehow timed to her music – soared higher than a quadruple lutz.
Sarah Feng & TJ Nyman, United States of America
JGP Ostrava Free Skate
Obsessive followers of American figure skating will recognize both Feng and Nyman as converts from other disciplines. Together, they’re another sign that it’s time to stop making dismissive jokes about American pairs. They’re not fully cooked yet – they need to work on timing their throw jumps – but they’re young, and they managed to land two difficult jumping passes like they weren’t even hard. Best of all, they livened up a Junior Grand Prix pairs field that was often blandly technical. Nyman swivels his hips like a ballet dancer at a So You Think You Can Dance audition, and Feng lights up the rink with her smile.
Daniel Grassl, Italy
Inge Solar Memorial/Alpen Trophy Short Program
Grassl’s short program at the Alpen Trophy is why I wake up at weird hours to watch as much of the Challenger Series as I can. We’ve reached the point where nobody is shocked to see teenagers throwing big quads anymore, but Grassl’s quad lutz at the top of this program is a reminder that a powerful jump can look like magic. It’s not just that Grassl made all of his jumps look effortless, but that he skated with the confidence of an athlete who’s already a star in his own mind. The commentator1 rightly notes that Grassl needs to work on his body lines, and his connection to the music comes and goes. But the kid has presence to go with his jumps, and with the national title and Junior Worlds medal he earned later in the season, he’s placed himself at the forefront of an exciting surge of men’s talent from Italy.
Yuma Kagiyama, Japan
JGP Yerevan Free Skate
Skating out to take his mark, Kagiyama tripped over his toe pick. It turned out to be the only wrong move he’d make. Kagiyama breezed through his difficult elements, including a smooth opening triple Axel and a high, clean triple flip-triple toe loop late in the program. What set him apart, though, were the classic deep knees and clean lines of a well-trained Japanese skater. If he’s this graceful and polished at fifteen, he’s on his way to becoming the next in a tradition of Japanese athletes who show up and quietly, steadily slay. Or not so quietly, if his triumphant laugh during his bows is a glimpse of the showman within.
Elizaveta Khudaiberdieva & Nikita Nazarov, Russia
World Junior Championships Free Dance
Khudaiberdieva and Nazarov’s free dance begins at the 20:30 mark in ISU’s full replay video of Junior Worlds, part 4/4.
One of the great tragedies of figure skating fandom is learning that your favorite ice dancers or pairs skaters have split. My hands-down favorite junior team of last season is already history – prey, it’s rumored, to a gap in age and experience. Fortunately, Khudaiberdieva and Nazarov have left us this moment of brilliance, an expressive and explosive skate that showcased their effortless synchronization and breathtakingly fast, difficult twizzles. It was the kind of performance that makes you forget you’re watching juniors. Khudaiberdieva is the star of the show here – Russia’s next great figure skating diva – but Nazarov is an extraordinary technician and partner in his own right. I can’t wait to see what each looks like in a new team that pushes their talents further.
Yelim Kim, Republic of Korea
Junior Grand Prix Kaunas Free Skate
It’s such a pleasure to watch Kim jump. She times her entrances precisely, launches into fast and straight rotations like airborne scratch spins, and snaps neatly into check-outs that propel her into her next move. Hers is a degree of technical cleanliness that looks like artistry even when her choreography is simple. A smart music choice heightens that effect: Massenet’s Meditation accentuates Kim’s long-limbed grace. Stumbles in higher-stakes competitions later in the season would show that Kim is not, in fact, a paragon of perfection, but this performance made her look incapable of putting a blade wrong. It also established her as one of the biggest names to watch in South Korea’s increasingly formidable ladies’ field.
Alysa Liu, United States of America
United States National Figure Skating Championships Free Skate
Liu might be the best American ladies’ skater ever, and that’s not a statement I make lightly. I do make it cautiously, since she’s only 13 – too young to compete internationally as a junior last season, barely old enough compete at the Olympics in 2022 that she will surely qualify for if healthy. But it’s hard to stay cautious when watching her land her triple Axel, a superhuman jump that she launches with so much power that she almost bounces back off the ice when gravity returns her to Earth. What video can’t capture is Liu’s precocious presence on the ice. She’s the kind of skater who makes a huge arena go quiet, holding its collective breath. Liu’s programs have an age-appropriate sweetness, but Liu herself doesn’t really. She’s a force of nature, and she’s smiling because she can’t wait to show you what she can do next.
Evgeniia Lopareva & Geoffrey Brissaud, France
World Junior Championships Free Dance
I’ve seldom seen a faster shift from “Who?” to “Oh hell yes” than with this newly formed French team. So newly formed, in fact, that they made their competitive debut at French Masters, blew most of their better-established domestic competitors out of the water, and raced to earn qualifying scores so they could compete at Junior Worlds. Their tenth-place finish in Zagreb reflects the growing pains of a brand new partnership, as well as nearly infinite potential. They’re bold and showy, as a couple of upstarts should be, but with speed and solid edges that reflect a lifetime of strong fundamental training. Every time I rewatch this, I squeal a little when Lopareva leaps into Brissaud’s arms for their final choreographic lift, convinced that this time, he won’t have the perfect timing to catch her and whirl across the ice. But he does, because they already have it together in a way that some years-old partnerships never do.
Anastasia Mishina & Aleksandr Galliamov
World Junior Championships Short Program
At first glance, “Party Like a Russian” seems like too on-the-nose of a music choice for a pair of Russian teenagers, but Mishina and Galliamov have some stereotypes to break. Russian teams thoroughly dominate junior pairs, but they’re often so young and so technically focused that they’ve developed a reputation as indistinguishable, robotic, and doomed to never graduate to the senior level. By infusing their short program with teenage fun – and by choosing music that forced them to maintain speed and momentum through the most difficult lineup of elements at 2019 Junior Worlds – Mishina and Galliamov established their individuality and brightened up the pairs field all season long. Mathematically, they won their Junior World title in the free skate, but emotionally, they took it in the short, with Mishina looking like she was having the time of her life every time she soared and landed perfectly.
Avonley Nguyen & Vadym Kolesnik, United States of America
Junior Grand Prix Ljubljana Free Dance
At the beginning of the 2018-19 season, there were a half dozen teams vying to become the next stars of American ice dance. Nguyen and Kolesnik haven’t established themselves as the Next Big Thing as definitively as some of the teams who have preceded them, but they could not have made a stronger case in their winning free dance at this Junior Grand Prix event. They took some choreographic risks in this program, most notably by placing an intricate and exhausting twizzle sequence in the final minute; it paid off when they burst with speed into perfectly synchronized rotations as the music crescendoed. On the artistic side, Nguyen showed she’d grown from adorable to mesmerizing and nuanced, while Kolesnik looked refreshingly comfortable in his moments in the spotlight – he’s more than just her backup dancer now. Unlike many of their rival teams, Nguyen and Kolesnik appear to have survived a recent American epidemic of springtime team splits, so we can look forward to seeing them grow into their role as the young Americans to beat.
Marina Piredda, Italy
World Team Trophy Short Program
Piredda’s performance begins at the 15-minute mark of the full replay of the World Team Trophy ladies’ short program on NBC Sports Gold.
What do you do when you have to skate first at the World Team Trophy and nobody knows who you are? You beast it, obviously. Piredda’s opening triple toe loop-triple toe loop combination got so much air and speed that for a moment, it looked like a third triple toe was on the way. With a full complement of clean elements, Piredda broke 60 points in her short program and almost kept up with some of the biggest guns in ladies’ skating. Italy has been searching for a star lady to pick up Carolina Kostner’s torch, and it’s hard to say whether 16-year-old Piredda can develop into that role. But she seems to have a similar mindset to Italy’s emerging powerhouse men’s team: focused, meticulously trained, and competing so frequently that nerves are no longer a factor.
Anna Shcherbakova, Russia
Cup of Russia 2nd Stage Free Skate
Shcherbakova is the quad lutz queen of juniors, and conversation about her seems to start and end there, unless it proceeds to cynicism and/or concern about her prospects past puberty. This confident performance at a national qualifier, early in the season, was a preview of the best-case scenario for Shcherbakova’s future. She begins by drilling out those two quads – a little shaky, but both judged cleanly rotated – and then she starts to have fun. In higher-stakes competitions, Shcherbakova often looked like a bundle of nerves, but here, she infused some feeling into her choreography. She also nailed the details of technique and the cool connecting moves that earn her high components marks despite her youth. Her exceptional ankle control ensures that she seldom cheats her loop jumps in combination, and her catch-foot spiral to triple lutz is a more compelling signature move than any quad.
Sota Yamamoto, Japan
International Challenge Cup Free Skate
Yamamoto’s ingenue year should have been 2015 or 2016, when he was quietly and unassumingly collecting junior-level medals, including a World Junior bronze and a National junior title. Then, he broke his ankle, and we all forgot about him for two years. He returned with little fanfare, and with so-so results, until he showed up to this senior B event late in the season and very politely reclaimed his rightful position as Japan’s next big skating star. His jumps looked both controlled and effortless, including one of the season’s most elegant quad toe loops and a triple loop-half loop-triple salchow so on the nose that Yamamoto briefly broke character to celebrate it. Most other skaters would turn his final choreographic step sequence into a show-off moment, but Yamamoto looked calm as he glided among edge moves as if snowboarding across the ice. It was like a figure skating humble brag.
Alexandra Trusova, Russia
Junior World Championships Free Skate
Did she fall on her quad lutz? Sure. Is her costume weird? Yep. Are all those powerful jumps a tiny bit terrifying? Try really terrifying. Can I take my eyes off this extraordinary athlete for a moment during this program? Not even on the tenth viewing.
Previously on The Finer Sports: Part One of my Great Skating Performances of 2018-19. Also, I had some feelings about Elton John. Part Three is on the way!