Valieva case spotlights an old question in figure skating: Will age minimum be raised?

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Valieva case spotlights an old question in figure skating: Will age minimum be raised?

Would raising the minimum age in figure skating prevent another Kamila Valieva situation in the future?

It would not directly deal with the issue of doping that is at the center of this highly controversial case, which has utterly overshadowed the 2022 Winter Olympic figure skating competition for the week since it became public.

But it would address part of the multi-layered problem that may have contributed to Valieva, 15, having a banned drug, trimetazidine, appear in a doping control sample she gave Dec. 25.

Olympic champion Nathan Chen’s coach, Rafael Arutunian, has advocated raising the age minimum for several seasons. He thinks the Valieva case will put more pressure on the International Skating Union to do it.

“If you are skating in an adult competition, you should be an adult,” Arutunian told me this week via telephone.

NBC Olympics has confirmed a Russian TV report that the ISU governing council will put forward a proposal to raise the minimum age for Olympic-level (senior) international competition on the agenda of the ISU congress in June. The minimum would go from 15 to 17, cover only figure skating and be phased in.

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Skating prodigy Alysa Liu, a senior national competitor at 13, is using the present to avoid future shock

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Skating prodigy Alysa Liu, a senior national competitor at 13, is using the present to avoid future shock

The idea was to show Alysa Liu what her future might look like and for her to get comfortable seeing herself in that picture.

So Samuel Auxier, U.S. Figure Skating’s international committee chair, arranged for Liu and her coach, Laura Lipetsky, to attend the junior and senior Grand Prix Final competitions earlier this month in Vancouver.

“Having judged and watched the Junior Grand Prixes, it was clear our skaters competing their first time in them were often very intimidated by the Russian and Japanese ladies,” Auxier said.

He soon realized that Liu isn’t intimidated by much.

“At first, she was amazed by the Russian ladies, but then (she) wanted to get out there and show them her triple Axels,” Auxier said.

That’s right, triple Axels.

The triple Axels Liu, 13, plans to show in the senior competition at next month’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit.

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Proposal to raise minimum age for senior events brings figure skating back to the future

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Proposal to raise minimum age for senior events brings figure skating back to the future

Jeroen Prins long has been deeply involved in figure skating, with a wide range of expertise.

Prins, 54, was a national-level skater in the Netherlands who now is an international referee and technical controller in singles, a technical controller in pairs and a judge in ice dance.  He holds several positions in the figure skating section of the Dutch Skating Federation and is a candidate for membership on the International Skating Union’s singles and pairs technical committee.  He is a figure skating commentator for Eurosport Netherlands.

And Prins had been thinking long, hard and deeply about the issue of minimum age in senior figure skating before writing the urgent proposal to raise it to 17 that the Dutch federation submitted to the ISU Congress that begins June 4 in Seville, Spain.

“I has this idea in mind already at the start of this past Olympic season, but I wanted to see how everything unfolded,” Prins said in an email.

What unfolded was the second youngest women’s Olympic champion in history, 15-year-old Alina Zagitova of Russia.  And the top two women (girls?) at the World Junior Championships, also both Russians, were 13 and 14.  And the top three women at the Junior Grand Prix Final, all Russians (the top two were the same as at junior worlds), were 13, 14, 13.

One of those three, world junior champion Alexandra Trusova, did two quadruple jumps in her winning free skate at the world juniors.  Since then, video has been posted of another Russian – Anna Shcherbakova, 14, who did not compete in the 2017 world juniors or the 2017 Junior Grand Prix series – doing a clean quad lutz-triple toe-triple loop combination in practice.

So Prins decided the time was right to ask that the ISU raise the minimum age for seniors in all disciplines from 15 to 17 as of the 2020-21 season, with the two-year wait designed to prevent any 15- or 16-year-olds already in seniors from being forced back to the junior level.

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An old debate about the young in figure skating heats up again: is it time to raise the minimum age for seniors?

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An old debate about the young in figure skating heats up again: is it time to raise the minimum age for seniors?

Is it time to raise the age minimum for singles figure skaters in senior international competition?

Rafael Arutunian thinks so. The coach of the only two U.S. skaters to win senior World Championship medals since 2009 brought up the idea unprompted during our lengthy recent conversation at his training base south of Los Angeles.

For a number of reasons, including health, career longevity and competitive equity, Arutunian favors a minimum age of 18 for senior men and women rather than the current 15.

“Everyone now talks about jumping too much and people starting to damage themselves,” Arutunian said.  “How do you want to stop that?  In my mind, there is only one way: not allow them to compete (at seniors) until 18.

“If I am 12 years old, and I know real money is after 18, do you think I will do too many quads, or I will do just enough quads to win and save my body for later?”

Several other coaches and skaters contacted by phone, email or text message, including Alexei Mishin of Russia, Brian Orser of Canada and Tom Zakrajsek of the U.S., agreed with Arutunian, especially where female skaters are concerned.

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Thoughts from the Hughes sisters, Olympians and Ivy League grads, on challenges and rewards Nathan Chen would have as skater and student at Yale

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Thoughts from the Hughes sisters, Olympians and Ivy League grads, on challenges and rewards Nathan Chen would have as skater and student at Yale

Sarah Hughes, the 2002 Olympic women's singles champion, was the last prominent U.S. figure skater to attend Yale.

Her younger sister, Emily, who finished seventh in singles at the 2006 Winter Olympics, went on to Harvard.

The big difference was Sarah’s competitive career had ended before she entered Yale, while Emily kept competing during her first three years at Harvard.

With 2018 men's singles world champion and Olympian Nathan Chen having been admitted to the Yale Class of 2022 and trying to decide whether he will matriculate for the 2018 fall semester, I asked Emily, 29, now a senior manager at Johnson & Johnson, for her thoughts on the demands of remaining a competitive skater while attending a university like Harvard or Yale and asked Sarah, 32, who is to graduate in May from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, for general observations on her Yale experience and the challenges Chen may face in New Haven.

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