In all fairness, S/K look rather out of sorts. Nikita made two obvious mistakes, at least, so probably his injury hasn't fully resolved itself. They looked very ragged even worse than their test skates, and that makes absolutely no sense.
Well just compare with Zahorski&Guerreiro. With only four months with Kustarova, they have regained fitness. They are back on track. Coaches are working them, and it shows.
S&Katsalapov were good in the test skates. Since then, they have deteriorated. Like last season with Bobrova. Not one team in the Zhulin camp ever achieve any improvements. As the season goes, so goes their fitness.
Add to that HE has a huge problem. Throwing your partner like he did in the SD isn't professional. It's criminal.
Durnev politiking them won't work if they don't put the work and are trained properly. Since both Denis Samohin and Oleg Volkov left that team, there is no coach to train those teams as is obvious when you watch how all the teams that leave them thrive anywhere else.
Take Sara and Kiril. They have good programs, but don't get the levels. They need to switch asap or can say goodbye to the olys.
Zahorski/Guerreiro look better prepared than last season. Kustarova gets a lot of criticism, but at this point I think the coaching change was a good decision. As #1 at the rink they get much more attention and it shows, IMO.
S/K`s performance really surprised me. They looked good in the Russian Cup competition they skated. S/B had a not so great challenger too and made significant improvements until their first GP. S/K now have two weeks to work on their programs, let`s wait and see how they will skate in Japan.
Only Zhang is an Olympic medalist so katsalapov can be likedned to him but I feel he’s like a trainer of young Chinese women in pairs rather than a real contender.
The current Olympic bronze and gold medalists is now an extreme disastrous failure! Why should he continue? There’s now opportunity costs. Russian fed needs to ban him now. Retire him like they did sokolova. Just get rid of him.
The pairs silver medalist from last season's GPF, and 4th at Worlds, last season isn't a real contender?
Re: Nikita. This is his livelihood. He should retire on his terms, not because he's not an OGM contender which no Russian is anyways. And if he's getting more GP and national medals and better placements than other Russian teams then he should keep going. People said D/R should retire and "are done" after poor results last season.... And they just beat Savchenko/Massot.
If he is taking money from other teams, those other teams are more than welcome to try to get better and do better than him and Sinitsina.
We get it. You dislike the guy. You had some exceedingly high expectation of him and Sinitsina. But if he's competing better than others and his competitors aren't taking the steps necessary to beat him then that's on them.
Btw I would love to know who your favourite dance team is, or who you think the most promising one is... because one can only hope they will one day be bad enough to win a Grand Prix silver.