Alexandra Trusova

[Arbitrary]

Motivations... motivations...

- My mom promissed me the Great French Poodle as soon as I'll land 3Ax.
From Sasha's recent interview.

https://www.sport-express.ru/figure...sel-trusova-o-motivacii-ot-roditeley-1604351/

Motivate your kids properly!

https://www.google.com/search?q=fre...KHVIQAG0Q_B0wdXoECGAQAw#imgrc=djAcRz52aik_KM:

- I can do 4F but it's not stable enough yet due to the overall number of different quads. Maybe I'll add it later. 3Ax is also on the table...
https://www.sport-express.ru/figure...nyu-sdelat-vmeste-chetvernoy-pryzhok-1604348/

 

[nussnacker]

Motivations... motivations...

- My mom promissed me the Great French Poodle as soon as I'll land 3Ax.
From Sasha's recent interview.

https://www.sport-express.ru/figure...sel-trusova-o-motivacii-ot-roditeley-1604351/

Motivate your kids properly!

https://www.google.com/search?q=fre...KHVIQAG0Q_B0wdXoECGAQAw#imgrc=djAcRz52aik_KM:

- I can do 4F but it's not stable enough yet due to the overall number of different quads. Maybe I'll add it later. 3Ax is also on the table...
https://www.sport-express.ru/figure...nyu-sdelat-vmeste-chetvernoy-pryzhok-1604348/

Alina's parents promised her a dog for winning the olympics and Alina won Promising Sashulya another doggie for mastering 3A is the best motivation :agree:

 

[Arbitrary]

https://vk.com/video-97272391_456243520

Video interview with English subtitles.

 

[sunn1ly]

Motivations... motivations...

- My mom promissed me the Great French Poodle as soon as I'll land 3Ax.
From Sasha's recent interview.

https://www.sport-express.ru/figure...sel-trusova-o-motivacii-ot-roditeley-1604351/

Motivate your kids properly!

https://www.google.com/search?q=fre...KHVIQAG0Q_B0wdXoECGAQAw#imgrc=djAcRz52aik_KM:

- I can do 4F but it's not stable enough yet due to the overall number of different quads. Maybe I'll add it later. 3Ax is also on the table...
https://www.sport-express.ru/figure...nyu-sdelat-vmeste-chetvernoy-pryzhok-1604348/

OMG Sasha doesn't really need 4F and 3A, it will be total domination. When they become stable she could just use them in one competition so we can see them and she breaks all the records again, apart from that she doesn't need the stress to warm up and prepare all those quads each competition.

 

[Arbitrary]

OMG Sasha doesn't really need 4F and 3A, it will be total domination. When they become stable she could just use them in one competition so we can see them and she breaks all the records again, apart from that she doesn't need the stress to warm up and prepare all those quads each competition.

Quite opposite.
Drop the "petite quads" like 4T & 4S, make two 4Lz & two 4F and one 3Ax. Kill them all...
Those petite 4T & 4S are suitable for kindergartens...

P.S. I wonder what the Mother of Dragons could do with five dragons? John Snow would not dare to stab her, sure.

 

[sunn1ly]

Quite opposite.
Drop the "petite quads" like 4T & 4S, make two 4Lz & two 4F and one 3Ax. Kill them all...
Those petite 4T & 4S are suitable for kindergartens...

P.S. I wonder what the Mother of Dragons could do with five dragons? John Snow would not dare to stab her, sure.

I dont want the 4T to go away, its so huge and she can combine it with whatever and whenever, but I can trade 4S for 4F any day. If she brings the 3A especially in the short the game is over.
You should have been the screenwriter of GOT instead of D&D, those 5 dragons would have been epic instead of the the catastrophic second half of 8 season.

 

[Alex65]

I dont want the 4T to go away, its so huge and she can combine it with whatever and whenever, but I can trade 4S for 4F any day. If she brings the 3A especially in the short the game is over.
You should have been the screenwriter of GOT instead of D&D, those 5 dragons would have been epic instead of the the catastrophic second half of 8 season.

When I saw Sasha’s 4S again this season, I immediately remembered her first attempts at this at JGP. Such a warm and pleasant feeling. Let 4S stay too. And he, too, is very large and beautiful when she does it.

 

[Edwin]

How a small skater becomes larger than life ....

An inspiration,
A fear,

She’s still a child smiling widely at the world in wonderment over yet another completed program with new content and composition, always striving to be better than previously.

 

[Arbitrary]

COP fully rules here. Higher BV, higher TES.

Anna made a proof - two major quads make difference. Two petite quads will not stand.

OK, Sasha with one Major and three Minors is fully OK for now, but she herself mentioned big issues when preparing three different types of quad.
Having only two Majors allows her to do four major quads. But it requires making combos with majors and here she experiences some difficulties.
Anna with her only 4Lz apparently concentrated and polished both combo and single. Smart move as it looks now.

 

[Alex65]

Great article about Sasha’s SP. Edwin will probably be able to make a quality translation. Please. Thank.
https://www.sports.ru/tribuna/blogs/artinsport/2618417.html

 

[Decoder]

This is not fair. We are already talking about how Sasha should pick quads for her programs, and others are still trying to get one!

Joking aside, it is a new challenge to find the best possible layouts for ladies who can do multiple quads, and Eteri group is in a unique position to set up some good examples, I guess.

 

[Edwin]

Great article about Sasha’s SP. Edwin will probably be able to make a quality translation. Please. Thank.
https://www.sports.ru/tribuna/blogs/artinsport/2618417.html

One of the best blogs IMO, so here is my take at:

Aleksandra Trusova - from Solveig to the Daughter of the Mountain King

This week, a great debut took place in the senior series of the Grand Prix in figure skating by two-time world champion among juniors Aleksandra Trusova. At the competition in Canadian town of Kelowna, Aleksandra brilliantly coped with her short program staged to Edvard Grieg’s 'Peer Gynt' suite. Unfortunately, due to the absence of triple Axels and the existing ban on performing quad jumps in the short program for women, Aleksandra the current record holder turned out short at the end of the day. However, the cosmic technical level of her free program allowed her to gain more than ten points over her closest rival, despite falling on the quad Salchow, and thus proving that the lag was, in fact, artificial. Having rid itself of this atavism in the rules, the International Skating Union will cease to force athletes with unrivaled technical superiority to recoup after faultlessly executed programs, moreover, due to a lag (!) In technique.

Suite "Peer Gynt" - one of the most famous works of world classics, is often used in figure skating in a variety of treatments: at one time it was approached by Yelizaveta Tuktamysheva, the couple of Alyona Savchenko-Bruno Massot and many others. The suite was written by the Norwegian composer to the philosophical play of the same name by his famous compatriot Henryk Ibsen, and at the request of the playwright himself. Grieg's mystical work, inspired in many respects by the Scandinavian folk tunes, gained worldwide fame and contributed significantly to the rethinking of the literary work, which at first was coldly received by critics and the public alike.

The protagonist of the play, who gave it its name, is actually a folkloric character. It was borrowed by Ibsen from the tale of Peter Kristen Asbjørnsen, which was included in the Norwegian Fairy Tales collection. Asbjørnsen and another folklorist writer Jorgen Mu were a kind of “Grimm brothers” of Norway - they traveled around the country collecting folk tales and legends, and wrote them down, trying as little as possible to distort the oral sources to convey the beauty and originality of folk art. The short tale, "Peer Gynt" tells the story of a brave hunter who roamed the mountains and fought with evil trolls. Ibsen, who worked in the transition period between romanticism and realism, substantially rethought the image of the hero, largely endowing it with his own features and turning it into one of the key characters in classical literature, the interest in which has not subsided to this day.

Per Gunt Ibsen was a hopeless dreamer, a kind of grotesque satirical portrait of a romantic. He travels the world in search of himself, tries on a variety of roles - an exile in the Norwegian mountains, an American slave trader, an unclean businessman in Morocco, the leader of the Bedouins, in the end, even the "emperor" in a Cairo madhouse - and does not find a place for himself anywhere, because deep down he is most afraid of finally deciding who he really is. He is charming and cheerful, but completely reckless and in all his actions obeys momentary impulses. At the beginning of the play, he meets the beautiful Solveig at a village wedding, but when she refuses to dance with him, fearing the condemnation of her strict father, who, like everyone in the village, knows Per as a talker and a loafer. The hero gets drunk and steals the bride Ingrid, and then, after sobering up, he immediately abandons her. For this act, he is outlawed and expelled from his native village.

The image of Solveig was conceived by Ibsen as the complete opposite of Per - the embodiment of "eternal femininity", strength of mind and purity. Having fallen in love with Per, Solveig leaves her family to share his exile in a mountain hut. At first, Per is happy, but then, not wanting to torment his whole life with the consciousness of his sins before the moral purity of a beautiful girl, he runs away from her and rushes into these wanderings around the world. Returning to the hut as an decrepit old man, Gunt was amazed to the core, discovering that the devote Solveig was waiting for him, without losing faith in her lover.

At the same time, Gunt himself does not justify this belief: throughout the entire work he switches Solveig many times, even with supernatural beings. Immediately after his exile, he enters the fantastic kingdom of trolls, where he meets the princess of trolls - "a woman in green", the daughter of the Mountain King. At first, Per likes the underground kingdom, and he even wants to marry the troll princess in order to become a prince himself, but strict troll rules scare him, and he miraculously escapes them. However, the princess didn’t give up so easily: she overtook Gunt in his hut and ordered Solveig to be driven out, otherwise she would settle with them. It is then that Gynt decides to escape from distant lands from his past and his sins.

For the musical accompaniment of the play, Edward Grieg chose several motifs and images that impressed him the most, and composed excellent compositions for them, including the most famous, selected for Aleksandra Trusova's short program, “Song of Solveig” and “In the Cave of the Mountain King”. In the modest, simple intonation of the “Song”, the image of the blond Norwegian beauty is drawn by Scandinavian folk melodies that sound majestically and restrained. A clear crystal voice sadly tells about the long wait for the heroine:

The winter may pass and the spring disappear

And the spring disappear

The summer, too, will vanish and then the year

And then the year

But then the melody sounds more confident, and Solveig talks about her determination to wait for her beloved, even if it takes her whole life:

But this I know for certain, that you'll come back again

That you'll come back again

And even as I promised, you'll find me waiting then

You'll find me waiting then

The “Song” ends with a piercing vocalization filled with joy from the expected meeting with a loved one.

There are several ballet productions to Grieg's music, in which, most often, Solveig appears in a simple dress of a village girl:
link to pictures

In turn, "In the Cave of the Mountain King" is a march in which art historians trace the influence of Scottish folk melodies (Grieg on his paternal side was originally from Scotland). The composition begins with slow, mysterious lower notes, barely audible played by double basses and bassoons, sounding menacingly and as if angularly, and at the same time a little mockingly, drawing the image of an approaching host of trolls surrounding Gynt, laughing at him. Gradually, the melody grows, becomes higher, new instruments come in, unstable dance turns into an unbridled rampage of blood-thirsty trolls:

Slagt ham! Kristenmands søn har dåret Dovregubbens veneste mø!

In the classical ballet, as you can see, the “woman in green” looks more like a forest elf than a troll. In a modern production of Edward Klug, it is more like a wild forest chimera:
link to pictures

As the dancer choreographer Daniil Gleikhengauz said, the main goal of Team Tutberidze is always the development of an athlete. If the skater does not leave her comfort zone, there can be no talk of any progress. This production is another example of how to choose an image for an athlete in order to develop her artistry in a new direction, without pulling out all kinds of strange things.

As already mentioned above, Solveig is a special character in world art. She is not a princess, not a sorceress, not a warrior, not Carmen and not even Juliett, but a simple Norwegian peasant woman, modest and proper. Her story is not about raging passions, but about self-denial and unconditional faith in one’s love. It is difficult to imagine a more suitable lyrical image for Aleksandra Trusova, who had already avoided lyrics for the last two seasons. Aleksandra’s Slavic beauty differs little from the Scandinavian one, and most importantly, her restrained, slightly alienated performing manner fully corresponds to the chosen role and music.

In order not to abandon the strong heroines familiar to Aleksandra, in the staging they resort to a well-known trick familiar to most from the ballet Swan Lake: the same performer represents the roles of protagonist and antagonist. The second role of Aleksandra - a demonic creature from the "Cave of the Mountain King", as it seems to me, is this very troll princess. In the staging of Aleksandra, she appears threatening, inevitable, like evil rock, powerful, like an avalanche, and fast, like a bat.
link to pictures

The transition to the second part of the production is accompanied by a change of dress - a necessary element, since it is almost impossible to come up with one outfit that would suit both Solveig and the daughter of the ominous “Dovrsky grandfather”. For the role of Solveig, white is taken as the basis - a symbol of purity, and the broken line of the neckline and the edges of the skirt resembles mountain peaks, among which the girl has been waiting for the return of Gunt for years.
link to pictures

Ibsen describes the troll princess as "a woman in green," alluding to the appearance of all the evil spirits. And in classical ballet productions, Ibsen's trolls, as a rule, are all dressed in green robes that look like moss and mud. However, this colour is used extremely rarely in figure skating and, in my opinion, it would not go very well with the top grayish-white dress, which still had to be taken into account, since they are visible on the spins. Instead of green, designer Olga Ryabenko chose black and dark gray as the main colours, adding a finish of blue and green rhinestones. The image of the "savage" is perfectly conveyed by a torn skirt and a cutout on the side with an interesting weaving of gray laces. The gloves for the costume are selected from gray, suitable for both options.
link to pictures

I, like many lovers of classical music, am not indifferent to this composition of Grieg and therefore I am very glad that it found its performer in one of the Four Aces. Aleksandra, I’m sure, will continue to improve and hone this image during the season, so we wish her success and will not lose hope the anachronisms in the rules will live out their last season.

Read also:

Overview of the free program of Aleksandra Trusova

Overview of the short program of Alyona Kostornaya

Overview of the free program of Alyona Kostornaya

Overview of the free program of Alina Zagitova

Overview of the short program of Anna Shcherbakova

Overview of the free program of Anna Shcherbakova
-----
All taken from this really great blog: https://www.sports.ru/tribuna/blogs/artinsport/

Do the critics of Gleikhengauz' choreography and staging really think those commercial choreographers could do a much better job with the same source material? Esp the 'developing the skater through staging of challenging images'? I don't think so. Commercial choreographers are only in it for the money.
All the postings in this blog prove to me that you really need to know your skaters as only #TeamTutberidzeForProgress knows them and is capable of giving them the full package, the complete treatment in all aspects of figure skating, including art and athleticism, worthy of champions.

 

[Vilord]

As to what is the best jump layout with quads I would say that thus far when verry few are doing them the main thing is to choose the layout that is the most consistent. Sure Sasha could up her TES by repeating 4Lz instead of 4T and changing the combos to maximize the number of tripples (or include 4F and have 4 different quads). I would say that for a 4quad layout the optimal should be.

4Lz+3T
4S (/4F)
4Lz (alternative doing 4T+3T in case she misses the first jump)
2A (/3A if she gets it)
---
4T+Eu+3F
3Lz+3Lo
3Lz
This I think is doable and gives jump Bv of 75.4

alt with 4F
4T+3T+3T
4S
4F
2A(/3A if she gets it)
---
4Lz
3Lz+3Lo
3F+3Lo

This layout is a bit ridiculous but if anyone can pull it of its Sasha (seriously doubt even Nathan Chen could). The Bv of this layout is the astronomical 78.31 without spins or step/choreo sequence.

But that being said I think the Layout she has now is more than enough to win and the most important part is to skate with as few mistakes as possible so if I where to make any changes it would be either excanging the 4S for 4F or the +Eu+3S combo for +Eu+3F. Either would up the TES without making the risks significantly higher imo.

 

[skatergurl7]

Why do I get the feeling that Sasha will do 5 quads by the time world’s comes around [emoji38]

 

[Alex65]

I also want to note the beautiful photo illustrations to the text in the original.
And thanks Edwin! :thumbsup:

 

[Grin]

Fan art
https://twitter.com/TeamTrusova/status/1189193149245059072?s=09

 

[flanker]

This is unfair to Gabby who was in a car accident around the time of WTT, missed almost the entire summer of training to recover, and had maybe a month to put two programs together.
Yes, Sasha's TES is amazing, but let's not compare her to other skaters who should be respected for coming back so amazingly for their circumstances.

This is the first time I hear she was in a car accident. She collided with Laurine Lecavelier during warm-up at WTT.

 

[Arbitrary]

Curious what could happen if Sasha skated today in China GP?
Could she win the male skaters competition?

Unlikely, I see. Someone mentioned the ice conditions were not good for FS, rather used for the ice hockey.

 

[JazzUp]

Sasha and Yuzuru

 

[MissBeeFarm]

Sasha and Yuzuru

That's so cute: Their feet/skates kinda scare me for some reason though