Should minimum age for seniors be raised? | Golden Skate

Should minimum age for seniors be raised?

cruzceleste

Record Breaker
Joined
Feb 23, 2014
From Icenetwork

Zakrajsek:
Raising the age really seems like a good idea because it appears the way the sport is headed could possibly be discouraging to participation by a lot of skaters, particularly ladies, if they have to compete against young girls who have such an advantage (for jumping) with their smaller height and weight

Fabio Bianchetti, chair of the ISU Single & Pair Skating Committee
I am personally in favor of increasing the minimum age to 16 (or) 17, "But for the time being, this is only my personal opinion and not that of the committee -- not because the committee is against (it) but because we have just started to discuss the matter during the meeting held in Milan after the junior worlds, and no official decision was taken.

Mishin:
It should be girls / boys and ladies / men

Viktor Petrenko:
bring in more mature skating and (allow) the younger generation to stay more healthy while they are growing.

Borser:
This young girl (Trusova) doing quads now, how is she going to be when she's 17 or 18?'' Orser said. "It's all fun, with everybody marveling on social media about her, but it could be a very short-lived phenomenon

Arutunian
Why follow Russia? We should follow reality, and the reality is you want to have these kids be able to compete for many years.

In young bodies, bones are not formed. If you do so many quads, they get damaged, and they will wind up in a wheelchair. If we don't have evidence of that yet today, we will have it tomorrow

Denise Myers
We don't know if raising the age will stop the young ones from working on quads, but we all want the young men and women to be healthy," Myers said. "How many are going to need hip replacements at age 18?

"The days are gone where we need to rush because skating was over for so many kids when they graduated from high school. They can continue to improve if they take care of themselves."
 
Joined
Dec 9, 2017
OR they can start incentivizing the artistic/PCS aspect of the sport by not automatically giving PCS boosts for people who land "difficult" jumps, and have "consistent" technique.

OTOH, someone with really great jumps, who's put time into learning them with proper dedication and care, should theoretically be able to compete with someone who's good at the artistic aspect. A teenager should definitely be able to compete with the veterans based on the strength of their technique, while still working on the artistic aspect. "Art"+"Sport" doesn't mean the athletes should automatically have both to win, but that both should be celebrated. This might turn out to be nothing but the usual repressing of someone who's up-and-coming out of fear, and the usual politicking, and the usual snobbery against, and putting down of, someone who isn't deemed "artistic" enough because of someone's flawed interpretation of figure skating. Awful.
 

Rissa

Record Breaker
Joined
Dec 11, 2014
That's rich, coming from "I have a 13yo with all the quads" Orser and "My student Nathan Chen is lucky not to have ended up in a wheelchair himself, let's go back to jumping quads" Arutunian.
 

cruzceleste

Record Breaker
Joined
Feb 23, 2014
That's rich, coming from "I have a 13yo with all the quads" Orser and "My student Nathan Chen is lucky not to have ended up in a wheelchair himself, let's go back to jumping quads" Arutunian.

Did you read the article? Go to the end... both of them address the issue
 
Joined
Dec 9, 2017
Did you read the article? Go to the end... both of them address the issue

They pass over the real issue. They start from the premise that skaters need to have quads to win. When really, they should be starting from the premise that the skaters now have little incentive for the non-jumping aspect. They should be pushing towards fixing that, so that not only are very good athletes on the same playing field as very good artists, but if you train both really well, when the time comes you would be able to pull away. But what's wrong with doing high level tech content to keep up with veterans who are good at both?
 

cruzceleste

Record Breaker
Joined
Feb 23, 2014
They pass over the real issue. They start from the premise that skaters need to have quads to win. When really, they should be starting from the premise that the skaters now have little incentive for the non-jumping aspect. They should be pushing towards fixing that, so that not only are very good athletes are on the same playing field as very good artists, but if you do both really well (and develop that from a young age), when the time comes you would be able to pull away. But what's wrong with doing high level tech content to keep up with veterans who are great at both?

I don´t think that´s the point of the article. A least not completely:
Allow kids to mature so the artistry is more on point when they get to compete in seniors.
That the jumps in kids bodies could have a more permanent damage and raising the age of competition could help slow down the time where the child start trying them
 
Joined
Dec 9, 2017
keep up with the young pogo sticks the past two seasons.

Well done for being the worst journalist any sport has probably ever seen, Hersh.

I don´t think that´s the point of the article. A least not completely:
Allow kids to mature so the artistry is more on point when they get to compete in seniors.
That the jumps in kids bodies could have a more permanent damage and raising the age of competition could help slow down the time where the child start trying them

It is though. The reason kids try quads, as far as I can tell, is because the coaches know that doing a quad will get them the win. Because there's a PCS boost associated with it. Land a quad, get a win. It is no longer "I can't keep up artistically all that well right now, so let me add tech content while I get there" reserved for the athletes with good jumping talent who have teams that can take care of them properly.

So currently, if they were marked correctly on PCS, they could probably work at both, and this might slow them down from attempting quads at such a young age if they don't have the talent for it. Become better artists if you can't do quads right now. Also, rewarding correct technique might help, so a quad done properly nets the points for the athletes who do them correctly and learn them safely.

OTOH, if someone wants to switch to seniors, they might not be able to keep up with the top veterans who're better artistically but also good technically. So then they can learn a hard combo/quad while still working artistically, so they still have a chance. Now they can compete with high TES, even though they'll get comparatively lower PCS. 15 year old Zagitova with her 3Lz-3Lo isn't there yet on the PCS side, but should be able to compete with a veteran. But there you see the issue -- a veteran can no longer compete with Zagitova, because she gets PCS boosts based on consistency and jump content.

The system is broken, and not because of the age limit.
 

4everchan

Record Breaker
Joined
Mar 7, 2015
Country
Martinique
bring back figures and make them mandatory until a "raised" senior year...

you will solve a lot of the issues, including being able to skate not just jump, getting kids a real passion for actual gliding on the ice, making sure that training is not just on elements, also creating competitions for younger levels figures + Free Program (with less jumping passes) which would not compare to SP+ FP, that way scores cannot be compared etc...

I don't think it helps when people bring in that Trusova's TES is higher than current ladies or even men ;) lol

What is important

1) health of athletes
2) longevity of athletes = stars need to shine just as bright but for longer.... right now, the very quick turnaround in Russia ladies can be seen as exciting by some but to me, it's scary...I was very sad for Julia... Lisa and Adelina seem done....where is Pogo??? What about Radio etc... we don't even have time to appreciate a skater (Medvedeva) and she is replaced right away by younger and stronger... but for how long??? Do we want new champions every season???
3) development of better basic skating... i find a lot of the junior ladies and boys to have very limited skills in terms of gliding... and it keeps going even as a senior... there is no way we were seeing such unpolished skating in seniors just a couple decades ago.... I love jumps... I love quads.. but the jumps are only 15 seconds in total in the air.. the rest of the 4 minutes is long when the skating is slow and rough.
 

singermelodie1

On the Ice
Joined
Mar 7, 2018
Technically isn't it 16? Since you have to turn 16 before July 1 (The start of the new season) which is fair compared to many summer sports which makes that you have to turn 16 before January 1 of the following year. It's basically the same just for how seasons are going. And is it really for their health when they would be doing the same jumps as juniors? And how many 15 year olds have won to require this change - Yulia was only the team event and Zagitova, none have won the world championships. All of them just scream hypocritical to me. If it was their skaters, they would be bragging about it. I personally don't think it's about age, many skaters are just not ready for all the jumps they're doing and thus increasing the risk for injury. And skaters wouldn't feel the need to do that if they component scores were judged correctly; so their only recourse is to increase their BV to even medal.
 

Bluediamonds09

Medalist
Joined
Sep 8, 2016
Why don’t they just start marking PCS accordingly??? That would help a lot. Don’t give high PCS to little girls (or anyone, for that matter) who pump their backs and look unrefined in movement.

There. Now, was that so hard, IJS?? Just start giving PCS accordingly.
 

yoloaxel

Record Breaker
Joined
Sep 23, 2017
I actually sort of agree with all the quotes, although to different extent.

The main reason why is that a 15yo girl can still have somewhat of a "child's body", which will give them a big technical advantage over other competitors who are actual grown women (the results of the last quad speak for themselves, I think). Nothing extreme, I think 16/17 would be more than enough, and I should also add that I only think this can become a true problem with quads becoming popular with junior girls, because it's pretty much a given that grown women will basically be impossibilitated from doing quads by the way their body will probably evolve.
 

schizoanalyst

Medalist
Joined
Oct 26, 2016
Some miscellaneous thoughts.

Who is this rule for? Who are we talking about when we are worried about some unartistic, solely technical upstart taking down an artistic, seasoned veteran? I haven’t see if happen yet (unless we are talking about Zagitova, who I think has deserved everything she’s gotten thus far). Are we just preparing for some hypothetical Eteri 15 year old in 2026 with 5 quads or something?

Yes, PCS should be more appropriately graded. People, even among the judges, will always disagree about how to balance the sport and artistic side. Maybe that will lead to wins that some people disagree with, but that’s OK for me. I think vigorous debate can be good for a subjective sport. But that is a problem with or without the age restriction.

I’m not really concerned at all if Trusova, or any other women, has a quad at 17 or not. Who cares? I care if the repeated exertion on her young, developing body is doing damage, but we don’t have any evidence of that and I hope her team is aware of this possibility and monitoring it. Right now, we have zero evidence that training quads on young bodies does significant, long-term, permanent damage. It could be, there are certainly risks, but we really don’t know. But if such evidence becomes apparent - yes the ISU should step in. I also hope the ISU will monitor this situation carefully, rather than denying it and covering it up as so many sports bodies do and act quickly.

2) longevity of athletes = stars need to shine just as bright but for longer.... right now, the very quick turnaround in Russia ladies can be seen as exciting by some but to me, it's scary...I was very sad for Julia... Lisa and Adelina seem done....where is Pogo??? What about Radio etc... we don't even have time to appreciate a skater (Medvedeva) and she is replaced right away by younger and stronger... but for how long??? Do we want new champions every season???

Sotnikova was always a very messy skater who pulled it together once when she needed it most. Lipnitskaya had other issues (mental health, poor technique). Tuktamysheva declined dramatically. Pogorilaya is wildly inconsistent and suffers from back injuries. Radionova is good, but not great. None of these people were affected by a young 15 year old ruining their chances. They fell out of the spotlight because they all had issues unrelated to that.

As for Medvedeva, she’s an Olympic silver medalist? Why can’t we still appreciate her? She lost a Gold, she wasn’t shut out of going to the Olympics by three 15 year olds at Russian nationals. And I don't understand the abstract desire for retaining the same champion every season. Let the best person win.

I'm just unclear what this rule's purpose is.
 
Joined
Dec 9, 2017
So? I don't see the purpose of this rule, but this is a nonsensical argument. Plus, if it passes, they could easily target 2026.
 

acapenci

On the Ice
Joined
Jul 16, 2017
The best of the best should be in the seniors, whether or not they are 15 or 28 ... I understand the concerns over devleopment but i can see this easily getting to a situation where juniors has tighter competition and is more exciting to the most people then seniors
 

Manitou

Medalist
Joined
Jan 17, 2014
The best of the best should be in the seniors, whether or not they are 15 or 28 ... I understand the concerns over devleopment but i can see this easily getting to a situation where juniors has tighter competition and is more exciting to the most people then seniors

There is a very concrete reason we don't allow child labor. This situation is exactly the same.
 
Top