The Beijing Winter Olympics came to a successful conclusion.
In just 16 days, many beautiful touching moments that embody the spirit of Olympic unity and friendship were born, and many naked and cruel regret moments were also left.
The most complicated and unbearable thing to feel is the dramatic result of the figure skating women's singles that night. Behind this heartbreaking farce is the almost suffocating living situation of those beautiful and agile Oros.
The "hexagonal warrior" Vallieva (15-year-old K Bao), who once brushed the world record with fault-type strength, was caught in a drug scandal before the game, and even fell through everyone's glasses to leave the field in a row;
K Bao covered his face and choked and cried bitterly after leaving the scene, "At least now the award ceremony will not be canceled."
Trusova (17-year-old Sasha), known for her frequent free skating record of high difficulty, challenged the limit to complete 5 four-week jumps to amaze the whole field, but the final score was very different from expected;
Sherbakova (17-year-old Qianjin), who won the championship steadily, did not care to congratulate her, and sat alone in the corner waiting.
Winning and losing in the arena is related to talent, hard work, and luck opportunities, but the continuous fall of K Bao's mentality, the anger of Sasha's belief collapse, and the situation of all the staff after the game are inseparable from the extremely inward-looking and almost distorted cruel high-pressure competitive environment of Russian women's figure skating.
This art in the arena of beauty and power, in which the pain is inwardly rolled, destroys more than a "k treasure" and a "salsa".
K treasure in the cub period
01
The Iron Queen and the Ice Flowers blooming under her command
As a highly artistic sports, athletes need to use ice knives to perform jumping, spinning and other steps on the ice.
Figure skating in the Winter Olympics is divided into two parts: short program and free skating, which focus on testing performance points and technical points.
The first Winter Olympics figure skating queen Sonia Hennie
Women's figure skating was once monopolized by the United States in the 90s, and after entering the new century, Asian women's figure skating rose and the "Golden Cat Era" dominated.
Mao Asada, Kim Ying-hyun
Russian figure skating was silent for a long time, until the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a figure who changed the direction of the world's women's figure skating history appeared
——She is the "Desperate DrugNer" and "Iron Queen" Russian figure skating coach Atry Tutsit Lizer, known for her cold and harsh training methods (because of her long hair like an exploding blond curl that resembles a bubble noodle, she is called "Face Sister" by Chinese ice fans)
Under the rule of the face sister's high-pressure and tough wrist, the Russian women's figure skating began to show the world that magical and terrible dominance.
Intergenerational:
At the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Lipniskaya (born in 1998, nicknamed "soft card" by fans because of her extremely flexible body) was the first student brought out by the face sister.
The soft card body is extremely flexible, the artistic expression is very strong, and it is very good at interpreting the poignant and broken arrangement style.
Bellman rotates
Later, because of excessive weight loss during development, he suffered from anorexia, and once had to rely on the input of nutrients to survive, coupled with injuries and long-term conflicts between coaches, etc., and finally chose to transfer to retire.
Intergenerational:
Zagitova (acrobatic baby, born 2002) and Medvedeva (born 1999) won the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics women's figure skating singles championship and runner-up respectively.
During this period, in addition to the evolution of jump height, the score-grabbing strategy of The Face Sister is to concentrate all the difficult jumping actions in the second half of the deduction, so as to maximize the use of the rules to obtain extra points.
After the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, Meeva missed the championship, and the acrobatic sisters drifted apart, and the face sister also tore a painful game and chose to change the group, although later transferred back to the face sister group, but no longer participate in large-scale events, and finally retired due to injury.
Three generations: The beginning of the terrible era of women jumping around
The three little babies participating in this year's Winter Olympics are also the aforementioned Sasha (born in 2004), Qianjin (born in 2004) and K Bao (born in 2006).
Sasha has long red hair, strong muscles, strong personality, hardcore and crisp style, she is also the first blade power warrior in the history of women's figure skating who can jump 5 times in a row and completely lose men's figure skating.
Qianjin is like an aristocratic girl who came out of classical oil painting, although her appearance is weak, her posture is generous and decent, her personality is gentle and firm, her mentality is calm and stable, her artistic appeal is extremely strong, and Sasha each represents the positive and negative polar styles.
K Bao, who has always been considered to be the winner of the Ziwei Star, is just 15 years old enough to meet the standards of adult competitions, but his previous performance on the field is extremely strong, whether it is softness, jump height, or strength and artistic expression, it is the all-round existence of the folded buff version.
02
The limited ice angel in the Cruel Music Box
Russian women's figure skating was able to form a fault situation in the world, because under the cold coaching of the face sister, it firmly held the ceiling of the technical points.
Once thought to be the four-way jump that only male athletes can make, the Oro not only can do it, but also increases the difficulty. (The younger Oros have even started training for the 8-week jump that is about to fly)
Under the difficult technical training, the Russians had to undergo extremely cruel physical and psychological tests.
When Meeva first started practicing jumping for three weeks, because she couldn't find the essentials, her sister rushed directly to the field to put her people down, dragging her legs on her head and feet.
Kostonaya (Feitian), who trained with Sasha and Qianjin and also made a splash in the youth competition, later changed the group because it was difficult to achieve a four-way jump.
Flying, compared to the ordinary figure skaters who train for 4 hours a day, the Russians have to train for 8 hours or even 10 hours a day
But even if you survive the training level, everyone can seize the only opportunity to enter the international competition.
Girls are difficult to develop, as they grow taller and gain weight, changes in the center of gravity of the body will directly affect the most critical jumping ability of figure skating.
The training of the face sister does not focus on the cultivation of adult girls, because there are still a large number of twelve or thirteen-year-old reserve forces, waiting to enter the adult arena after reaching the age of fifteen.
A steady stream of new forces emerged, and the Russians basically used up a stubble and abandoned a stubble.
It also means that competition is so brutal that everyone has almost only one chance to compete in the Olympics, and if you happen to pass the Olympic year at the best age stage (15-17), you will never have another chance to qualify.
In the past two years, the acrobatic baby who has won the European Championships, the World Championships and the Pingchang Winter Olympic Grand Slam has quickly lost its competitiveness after the three children have been promoted to the group, and they were only 17 years old when they entered the retirement state
In this deformed, squeezed and suffocating environment, a number of problems continue to emerge:
In order to allow athletes to devote more energy to training and constantly expand the boundaries of their own limits, there have been large-scale officially advocated doping fraud incidents in Russia.
In 2016, the former director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory revealed that the Russian government had sent agents to exchange urine samples from athletes.
Including the use of illegal drugs by K Bao before the competition, how much ability does a 15-year-old underage girl have to accurately control drug dosage and strictly calculate the metabolic cycle, so that she can successfully evade detection many times before, only this time accidentally exposed negligence?
The answer to this question, I think the coaching staff knows.
But after the incident, no one stepped forward to take responsibility, from the "genius figure skating girl warrior" fell to the "doping scandal athlete", and the future was ruined only overnight.
In addition to stimulants, athletes who had trained with the face sister also broke out that the team members would take hormone-suppressing drugs to delay growth and development, which had an impact on the nerve and heart system, and even had a serious reaction due to overreaction.
Anastasia Kuprinya, who is affected by the side effects of the drug
In a cruel environment, the girls have various physical and psychological problems.
Soft card retired at the age of 19 due to anorexia, Meeva was unable to make a left-handed movement due to spinal injuries, acrobatic baby was injured in the buttocks at the age of 17...
Extreme dieting and training injuries are commonplace, and the luckier ones are about to go off before they have time to show their prominence in the big games, and the better ones, injury retirement is also the result of sooner or later, and there is even a risk of hip replacement surgery when older.
The tense pressure in the team made SoftKa, Meeva, Feitian and even Sasha, once tense with the face sister and switched to other teams.
While athletes are younger, arranged routines, and intensive technical actions, the artistic appeal is also weakening.
As an artistic sport, figure skating has gradually lost its original beauty and sportsmanship under the competition of desperately rolling scores.
Teenage girls are like fleeting ephemeral meteors, some of which have not even bloomed, and have been forever labeled with pass, dusting into an insignificant speck in the history of Russian figure skating.
03
The premise of sportsmanship is to cherish beauty rather than destroy it
As Sasha exuded in her post-match interview, she was angry, aggrieved and confused:
"I tried to challenge higher goals and I thought if I had done all my jumps, desperately adding more four-way jumps and high-difficult moves, when I succeeded, I would have won, but that didn't happen."
Even if Sasha wins the gold medal, then what?
Then the Oros will squeeze themselves in a more crazy and extreme way, just to pursue a moment of light; then Sasha will be like her sister Meeva or Acrobatics, and the new generation of Oroli that emerges in the next tournament cycle will gradually be forgotten by the public.
What kind of win is the win we aspire to pursue?
I think Sui Wenjing and Han Cong, who won the gold medal in pair skating, have already told us the answer.
The root of sportsmanship lies in enduring the unbearable pain of ordinary people to fight hard, in using the last bit of strength to challenge the limit, and in never giving up on surpassing oneself for the sake of dreams.
But most importantly, the root of winning is to bring uplifting power to the human heart, not to endless extreme pain.
Sui Wenjing fell into a low ebb after ligament surgery in 2016
After years of pain, the two fell from the peak and then gritted their teeth to stand up, carrying each other step by step to the highest peak.
Fight for championships and gold medals, but the meaning of the end of the struggle has long exceeded the glory of a gold medal, because they live to inspire and surpass themselves, and the strength and beauty they bring are lasting and eternal, not short-lived.
But the cruel art that girls interpret with their short youth and endless pain, I can't think of it as beautiful, because true beauty must not be a cruelty.