Today, figure skating is the calling card of Russian sport, albeit detached from the world. In my opinion, such strong words are still quite justified. Figure skating, especially girls, are on everyone’s lips: athletes are regularly invited to TV shows and social events, often completely unrelated to sports; skaters become the faces of major advertising campaigns and simply idols of millions. Even the country’s main TV channel acquired the rights to exclusive content about figure skating. People really loved our figure.
Figure skating owes its widespread popularity to the times of PyeongChang. It would seem that the triumphant 2014 Olympics in Sochi, where our athletes won a convincing victory in the team tournament and the overall medal standings, was destined to attract the attention of mass audiences. But the real boom happened later, at the 2018 Olympics. How so?…
Until that time (2018 Olympics), figure skating had not been talked about so often and so much. Although, according to the statistics of the awards won, our skaters performed weaker in Pyeongchang, it was then that the figure acquired the status of a national treasure of Russia. Every year, interest in this sport in our country only grows. Why did the figure remain slightly in the shadows in victorious Sochi, but gained particular popularity only four years later? Let’s remember the past and figure it out.
Perhaps it’s worth turning a little to human psychology.
The 2014 Games definitely went down in the history of Russian figure skating. This is especially true for the women’s singles: Olympic Sochi gave us the legendary performance of Yulia Lipnitskaya to “Schindler’s List”, which is still recognized as one of the best interpretations of the legendary theme in figure skating, and Adelina Sotnikova, unexpectedly for everyone, won the individual tournament and became the first Olympic champion in our history.
People love drama and intrigue. This is how we are structured from the point of view of psychoanalysis. In fact, there was drama in Sochi, and not just one. The talented Lipnitskaya failed the free program in the individual competition, and Sotnikova, on the contrary, won the Olympics, but for some it is controversial – so much so that her success is still discussed, especially in South Korea.
Plushenko withdrew from the individual competition a couple of minutes before the start, which deprived Russia of the participation of its athlete in the only quota in the men’s tournament and caused a wave of negativity against him. At the same time, the Russians won gold in the first ever Olympic team competition, and how symbolic that this happened “at home.” But the intensity was still not enough… Why? There are several reasons.
Firstly, the very status of the home Games played a cruel joke on the interest of fans in certain sports. The Olympics were so successful for Russia that the success of the figure skaters was only one of the bright pages of these Games, and not something exclusive, as four years later in Pyeongchang, where our team, competing under neutral status, won only two gold medals, one of which are exactly in the figurine. The solemn atmosphere of the holiday of Russian sports in Sochi shifted the focus from the Lipnitskaya tragedy or the controversial removal of Plushenko to other victories, of which there were many at that time.
Secondly, the Sochi Games lacked the presence of significant personalities among athletes or coaches not only for long-time fans of figure skating. The same as Eteri Tutberidze became for the 2018 Olympics. The era of TST in Sochi had just begun, but by Pyeongchang the image of the legendary coach of our invincible girls had already fully developed. First of all, thanks to Zhenya Medvedeva, who held the position of world leader for two seasons before the Games in Korea. Plushenko did not live up to being an epoch-making figure in Sochi, as he spoiled his reputation by being withdrawn from the personal tournament and, outside of the duel with Yagudin, was no longer perceived as the locomotive of our figure.
Third, figure skating in Sochi 2014 obviously lagged behind Pyeongchang 2018 in terms of media coverage. Over a four-year period, new media platforms for broadcasts, exclusive interviews with skaters about their preparation for the Olympic Games and other content appeared. The “mediatization” of sports introduced the general public to individual athletes and encouraged them to monitor their achievements in the future. The explanation lies in the plane of psychology, namely in the phenomenon of personal authority: the more we learn about something, the more trust and interest we experience in it. This happened with the figure after Pyeongchang.
Finally, let’s move on to fourth the reason for the success of Pyeongchang 2018 compared to Sochi 2014, what we started with – with drama. The confrontation between the experienced Medvedeva and the young Zagitova immediately went down in history as “a dramatic story without a happy ending,” because both athletes were worthy of gold medals. But there is only one gold, and we know who got it. But then, in 2018, the outcome of the battle was not obvious and the women’s individual tournament attracted the attention of millions of fans around the world. Well, then there’s a chain reaction: tears of athletes and coaches, loud headlines in the press, etc. As we see, it was the women’s singles that caused that very figure skating boom, which gradually spread to other types.
In recent years, the figurine has actually been made into a brand: it is financed, adapted for a wider audience, even integrated into show business – and this, on the one hand, is cool. But, if we put aside the beautiful wrapper, the fear of excessive “mediatization”, and with it the degradation of sports, is not unfounded. I would like to believe that the pursuit of online views, scandalous headlines in the media and earnings will not prevail over fair sport and interest in development among the skaters themselves…
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2023-09-28 02:00:00
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