The era of quads

I wrote the article on my way back home, in the train... i was so amazed by what was achieved during practice at this competition, the article came by itself. It has been released on the net at Paula Slater's site at About.com.



Several years ago, a male skater capable of doing all the three-rotation jumps (toe loop, Salchow, loop, flip and Lutz) would have reached the highest level of difficulty obtainable in a free program. It would certainly have guaranteed a medal- if not a victory- in international competitions like the European and World Championships and the Olympic Games.

In 1978 Vern Taylor officially landed a triple Axel (three and a half rotations) for the first time in competition and the 'king jump', as it has been called, became the most demanding jump a skater had to include to defeat his opponents. Now, more than 20 years later, the overall technical level has increased so much that a skater without a triple Axel would not make it into the top 10 at a World Championships.

In addition, the jump must be in both the short and the long programs, as a solo jump and/or within a triple-triple combination. And still, it is not sufficient to include just three and a half turns; another half turn now has to be added... this is how the era of quadruples evolved.
This new era officially started in 1988 when Kurt Browning landed the first quadruple jump in competition, a quadruple toe loop, during the World Championships. Alexei Urmanov, Petr Barna, Jozef Sabovcik and others followed suit. However, it was not until Elvis Stojko landed it again and in combination that the quad really became the jump that a lot of skaters started to work on, and yet, the difficulty had to be pushed further.

Ilia Kulik won the Olympic title in 1998 with a quad, Alexei Yagudin captured the world title in 2000 with a quad and a quad-double combination, and Evgeni Plushenko recently became European champion with a quadruple and a quadruple-triple-double combination. In this context and one year before the Olympic Games of Salt Lake City, it is clear that, as Alexei Yagudin said, several different quadruples will be needed to win.

Two quads of different kinds? Well, skaters like Tim Goebel have already proved that they are capable of achieving such a high level, and others like Yagudin (who said he landed his first 4 Salchow in November) must be very close. But we're talking here about the quadruple toe loop and the quadruple Salchow, the two 'easiest' quads.

The truly amazing thing is that during the first "Top Jump" competition held in Lyon on the 3rd and 4th of March, quadruples of EVERY kind were tried by the skaters. The technical level was expected to be high, in this competition exclusively based on jumps: seven skaters with impressive international results and two others from the qualification rounds confronted each other through eight rounds of jumps, up to a quadruple and a quadruple-triple combination.

Most of the finalists were already known to have a (more or less) consistent quadruple toe loop (Monnier, Dinev, Sandhu, Weiss), a quadruple Salchow (Dambier) or both (Klimkin); in Lyon they tried quadruple Lutz, quadruple flip and quadruple loop ! The quadruple Lutz had already been tried by Michael Weiss in the past; in practice he almost landed it again, be it only for an obvious two-footed landing.
A nice surprise came from Fredric Dambier, who tried the quadruple flip several times even though he's only been working on it seriously for one week (after all "it's the same jump as the 4 Salchow" as his coach explained... except for the additional toe pick). He completed the 4 turns correctly and even landed on the outside backward edge, but he fell just after the landing.
Roman Serov was the closest to land his quad, a quadruple loop. Serov was very tight in the air and his free leg only touched the ice slightly. Amazing! Watching the men practice was like viewing the future of ice skating...

Who knows what this future will it be made of? It is not absurd to think skaters will be doing more than two different quads (some are already working on three quads), and seeing Klimkin doing quadruple Salchows and quadruple toe loops with such ease and knowing he still can progress makes one wonder if the first quintuple will not come sooner than expected.