Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva will be one of the youngest athletes on show at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, but all eyes will be on the all-conquering 15-year-old, who arrives as the European champion and favorite for women’s singles gold.
The frightening thing for her competition – which is led by fellow Russian athletes Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova, who finished second and third at the European Championships in Tallinn, Estonia – is that she has more to come.
While Valieva set a new world record of 90.45 points in the short program, bettering her own world record of 87.42 points set at the Grand Prix in Sochi in November, she did not have a perfect free skate.
Far from it, in fact. This was the first time the 15-year-old had competed at a major event and she fell in her free skate to finish with 168.61 points, a mark that was 17 points fewer than the world record that she set earlier in the skating season.
“Today’s performance, I can say that it’s a work in progress skate, not everything worked out,” Valieva admitted afterward. “I couldn’t switch off some of my emotions and that prevented me. I will try to skate calmly.”
It did not matter. Valieva still topped the free skate marks in Tallinn and won her first European title by some 22 points.
The crown came at the same venue where she won the world junior championship back in 2020.
“Today, I really feel that I am in the program, that I am telling the story, it’s a nice feeling when you skate and you forget about your body,” Valieva said after her record breaking short program in Talinn.
“When I went out on the ice, I remembered the junior world championships two years ago and it was like I never left, everything was so harmonious so maybe it helped me,” she said.
Should the Kazan-born teenager win in Beijing then she will be the third Russian skater in a row to claim the women’s singles gold.
She started skating as a toddler before choosing the sport over ballet and gymnastics aged 5 and moving to Moscow aged 12. After battling with injuries in recent years, Valieva is something close to her untouchable best going toward the Games.
In December she became Russian champion, which followed consecutive events where Valieva set world record marks for free skate and total score.
“I just try to do my best. Our entire team works for the result and the rest does not depend on us,” Valieva told the Russian news agency TASS last year.
As we have seen, anything approaching her best will be too much for the rest of the competition in Beijing.
