Who's Afraid of Adeliia Petrosian?

The grand finale of Olympic figure skating, the women’s free skate, is less than 24 hours away. The last time a true crowd favourite won this competition was 16 years ago. Yuna Kim ascended to the top step of the Vancouver 2010 podium in a David Wilson-choreographed moment of perfection. Every women’s Olympic champion since 2010 has been contentious. Adelina Sotnikova’s title in 2014 is best remembered as The Robbery of Yuna Kim. Alina Zagitova’s 2018 gold medal was won with a back-loaded jump clinic best remembered for the size of Alina’s tutu rather than artistic merit. Finally, 2022 was the biggest scandal in figure skating since Salt Lake City, featuring three traumatized children trapped in a doping circus while Kaori Sakamoto tried to enjoy her bronze medal. Figure skating could really use a vanilla victory in the women’s event. At the very least, it would be great to watch a competition that doesn’t culminate in skaters sobbing on camera or screaming backstage, “I hate this sport…There is no happiness.”

What kind of champion will we get tomorrow night? The standings after yesterday’s short program look promising on paper. Ami Nakai leads the event after a bubbly short program, her score buoyed by a triple axel. Kaori Sakamoto is in second, but only just, and has a record of strong free skates to draw on as she approaches her final Olympics. Alysa Liu is in third and temperamentally bulletproof. At a glance, all seems well.

Look a little further down the results list and there’s a name both unfamiliar and problematic: Adeliia Petrosian. Petrosian is in fifth place after the short program and will skate in the final flight of the women’s competition. This is a feat for any skater, but it’s an exceptional result for skater in her international debut. Petrosian, like all Russian athletes, has been banned from international competition. Her appearance at the Olympics was the first time most viewers had ever seen her skate.

Dressed in a sequinned homage to Michael Jackson’s red leather jacket in the “Thriller” music video (despite not actually performing to “Thriller” itself), Petrosian muscled her way through a technically clean short program and was rewarded with a season’s best score. This is another feat, considering that her previous high score was earned in domestic competition and such scores are often inflated. If figure skating made sense, Petrosian’s performance should be sitting somewhere in the mid-teens on placement with PCS around 7.5. She skated a program to music and there were hand movements to punctuate the beats, adequate but unmemorable for its performance qualities. Apparently the judges couldn’t get it out of their heads for the rest of the competition. It took Ami Nakai’s triple axel to topple Petrosian’s score, a full 16 performances later.

It’s difficult to critique a skater so obviously forged by fear. Petrosian, like every female skater enrolled in Eteri Tutberidze’s Sambo-70 skating club, is a hyper-flexible waif desperately outrunning puberty and cascading joint problems. She reportedly hurled herself at 14 quad toe jump attempts in practice today and either under-rotated or fell on 13 of them. She knows she is the only skater in the competition attempting a quadruple jump. She knows that she needs every tenth of her TES to compete with Sakamoto and Liu, among others, who are powerful and sophisticated skaters. She knows that if she fails to medal she will face intense media criticism at home and is unlikely to receive much comfort from her coaches. The weight of that knowledge must be terrible.

My critique of Petrosian is not of her personally or as an individual athlete. She is the product of a horrific training system that brutalizes skaters in pursuit of victory and has broken skater after skater. That system is the source of my frustration, along with many other people who do not support the skaters from Eteri’s camp. In an ideal world I would teleport her out of Russia and see what happens if she trained with a sane coach outside of a nationalist propaganda bubble that justifies the invasion of Ukraine. But that’s not the world we’re in. I’m not afraid of Adeliia Petrosian absconding with a gold medal in Milano. I’m afraid what such a victory would mean when skating already has a rotten record when it comes to protecting young athletes from abuse. The higher Petrosian scores, the more it feels like we’re returning to an era where bird-boned little girls fling themselves at the sky, only to crash in a heap of broken feathers. We have been spared such a sight for the last four years, and no one is eager to return to the dark ages. If she somehow scrapes together a win at this Olympics it will be distressing to say the least.

We’re not there yet. If there’s any grand theme at this Olympics, it’s that anyone placing bets on the podium is likely to lose them. I’m still hoping for a pleasant surprise.