Introduction
Back at the beginning of the month, I was intrigued when twice in the span of a few days I read that Gabriella Papadakis/Guillaume Cizeron's execution of the Ravensburger Waltz pattern in their winning Short Dance at the 2016 World Championships was superior beyond belief.Gadbois' junior Japanese team Rikako Fukase/Aru Tateno gave the following quote (translated by Google) in this interview published on September 2. (They then go on to praise the unison and ability for expressive movement they believe Papadakis/Cizeron possess.)
"Tateno: They are going up to top speed in two to three steps. I'm I'm not pushing, but I become the story of the growth of skating = "glide (move to slide)", it is already amazing.
Fukase: it is the odd large pattern dance! Other athletes also I'm very clean, Gabriela and Guillaume, the size of the pattern is completely different.
Tateno: This is an order of magnitude larger.
Interviewer: It is that is the same time in the distance and are = much slipped take than the other set.
Tateno: That's right..."
V/M's return has meant skating discussion getting restarted in earnest over at the dubemoir watering hole, and a comment claiming that P/C's basic skating was superior to Virtue/Moir's included this example:
"...P/C's pattern in the SD was so, so much bigger than any other team's pattern. It was like there was no friction to slow them down, so they could glide and make the pattern as large as they wanted. I've never seen anything like it."
The breathless enthusiasm that has surrounded P/C the last two seasons has given rise to countless claims of extraordinary talent, but not many as specific as this one. I was skeptical, when struggling to maintain speed when faced with difficulty, is a clear weakness of theirs. (Watch how many crossovers, simple stepping and pausing on two feet they do in their Free Dance from the same competition. There is a floaty quality to their skating which seems to mesmerize people - and certainly a team being able to glide on an edge is a novelty after the horror show that was Davis/White - but P/C get sluggish and messy when it really counts.) However, when I actually compared the Ravensburgers of the SD segment, I was surprised to find that, although the claim that P/C's covered the most ice by far - or even overall - was incorrect, with a handful of teams having a pattern of similar size, it is indeed true that theirs was one of the largest, and arguably a little bigger than that of Maia Shibutani/Alex Shibutani and Kaitlyn Weaver/Andrew Poje.
I found this quite curious. How does a team that minimizes complexity and being close in hold in their choreography- presumably because of how bogged down they get when doing anything that approaches intricacy - accomplish this feat? I decided to take a look at the accuracy of their steps, as well as the quality of holds and general ease of movement. Was everything clean and close, like should be the case with a brilliant team? Or could this evidence of their superiority actually be a result of gaining an advantage through cutting corners? Could their height also a contributing factor?
What started as a quest to understand the size of their pattern has since expanded into a more in-depth project of using this element to break down their skating. For now, I'm going to set the issue of comparative ice coverage aside, but will return to it in a future post.
Part 1: Versus the Shibutanis, Steps #1-6
Fortunately, the camera angles of P/C's performance match up almost perfectly to that of Shibutani/Shibutani, the team present at this competition who I consider to have the best skating skills, so that is where I am going to begin. I'm going to start by working through Section 1 of the RW to examine the general technique of the teams in question. The Key Points and issue of timing and musicality will be dealt with later in this series, along with a closer look at the requirements for Grade of Execution and Program Components. A table of scores relevant to the first section of the pattern is below. Section 1 comprises steps #1-19, but this post will only cover part of the section, with the rest being looked at in part 2.
