The figure skating competitions at the Beijing Winter Games may only open in three weeks, but industry enthusiasts and commentators claim they were decided before they even began.
30 women will rise on the ice in China, and above all, 15-year-old Russian Kamila and Aliba will stand out.
And Aliba is no longer a skater, she's just a brilliant dancer on ice, mesmerizing everyone and you can not take your eyes off her.
Every movement, turn or jump of it is done perfectly.
Into all this she brings tons of charisma, and adds to them a little spice of emotion.
The talented girl started skating at just three and a half years old.
However, this was not her only hobby - she also went to ballet and gymnastics classes.
At the age of five her mother asked her to choose one sport.
Camila focused on skating, and has not looked back since.
At the age of 12, her parents took her to the "Sambo 70" sports school in Moscow, where she was spotted by Tubridza (2014 Olympic champion coach Alina Zagitova and world champion Yevgenia Medvedev), who decided to take the girl under her wing.
"I also started doing gymnastics, and even studied at a ballet school," Valieva recalls.
"True, I had to abandon it all gradually for the sake of skating. I chose ice for two reasons: I really liked the fast laps, and my coach Ksenia Semionovna Ivanova, who taught us new elements."
Camila and Aliba.
Occupier, Photo: AFP
But her path was not easy.
"The first training on the surface was a real challenge: I kept falling, getting up, falling again - and in the evening I had a fever. Even from my debut competition, I just remember being very cold while waiting for the awards ceremony," she said.
Despite her short career, she also suffered several injuries, the first of which came during the fitness month, where she broke her finger, but that did not stop her from continuing to train on ice.
At age 13, she broke her leg, just before the Youth Grand Prix final.
In the 2019/20 season the hard work paid off, and she started bringing in receipts when she won the Grand Prix final and the World Youth Championship, becoming the second skater in history to perform a "square toe jump", one of the hardest jumps, after her training partner Alexandra Trosova was the first to do so.
The intricate leap, she first introduced on her birthday four years ago.
"I do not know what will happen when I reach the age of 18. Maybe I will have a hard time doing it, so I decided to try the jump," Camila recalls.
"I do not count how many times I do it in training, because I concentrate on doing all my elements as best I can."
When asked in the past if jumping is the part she loves most about figure skating, she replied: "Figure skating is not just about jumping. Working on the new shows is a lot of creative work and inspiration. You need to reveal the overall picture with choreography, your own art, costumes, makeup, hairstyle, And at the same time slip and get through the technical part as cleanly as possible. "
And there is no more beautiful way than this to describe the frozen industry: "Figure skating is a multi-layered art, so to speak. You are an athlete, a dancer, an artist, a model, a bit of a musician, even your own make-up artist and stylist. A very versatile sport. A kind of 'sports theater'." .
Shattering barriers
Although Valieva spends quite a few hours training, but in her free time the girl enjoys painting, riding an electric scooter, reading the comments and answering fans on her Instagram, eight hundred thousand followers and taking care of her lava dog, which she received as a gift in 2019 from fans.
When asked what her dream is, she replies that one day she wants to become a psychologist.
To realize this dream in the future, the skater does not give up studies.
"True, I do a lot of things that 15-year-olds don't do, but I'm like everyone else and I study in school. Now it's easier to combine lessons and training, because all over the world, even in competitions, you can study online."
In her senior debut in the Finland Cup, Valieva was only third in the short exercise, but then advanced to the final and presented an exceptional free exercise with quick laps and jumps that seemed to be hovering in the air, followed by clean landings as well.
It paid off for her and big time when she won a score of 174.31 points and saw on the board the letters "WR" flickering, a new world record.
Two weeks later, at Skate Canada, her first appearance in the Grand Prix round, the young skater continued to break records, this time achieving 180.89 points in the free exercise, and on the way also became the first woman to smash the 250-point barrier, earning 265.08 points along with the short exercise.
No less amazing.
Last November, Valieva continued her great form at the Russia Cup in Sochi.
She increased to do and broke the three world records when she scored 87.42 points in the short exercise, 185.29 points in the free exercise and 272.71 points in the overall score.
To understand how great the achievement is, the fact that Valieva won the competition by an incredible margin of more than 43 points from her teammate Elizabeth Tuktamisheva, former world and European champion.
Valieva's first test came on December 26, 2021, when she knew the road to the Olympics was through the National Championships.
There she easily won the title of Russian Figure Skating Champion, becoming the first participant in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
This weekend she took part in her first European Championships for seniors, when she opened as only she knows with a new world record in the short exercise - 90.45 points, but the sequel was much harder when in the free exercise she fell.
Nevertheless, the high level in her exercises, brought her the gold.
"I still have a lot of work to do until the Olympics. I had a good experience in these competitions because I am young, and I hope to continue to be successful."
Indeed, if she continues like this, no one will be able to stop her from collecting the Olympic gold either.
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