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The 2022 World Figure Skating Championships are currently being played in Montpellier, France, and the winners have already been decided in pairs skating and women's singles. However, due to the absence of many famous players for various reasons, the world figure skating championships have been discounted in terms of both the level of competition and the degree of attention.
Due to the short interval between the competition and the Winter Olympics, the Figure Skating World Championships in the Olympic year usually have some famous players absent, but compared with the past, the 2022 Figure Skating World Championships are obviously missing more stars. The gold medalists of the four events of the Beijing Winter Olympics, only the ice dance champion and the host team of the World Championships, Papadakis and Nishizawa Long, will play in the World Championships, the other three gold medalists are all absent, and the Russian team that won the team championship is completely banned. In addition, the super popular star of the figure skating arena and the famous Japanese player Yusei Yushin also withdrew due to injury, which also made the starlight of the World Championships even dimmer.
At present, the two events of pair skating and women's singles have decided the final champions, the American combination Of Nereem/Fraser and Japan's Hanae Sakamoto have won the championships respectively, of which the gold medal of Nereem/Fraser is the first world championships gold medal of the United States team since 1979, and Sakamoto Hanae has won the first world championship in the Japanese women's singles in nearly eight years.
For individual athletes, it is natural to congratulate them on being able to make such a historic breakthrough. However, if you compare their winning results with the Beijing Winter Olympics more than a month ago, it is not difficult to find that the gold content of these achievements is really not high. Especially in the pair skating event, at the Beijing Winter Olympics, Sui Wenjing/Han Cong, Peng Cheng/Jin Yang won the first and fifth places for the Chinese duo, and the three pairs of Russian teams were ranked second to fourth respectively, and now these five pairs are all absent from the World Championships, which also makes the World Championships double event evolve into a direct dialogue between second-tier players. In the end, the Combination of the United States and Japan, which ranked sixth and seventh respectively at the Winter Olympics, ranked in the top two, and each won the best result of the World Championship, which is also reasonable.
However, although the final victory of the American team was nearly 10 points higher than their own performance at the Beijing Winter Olympics, it was still not enough to reach the podium of the Winter Olympics, which was 16 points worse than the score of the Russian team that won the bronze medal at that time. The combined silver and bronze pairs did not even cross the 200-point mark, a rare occurrence in the world championships doubles event in recent years.
Similar to the doubles event, the collective absence of the Russian "matryoshka doll" in the women's singles field also caused a faulty decline in the final medal score line. Japan's Hanae Sakamoto, who won the bronze medal at the Winter Olympics, won the title with two near-perfect sets of programs, and the overall score of 236.09 also set a new career best. In addition, Belgium's women's singles player Hendricks and the United States Liu Meixian won silver and bronze medals respectively, and they also set their best results in the World Championships.
Objectively speaking, due to the collective absence of the Russian women's singles, the women's singles event returned to the "three-week jump" era, in which case, Sakamoto's performance was perfect enough, but obviously once the Russian girls returned to the field, the top three results of this World Championships would be uncompetitive. Sherbakova and Trusova both won gold and silver medals at the Beijing Winter Olympics with more than 250 points, which would have been unattainable without a four-week jump configuration. Perhaps because of this, Sakamoto Also said in an interview after winning the championship that she is likely to start trying to jump around in training in the future. Although the world figure skating championships appeared to be starless due to the absence of many famous players, after experiencing the difficulty breakthrough of the Beijing Winter Olympic cycle, the development of figure skating has actually entered a new era.