Natalia Kaliszek and Maksym Spodyriev placed 17th at the World Figure Skating Championships in Milan. The couple, that was 14th at last year’s World Championships in Helsinki as well as 14th at the Olympic Games, has had higher hopes for their performance in Milan, especially that the top ice-dancers Tessa Virtue/Scott Moir or the Shibutani siblings were not taking part in the Milan Championships. In those circumstances 10th place should have been in our duo’s reach.
Natalia and Maksym’s short dance got a score of 63.7, which was slightly lower than in Pyeongchang (66.06), but it gave them 13th place and a guaranteed advance to the final twenty. After the free dance the couple was very pleased. According to them everything went to plan. However, the technical panel after long and thorough analysis, pointed out a major mistake in their performance, which decreased the result over 12 points in comparison to their predictions. Their technical result reached only 42.19, which together with the results for other components made only 87.76 points and 19th place in the free dance, which then after the finale, translated to 17th place in the overall classification.
As the couple’s coach Sylwia Nowak-Trebacka says, according to the judges reports, “After the twizzles Natalia and Maksym performed a rotary lift, so Maksym had to hold Natalia above the ice for over than one spin, which then means that a RoLi was made twice and that kind of move is allowed only once per program. Extra elements take away one point each. As a consequence, the next original lift Curve Lift was treated as ChoreoLift and their ChoreoLift as an extra element taking away another point. Because all of that, my couple lost over 12 points, so as many as they would lose if they fell twelve times in one program.”
Despite that, in the coach’s eyes, that was her protégés’ one of the best performance of the season and one detail caused huge point loss and a distant 17th place of the duo.
