u/athicketofmusings

Partnership splits

With all of the recent splits in ice dance & pairs, I was just wondering if those of y'all who have actually skated or have IRL connections to skating have any insight as to some of the less obvious reasons at play here. Obviously I know splits often happen bc of age, injury, desire to retire from skating/move on to other life goals, etc. But this year in particular there seem to be a lot of splits where both partners intend to continue skating, which rules out the above listed issues.

The reason I'm asking is that I was having a conversation with a long time friend today about how communication issues/personality conflicts seem to the the biggest issue in everything from marriages to workplaces. Basically we as humans just suck at communicating! In my career field (healthcare) communication errors are well known to be the root cause of errors. All of this got me to thinking that perhaps many of the splits we're saying are rooted in the same thing- communication issues & general personality conflicts. I mean as closely as these skaters have to work together, I can see how that could become an issue. But I can also see how that would be difficult to address or to disclose publicly. No one wants to go on record saying "Yeah, we just don't get along anymore."

To be clear, this is NOT a request for gossip on any particular partnership. Just general musing about human nature & how that impacts skating.

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u/athicketofmusings — 2 days ago

One of my special interests, aside from figure skating, is linguistics. I find it fascinating how so many of today's skaters are multilingual. Even most of the American skaters are bilingual (which I love bc most Americans are not). And there are many skaters who are trilingual or even quadrilingual! As someone who grew up with 90s skating, it makes current skating even more fun now that so many of the non American/Canadian skaters can do interviews in English. That's not something we saw much back in the 90s & early 2000s!

All that to say, we know Ilia speaks & understands Russian fluently bc of his parents. But does anyone know if he can read it? As in the actual Cyrillic script? Same question for Max, Andrew, & Anthony see they all have Russian parents as well.

Side note- I wonder if Andrew speaks/understands Ukrainian since his maternal grandparents are from Ukraine & still live there.

Last side note- I'm largely self taught in Spanish & am semi fluent now, but my goal is to eventually be truly fluent. I have no ambitions of learning Russian but I do love the way it sounds.

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u/athicketofmusings — 9 days ago

Y'all, I researched Misha's OGM performance today, & may I just say how much more enjoyable it was without the American commentators? I say this as an American myself. My god, the American commentators were horrible during Misha's skate. Being able to watch it with other commentators who were respectful & appreciative of his talent made it so much more enjoyable. Brought tears to my eyes.

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u/athicketofmusings — 11 days ago