MOSCOW, April 25. /TASS/. Russian 12-year-old figure skater Maxim Belyavsky has executed a quintuple, a jump with five rotations, during a training session on Thursday and posted a video of the jump on Instagram.
The figure skater executed the quintuple, which has never been performed before, using a harness system that helps figure skaters to learn new elements during training sessions and called a "fishing pole" in this sport.
In an interview with TASS Belyavsky said he executed this new element on the next training day after he tried it for the first time and failed.
"I began practicing quintuple yesterday," the young figure skater said in an interview with TASS. "My coach asked ‘Can you twist the quintuple?’ I tried and fell. Then I tried it again and it started straightening out gradually."
Belyavsky also said that he is already capable of executing two types of quadruples - toe loop and Salchow. He is currently learning two more complicated quadruples - flip and Lutz.
The quintuple has been never executed at the tournaments in the history of figure skating. The International Skating Union (ISU) currently has no criteria how judges should mark in their evaluations the execution of the quintuple jump.
President of the Russian Figure Skating Federation (RFSF) Alexander Gorshkov told TASS that Belyavsky still had to work hard to achieve stability performing a quintuple.
"This is very interesting," Gorshkov, who is the 1976 Olympic champion in ice dancing, said. "It is very important that Maxim is so seriously committed."
"However, firstly, he is only 12 years old and secondly, the jump was executed using a fishing pole," the RFSF president said. "Enormous work is still ahead of him to learn executing this jump firmly without a fishing pole, at least at training sessions, and then at tournaments."
However, world’s legendary figure skating coach Tatiana Tarasova was not so optimistic about Belyavsky’s jump saying in an interview with TASS that only amateurs would consider a quintuple executed with the use of harness as the first ever in the world.
"An assistant with a fishing pole is near Maxim, supporting him, and this is how we teach jumps to prevent children from falling," Tarasova said. "Using the Mishin’s vestibular simulator [a type of harness], one can execute 10, 12 and even 100 rotations, while in a circus they are simply flying using harness systems."
"Only amateurs may view this jump on a fishing pole as the world’s first ever execution of the quintuple. Perhaps, the coach simply wanted to attract attention to what children are capable of," Tarasova added.