MILAN — Adeliia Petrosian is called an Individual Neutral Athlete at these Olympic Games, but she’s Russian through and through. She was born and raised in Moscow. She is the three-time Russian national champion and is her country’s only hope to win a fourth consecutive Olympic gold medal in women’s figure skating.
To the international figure skating world, the sole Russian female skater allowed at the Winter Olympics is a bit of a mystery. Because her nation has been banned from competing worldwide since its invasion of Ukraine, this is the first time most of her competitors are seeing her in person.
That said, most of them missed her during Tuesday night’s short program. They weren’t even in the arena when she took the ice. Petrosian, 18, was forced to skate second out of 29 skaters in the short program because she has not competed internationally and thus has no worldwide results or resume.
She came onto the ice as some spectators were still finding their seats, but skated a clean short program that received a strong score of 72.89. For two and a half hours, she held the lead, until Japan’s 17-year-old wunderkind, Ami Nakai, grabbed it away with a delightful performance highlighted by a spectacular triple axel. Petrosian ended up fifth in the short program.
After she skated, Petrosian said it was the ‘most important skate of my life.’ She said she was pleased to get the nervy short program out of the way early. ‘It’s actually an advantage because you’re done earlier and you have more time to rest.’
Asked if she was going to stay in the arena and watch the other skaters over the next several hours, she said she was heading back to the apartment she and her mother are staying in to watch the competition on the live stream. The apartment is convenient; she occasionally walks back after practice.
So now she turns her attention to Thursday’s long program. While she said she is not practicing her triple axel, she also said she wanted to keep her plans for a triple axel or a quadruple jump ‘a secret because I never tell about my program.’
She also said she hadn’t seen favorites like Alysa Liu and Kaori Sakamoto yet at the Games because they were in other practice groups. But that now will change when they skate in the long program Thursday, Feb. 19.
‘I hope to be with them in the same warmup,” she said, hours before she found out she was, ‘and then to really compete with them.’