Figure skating has lost its aesthetic appeal and places too much emphasis on complex but ugly moves, the newly crowned European champion pair of Tatyana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.
Russia swept the podium in the pairs skating at the European championships in Sheffield, England, last month, while soloist Evgeny Plushenko took gold in the men’s competition.
“It just isn’t aesthetic,” Volosozhar said. “We’re going away from audience appeal, from the beauty of pairs skating.”
Trankov said some of the sport's more difficult moves "look, to put it mildly, not very good.”
He said the current scoring system puts too much emphasis on high-difficulty moves, and does not reward elegance enough.
“People are performing some type of distorted moves on the ice but getting high marks for it," Trankov said. He called for the abolishment of extra points for difficultly on some moves.
“For example, I reckon that a triple backspin should be judged only on the quality of its execution. Done high, with the splits, you’d receive more points.”
He said that supports and backspins in particular had become less attractive for spectators as the sport focused on complexity.
“I’d actually like it if we moved in the direction of choreography, devoted a lot more attention to it than we do now, so that pairs skating was more like a show.”
The pair said that they hoped to build on their European success with wins at the World Championships in Nice, which start March 26, and the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi.
Volosozhar and Trankov won silver at last year's world championships in Moscow, their first major competition together, and the first major event for Volosozhar after she chose to compete for Russia instead of her native Ukraine.
At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics they competed with different partners, with Trankov coming seventh and Volosozhar eighth.
