By the numbers, Russia's Petrosian looks golden at 2026 Olympics. Will pressure and her coach's past factor in?

Adeliia Petrosian of Russia during the 2024-25 season. (Russian Figure Skating Federation web site)

Figure skating has become more and more of a math exercise since the sport began using its new scoring and judging system in the 2004-05 season.

If it were only a numbers game, you could securely place a bet on 17-year-old Russian Adeliia Petrosian becoming Olympic women’s singles champion next February because she has mastered high-scoring jumps none of the other contenders are likely to try.

But human behavior factors into the final score, so placing that bet involves more of a gamble than it might seem.

Athletes make mistakes.  Women’s bodies change, making movements that had become routine require a return to the drawing board or a jettison of a suddenly balky jump.

And then, in the truer-than-ever analysis of Rafael Arutunian, who coached Nathan Chen of the U.S. to the 2022 singles gold, “It depends on the judging.” Asked to elaborate, Arutunian added, “You know what I mean.’’

That judging includes the evaluation by the technical panel, whose determination of things like jump rotation weighs heavily on outcomes.  It is asked to make those decisions in a few seconds with benefit of replay from only one angle.

Sometimes they see what they want to, their eyes – and those of the judges – jaundiced by assumption (“she always underrotates that triple loop”), or by simple bias, or by an instant’s inattention.

So, as I calculated Ms. Petrosian’s mathematical advantage before discussing it here, I remained very aware that ice is slippery and that the sport, even with what seems like a googol of numbers designed to create objectivity (or the illusion of it), remains subjective at its core.

Being favored to win skating’s biggest event brings a singular form of pressure, especially for someone who has been absent from the world stage for three seasons.

Because the International Skating Union barred Russian and Belarusian athletes following Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, two-time reigning Russian champion Petrosian has not skated in an ISU competition since winning a Junior Grand Prix event at the end of September 2021. 

Her next ISU competition will be the Olympic qualifying event Sept. 17-21 in Beijing, where five more spots in the 29-woman field for the 2026 Olympics are available.  While it seems a foregone conclusion that Petrosian will achieve the top-five finish necessary to earn herself a spot, it will still be interesting to see how international judges view her after seeing her only on video for four years.

That qualifying event will be her only ISU competition before the Olympics.

Petrosian, who turns 18 on June 5, became eligible for the upcoming Winter Games as a result of the international federation’s decision last May to allow some “Individual Neutral Athletes” (AIN) from Russia and Belarus to compete.

They had a chance at earning up to one spot per country in each figure skating discipline for which athletes were approved but are barred from the team event; under normal circumstances, Russia would likely qualify the maximum three spots in each discipline and an entry in the team event.

Both countries had to submit names of two possible entries per discipline – one as a substitute - for screening to see if they had any links to the military or had made any statements or physical shows of support for the war in Ukraine.  The result was Russia getting one spot in both men’s and women’s singles but none in pairs or ice dance, with the men’s going to Petr Gumennik.

 Petrosian has competed only in Russia since autumn 2021, benefitting there from the friendly judging characteristic of national events in nearly every country (especially on grades of execution and program components).  So it is essentially meaningless to compare her scores against international scores for other skaters.

(For what it’s worth: Petrosian’s total scores in four Russian competitions were the top four in the world last year, with the highest, 262.92, more than 30 points better than that of the highest non-Russian, three-time world champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan.  Petrosian has won two straight national titles and is unbeaten over the past two seasons, winning eight straight domestic events over formidable opposition.)

There is one useful area of comparison: base value scores, which are the same in national and international events.  They measure the difficulty of the program elements a skater performs in the short program and free skate or rhythm dance / free dance.

For the chart below, aided by the wealth of sortable numerical information on skatingscores.com, I listed Petrosian’s top base values for each segment during 2024-25 with those of the top six finishers (placements in parentheses) at the 2025 World Championships.

Those numbers show Petrosian starting with a substantial advantage over her potential Olympic rivals.

(Source: skatingscores.com)

That means if she were to do clean programs, which would reasonably bring good grade of execution scores, Petrosian would be nearly impossible to beat unless the judges hammered her with PCS scores so low they would make a mockery of the event. 

Watch this video of her free skate at the 2025 Russian Championships, her best free skate of the season. Sure, her jumps were the most eye-catching part of it.  But she backed them with tremendous speed (skating skills) and got nicely into the spirit of the tango (presentation), even if her face lacked the fiery expressiveness characteristic of tango dancers.

Yes, the Russian judges PCS scores for Petrosian, all 9.5 or higher, were rather generous, to be polite.  Even knocking them down to 8.5, which would seem harsh, her base value advantage and reasonable GOE scores should still carry the day. . . if she doesn’t make big mistakes.

Petrosian gains her advantage by doing two quadruple toe loops (BV: 9.5) and a triple axel (BV: 8.0) in the free skate and a triple axel in the short program.

None of the non-Russian top skaters in the world attempted a quad last season; among the top six at worlds, only Amber Glenn of the United States did a triple axel.  In the short program, where a double or triple axel is required, the double has a base value 4.7 points lower than the triple.  The quad toe is worth 3.6 points more than any triple jump except the axel.

In the two seasons prior to 2024-25, Petrosian had landed two higher-scoring quads, the flip and the loop.  She eschewed them this season, suggesting they have become harder as she got older.

Adeliia Petrosian on the cover of a Russian figure skating publication.

“I am far from 15 years old now,” she said in a recently published interview with the Russian Federation magazine, World of Figure Skating.  “For now, the main task is to skate the content that I have cleanly. Of course, I want to return the (quad flip) to the free program.”

That is why Arutunian would not go so far as to say Petrosian’s jumps make her nearly unbeatable.

“Will she have the jumps next year?  We don’t know,” Arutunian said.

We don’t know partly because the eligibility change since the Kamila Valieva imbroglio at the 2022 Olympics has reset the age parameters, moving the minimum age for international senior competition from 15 to 17.

Of the three Russian women’s singles skaters at the 2022 Olympics, all of whom had landed a variety of quads repeatedly in the seasons leading up to those Beijing Games, none has done a clean quad since, and none was still competing last season.

Petrosian will be 3 1/2 months shy of her 19th birthday at the 2026 Olympics.  Only two women have landed clean quads at age 18 or older – Rika Kihira of Japan, who was 18, and Elizabet Tursynbaeva of Kazakhstan, who was 19.

Kihira has never attempted another one, as injuries have sidelined her in three of the four seasons since she hit a quad salchow at the 2021 Japanese Championships.

Tursynbaeva, whose quad salchow at the 2019 World Championship was first by a woman in senior international competition, did just one minor event after that because of chronic back problems.  She officially retired in September 2021.

Petrosian will be jumping with the weight of her country’s gold medal hopes on her shoulders, especially given that Russian women have won the last three Olympic singles titles.  She will also be in the spotlight because the controversial Eteri Tutberidze is her coach.

Tutberidze also coached Valieva, who had been an overwhelming favorite for the 2022 title until the revelation during those Beijing Winter Games that a doping sample she had given six weeks earlier came back positive for a banned substance, trimetazidine.  The drug, used medically to treat heart issues, is banned because it could increase endurance by increasing blood flow to the heart.

Legal maneuvering allowed Valieva, then just 15 years old and highly unlikely to have taken the drug of her own volition, to keep competing in Beijing.  But, after winning the singles short program, she fell apart in the free, finishing fourth as two other Tutberidze-coached athletes, Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova, went 1-2.

Happier times: Eteri Tutberidze and Kamila Valieva after Valieva won the 2021 Russian Grand Prix.

After a convoluted, two-year appeals process, Valieva was banned from competition for four years, starting from Dec. 25, 2021, the day of her positive test.  The World Anti-Doping Agency talked of an investigation into the “adults around Valieva,” but that would have been the responsibility of authorities in Russia, which gave Valieva a hero’s welcome upon her homecoming from the Olympics.  So don’t hold your breath.

The ISU Communication issued last December (Communication No. 2680) that opened a path and established the rules for Russian and Belarusian skaters to compete at the 2026 Olympics contains this language in paragraph 4d: “Nominated Athletes and their Support Personnel must have not associated in any way with any person serving a period of ineligibility for an Anti-Doping rule violation. . .”

This is where we get into hair splitting and degrees of separation.  Petrosian trained for several years in the same rink in Moscow rink and under the same coach as Valieva, but that Valieva-Tutberidze-Petrosian association is too tenuous to disqualify Petrosian.

WADA director general Olivier Niggli told the Associated Press in March 2024 that “the evidence is not there” to implicate Tutberidze in the Valieva doping case.

Asked about the issue, ISU media relations officer Chloe Burkhardt replied by email:

“Ms. Tutberidze is not serving a period of ineligibility for an Anti-Doping Rule Violation, and therefore paragraph 4d from ISU Communication 2680 does not apply to Ms. Petrosian.”

Nevertheless, the connection to Tutberidze, decried for her harsh training methods, will increase the media scrutiny on Petrosian at both the qualifying event and the Olympics.  The ISU has decided to lessen it by shielding Russian and Belarusian athletes from the press, as outlined in paragraph 4m of Communication 2680:

“AIN (individual neutral athletes) and their Support Personnel will not be allowed to go through the mixed zone or to participate in any press conference during the Qualification Competitions and the OWG 2026. They will also not be allowed to give any interviews to media during such Competitions.”

I cannot recall such conditions ever having been imposed on media and athletes at the Olympics.

Clearly, there are good mental health reasons to protect young athletes from being subjected to what might seem like relentlessly antagonistic questioning.

In this case, though, that protective umbrella will also cast, or lengthen, a shadow of doubt over Tutberidze and Petrosian, the coach’s latest prodigy.