Figure skating Milania Väänänen and Mihail Akulov return Finnish colors to the European Figure Skating Championship – “We are trying to get technical points for the World Championships”

In the domestic There are rare moments in figure skating at next week’s European Championships in Tallinn, as the Finnish team is represented in Estonia in all four series.

At the European Championships in doubles skating, Finnish color is seen after a break of almost 40 years, when Milan Väänänen, 18, and Russian Mikhail Akulov, 29, skating on the race stage.

“It’s exciting, but I’m really looking forward to it,” summed up debutant Väänänen summed up his European Championship expectations at the Figure Skating Association’s remote information event.

The career paths of Väänänen and Akulov, who focused on doubles skating in recent years, met in Moscow last spring. The duo’s cooperation has quickly borne fruit, as the technical points required for the European Championship programs were created in October at the Finlandia Trophy and at the beginning of December in Croatia.

Akulovilla has valuable experience from 2018, when he represented Switzerland in the European and World Championships in pair skating, currently representing Hungary. Ioulia Chtchetininan with. Väänänen said that he could draw a lot from the Russian experience bank.

“Mikhail has given me support and told me what it’s like to be at the European Championships and the World Championships. He believes that I can skate really well in Tallinn. We believe that it is possible to do everything we aim for there,” Väänänen said. the limits of the technical points at the March World Cup.

Seeing Finnish colors in the value skating of value competitions is a rare treat. Emilia Simonen and Canadian Matthew Penasse participated in the World Championships in Helsinki in 2017, but before that the Finnish representation in doubles can be applied for in 1983, when Maija Pekkala and Pekka Pekkala competed in the European Championships and World Championships in the sport.

From Lahti native Väänänen has been practicing in Russia for several years. The internship with Akulov started in the south of Russia, but in the early autumn the couple moved to Perm at the foot of the Ural Mountains due to economic challenges, where training is cheaper.

In Perm, the duo is coached by a Russian Pavel Sliusarenko.

“It was a good change. There are other really good pairs here, so we get a lot of sparring. Thanks to that, the results of the elements we learned have improved,” Väänänen described.

Väänänen has not yet given much thought to long-term goals.

“We’re trying to get technical points for the World Cup, but after the European Championships we have a little holiday, maybe about a week. I remember there is a competition in the Netherlands after that where we have a chance to get those points.

The European Figure Skating Championships will be held in Tallinn on 12–16. January.