Anon here who is trying to cope with MAPPA being assholes by planning out a teenage years YoI fic (dunno if I'll ever write it, but hey, it's the first thing to break my years-long writer's block, at least). Anyway, I was wondering: if Yagudin and Plushenko didn't exist, how do you think the Russian men's figure skating would have looked in 05/06? Basically, Plushenko can't be around for obvious reasons, and since Yagudin is a bastard I might exclude him as well, so what would that look like?
YEAH. In a world without homophobia Yagudin simply would never have existed.
Victor would probably have looked up to skaters like Ilia Kulik and Alexei Urmanov growing up. He may have looked up to Viktor Petrenko too. He would have been stepping onto the scene right after Alexander Abt was the top Russian skater. Alexander was mega-talented, but super inconsistent and could never break through to the very top.
Victor's domestic competition at the time would have been Ilia Klimkin, who I don't think he'd have had much trouble surpassing. Russian men would definitely have been in kind of a dearth from 1999-2006 without Yags and Plush there, so it stands to reason that in YOIverse, Rusfed would probably have seen someone as promising as Victor as like, the second coming lol.
During the Soviet Era, Russia's medals mostly came from pairs and ice dance, without the kind of dominant men we saw from them in the 90s and 2000s, so if he were looking back before his time, there's a decent chance he'd be admiring American, Canadian, and British skaters. I feel like Stephane would have been the it boy at the time Victor started competing, and I have to think teen Victor may have had a bit of a crush.
If Yags and Plush weren't there, the quad race may have been sped up by Timothy Goebel winning Olympic gold in 2002 with his quad salchow, quad toe, and three quad fs. No one else had close to that level of difficulty, but since even with that tech, Tim was still placing below Plush and Yags, it stands to reason that perhaps the rest of the field wasn't rushing to catch up. This would track with YOI, where the quad race does seem to be a bit ahead of where it was in real life in fall of 2016.
In my mind there was a very dominant man (or multiple men) in YOIverse from the mid-2000s to 2012ish, and he was from Asia, Australia, Africa, or the Americas (fun thought: maybe this was when Japan really broke out in men's singles in YOIverse). The reason I say this is because despite Victor being a senior in 2006, he did not win his first world title or GPF title until he began his streak in 2012. However, we know he was winning European titles, so there must have been at least one (or more) huge skaters that he just couldn't break through at worldwide ISU championship level. Being said, he was obviously already a huge star by then, so apparently the lack of those did not halt his popularity!
