If we make a list of intrigues for the show program tournament that can excite figure skating fans, then any similar tournament of those that have taken place in the past few years will fade next to it.
Moreover, which of the intrigues is more exciting, no one will undertake to say.
Will Evgenia Medvedev take revenge from Alina Zagitova for the Games in Pyeongchang, and Elena Radionova from Elizaveta Tuktamysheva for the 2014/15 season?
Will the Olympic champion in Salt Lake City Alexei Yagudin roll over the last two Russian victors of the continental championships - Mark Kondratyuk and Dmitry Aliev?
Who will be better - the vice-champions of Beijing Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov or ... their coach Maxim Trankov with his wife and partner Tatyana Volosozhar?
And that's not all...
But one of the figures of the coming evening definitely stands out.
This is Kamila Valieva.
What it can be, we all saw in the last days of December at the Russian Championship in Krasnoyarsk.
But this happened not at competitions, but in demonstration performances, where Camila for the first time presented to the public a number based on the sensational TV series "Wednesday".
If the rules of the show-tournament allowed using the programs already tested on the audience for performances, I think Camila in that December image of the daughter of the Addams family would definitely become the favorite with the maximum chances of winning.
It's not even that the chosen image sat on Valieva like a glove, but in the mood with which the skater performed it.
Camila did not skate any of her competitive programs with such pleasure and inner looseness.
As part of the competition, she was the same during the season as she always was: with a fairly similar choice of music, familiar, if not to say boring, choreographic interpretation of tracks and chords, and a colossal internal anguish, which actually raised only one question: when will it all finally end?
And the anguish, and it is not clear why the invented, soul-exhausting Olympic tribute, and the emphasized mourning of competitive costumes, and the realization that you are no longer a star, since others have appeared.
If the Games in Beijing ended with exactly the scenario that Valieva was led to for two years, that is, with an individual Olympic victory, now it would not matter at all how many outstanding programs Kamila managed to skate in her short sports life and whether she intends to continue her career.
In the history of figure skating, in this case, she would most likely remain as another successful product of the “Tutberidze system” - an athlete who completed the task and gave way to rivals of a more perfect format.
Before Valieva, the scheme worked without failures and repeatedly justified itself.
But now, in a certain sense, everything is out of control: from an absolutely systemic athlete, Camila has turned into a person who, if not destroying the established foundations, then shakes them in order.
The year that has passed since the Games in Beijing has shown quite convincingly: even in her current state, Valieva is no worse than Sofia Akatieva and Adelia Petrosyan, despite the fact that the first beat her at the national championship, and the second - in the final of the Russian Grand Prix.
Camila has no serious injuries, her bones and ligaments have long been strengthened and adapted to technical challenges, puberty is no longer able to break the technique of ultra-c jumps, and most importantly, she is still motivated and able to ride so that you want to watch it endlessly.
So it was at demonstrations in Krasnoyarsk.
And, perhaps, it will be in Moscow, if you are lucky with the productions.
In this regard, the show tournament is a great opportunity for the coaching staff to show the world a completely new Valieva.
Able to become a trendsetter in women's single skating for the next few years.
Just for this you need to set yourself such a task.
To a certain extent, this is a serious challenge.
It requires piece work and a piece attitude towards the athlete.
That is, an approach that the Khrustalny system has never, by and large, needed.
Why is it needed now, and is it necessary?
In my opinion, yes.
Firstly, it would be fair to the athlete herself.
The fact that Camila has grown up and matured does not at all cancel the fact that, in terms of her potential, she remains the most powerful skater of her generation: she is not afraid of experiments, including technical ones, she has a phenomenal ability to “sell” her jumping and non-jumping elements, earning on they have the maximum bonuses for quality, she is the most component figure skater in the world, which, according to the second assessment, no other single skater is objectively capable of approaching, even with the maximum loyalty of the judges.
And a talent of this magnitude, whatever one may say, under no circumstances should remain in the history of his sport just a “consumable”.
The second reason is purely utilitarian: despite the apparent “thaw” of international structures in relation to Russian athletes, no one knows how soon the country can return to the level of top tournaments.
Yesterday's juniors in this regard are an absolute pig in a poke: they can wait for their chance and shoot (just as Zagitova did in 2018), or they can go into oblivion as quickly as they appeared.
A very powerful leader is best able to keep the sport at the proper level: at one time, Evgeni Plushenko kept all men's single skating in this way.
With regard to women's skating, there is simply no better candidate than Valieva.
And this is important not only for Russia, but for the whole world.
In a certain sense, even the current situation plays on Camila: in the eyes of the vast majority of people from the world of sports, she is a victim of the Olympic scandal, and not the culprit.
This is understood even by those who continue to demand punishment for the athlete for a positive pre-Olympic doping test.
At the same time, Valieva, no matter how strange it may sound, has absolutely nothing to lose.
The threat of disqualification still hangs over the athlete, and the prospect of losing the Olympic gold won in the team tournament hangs over the country, but the paradox is that a guilty verdict is unlikely to aggravate the overall situation and plunge Camila into an abyss of stress.
She has experienced so much in a year that everything that follows will be perceived almost on autopilot.
The suspension of four years, which WADA and the IOC are asking for, is a measure that is maximally overestimated, and, therefore, unrealistic, in the most negative version, the prosecution will be able to achieve a disqualification for a maximum of two years, but even in this case, at the end of December 2023, Kamila will again receive the right to compete.
And even if she loses the titles won last season, they are only a small fraction of what Camila has the potential to win.
That is why I so strongly want a reboot in every sense of the word.
I want a long and bright career.
I want a banal happy ending, finally: it is what everything that continues to happen with Valieva now implies.
And why not start writing this script right now?