Plaidder's Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Grand Prix finals, 2001

The Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com
Alas, my inept videotaping skills prevented me from recording the second ladies' free skate; but apart from that I saw most of what ABC Sports saw fit to broadcast. Time is precious here in the holiday season, so let me just hand out some awards:

BIGGEST MISCARRIAGE OF SKATING JUSTICE: That Lithuanian ice-dancing team. They were fabulous, and they got HAD. Once AGAIN. As far as I could tell they were the best team out there, but I guess they just didn't stuff enough cash into the judges' G-strings. At least the bright spot is that now the commentators openly discuss the fact that the "judging" in ice dancing is all rigged by a corrupt cartel, although Susie Wynn is usually a little less frank than that. I am glad, however, that the Italians got the smackdown that in my opinion they have long been cruising for. As for Anisina and Peiserat, they get my next award:

PENALTY, FIFTY YARDS, VOCALS ABUSE: Can you say "tacked on?" I thought you could. You all know, surely, that I don't have a problem with narrative or "theme" programs per se, nor do I generally bust on people for being too high-concept. But this "anthem to liberty" thing that Anisina and Peiserat claim they have going with their free dance is, in my humble opinion, a load of crap they came up with to try to sell an otherwise unimpressive program. First of all, I am so sick of people using snippets of Martin Luther King Jr. every time they want to make whatever it is that they're doing seem less like commercial self-promotion and more like a Deep Meaningful Gesture. What has his "I Have A Dream" speech got to do with any of the rest of that music? Or, indeed, with their program? Or ice dancing in general? Big points off on that number for being both semiotically incoherent and just plain crass.

PENALTY, FIFTEEN YARDS, VOCALS ABUSE: Set slightly less far back by his choice of music is Yevgeny Pleshenko, who made the inexplicable decision to interrupt an otherwise fairly coherent piece adapted from the Cirque du Soleil soundtrack with a 20-second sampling of "El Tango De Roxane" from Moulin Rouge. I freely admit that the first time around I was too busy laughing my ass off remembering the number to notice what he was even doing at this point in his program. Maybe Pleshenko is not familiar with Sting's "Roxanne" and therefore does not understand; but then again, he's got other problems.

PENALTY, TWENTY YARDS, UNCONSCIONABLE REMIX: To the Italian ice-dancing team for doing brutal violence to "I Will Survive" by tacking on the kind of choral re-arrangement you hear underneath William Shatner on "Tambourine Man."

GERRALDO RIVERA MEMORIAL AL CAPONE'S VAULTS AWARD: Here again, the palm leaf of victory goes to Yevgeny Pleshenko. All through the Grand Prix, people were asking, "Hey, Yevgeny, when do we get to see your Olympic program?" and he was saying, "It is a sacred mystery that will be revealed with great fanfare at the Olympics, where it will bring everyone to their knees in astonishment and awe." Well, his English isn't really good enough to actually say that, but you could tell that was what he meant. Well, he finally unveiled it in the second free skate at the Grand Prix finals, and proved that sometimes, hype doesn't pay.

I've gone back and forth on Pleshenko, who is clearly a great jumper and is also clearly not afraid to embarrass himself, as for instance Michael Weiss obviously is, by really putting himself out there when he does a program. As weird as that "Once Upon A Time In America" program is, it does hold one's attention, and I thought it allowed his personality to come through (at least it seemed like that was his personality). I always liked Yagudin's programs better--and the costumes, don't get me started--but I still got that "red-hot performance" vibe from Pleshenko, so I was always happy to watch his programs.

This program, on the other hand, I hate. Let me count the ways:

  • The music. Like I said.
  • The choreography. As much of a pain in the ass as Dick Button is, he's right about one thing: there is a difference between dancing and flailing, and what we have here is clearly flailing. Especially with the arms. It's like he got started on his aerobic workout and then somebody sprayed him with caffeine.
  • The plagiarism.

    Now, I can't prove this, and what do I know about the technical side of things, but even Terry "Just A Pretty Face" Gannon seemed to notice that Pleshenko's footwork sequence looked remarkably similar to Yagudin's. The fact that he was swiping a page out of Yagudin's book was emphasized by the fact that this segment occurs during that one lone Moulin Rouge excerpt, which helps it feel out of context and out of character. And Pleshenko has not learned the first rule of plagiarism, which is that if you are going to steal something and pretend it's yours, you should not turn it in to someone who is already familiar with the original--especially if your copy is markedly inferior. It was perhaps particularly unfortunate that the ABC team had chosen to do a little "compare and contrast" segment on Yagudin and Pleshenko's footwork earlier in the evening, during which Dick Button pointed out the difference between Yagudin's more organic whole-body choreography and what Pleshenko was doing, which was combining footwork with what I call unrelated gratuitious arm-waving (UGA) but what Dick Button calls "applied nonsense" (as opposed to theoretical nonsense). Even without Dick's help, though, it was pretty clear what was going on, and I'm glad he didn't get away with it, even though Yagudin's victory may qualify as the Second Biggest Miscarriage of Skating Justice.

    I say this not because I don't think Yagudin deserved to win (his Man In The Iron Mask program is not as good as his Gladiator program was, but it was still really good, and for once he really skated it well) but because it was clear that something was up with the judges. They seemed to be taking a really long time to give him his marks, perhaps because, as Liza suggested, they were busy forging alliances ("Marry your daughter to my son and together we will create a skating judging dynasty that will rule for generations!"). And then, as Dick Button so rightly and so annoyingly pointed out, Pleshenko's technical merit marks were much lower than they are wont to be, even considering the double-turn on the combination. Now, I ain't saying these marks were lower than they should have been, because I believe in flunking people for plagiarism, plus his spins are just nothin' but ugly, but the point is they are not consistent with the way he's been marked so far in the Grand Prix, and it's clear that some of the judges sandbagged him so they could give it to Yagudin. And you know, he deserves it, and it was heartwarming to see how excited he was, but still. I'm glad Kennedy got elected too, but it'd have been better without all those votes from dead people in Chicago.

    ET MEMORIAL WHERE'S MY @#$! KLEENEX AWARD: To Sale and Pelletier, whose "Love Story" program made me cry, despite the fact that a) I've seen it several times already and b) I hated the movie when I saw it. ("Love means never having to say you're sorry." My ass! Love means being willing to say you're sorry at a moment's notice! Over, and over, and over again! But I digress). But there it is. I could not explain it to you if you asked me, but for whatever reason, their performance of it at that event had some kind of emotional power which cannot be explained by the way they were landing their jumps. Which is why I liked it, and am glad it won, because if making people cry is not what presentation is all about, then, well, what is?

    EUROCENTRISM MEETS HETEROCENTRISM AWARD: To Dick Button, Peggy Fleming and Terry Gannon for their commentary on the pairs teams, especially Shen and Zhao of China. You could tell that the producers sat down with Dick a couple weeks earlier and said, "OK, Dick, your theme for the pairs segment is 'romance.'" Because he really was hammering away at it, and I mean maybe my gaydar is way out of line here, but there was something truly surreal about listening to him trying to enforce the heterosexual norm. "There's just no romance here. When you're in love, you fly." Well, maybe you fly, Dick, but for me, love involves a lot of washing the dishes and scooping the cat litter. (Actually, Liza scoops the cat litter, but I've been getting up at the crack of dawn every day to drive her to the train station since her car got totaled...oh dear, I've digressed again.) I personally liked it when Bereshnaya and Sikuralidzev started trying to get away from the heterosexual-romance model after their breakup; however, I notice they are right back at it, skating a very lovely program based on some Rodin sculpture that involves a stone guy and a stone babe locked in a hot clinch. The pairs team least well served by this relentless emphasis on "romance" is Shen and Zhao, who have always been more about speed, strength, and skill than about flying on the wings of love. I know that I normally bust on Timothy Goebels for being exactly this way, but you know what, Timothy Goebels with slightly better artistry is *still* boring as hell, whereas Shen and Zhao were always exciting with or without the "expression" that Peggy Fleming was lauding them for having finally gotten a handle on. And I was disappointed to see that Shen and Zhao have capitulated to the pressure and are working very hard to put together a program that conforms better to European ideas about what constitutes romance and/or artistic expression--working so hard that they are now screwing up on the technical side, which is a real shame. They still have better throw jumps than anyone else in the world, though. I would happily watch them just do nothing but throw jumps, but I suppose that would tire them out too much.

    X-FILES MEMORIAL THE THRILL IS GONE AWARD: To the ladies. I guess maybe it's because I've seen them so often because it's all ABC really covers iwth any completeness or regularity, but I'm not as excited about this part of the competition as I once was. That, and I'm really worried about Michelle Kwan. I was so troubled by her decision to fire her coach AND her choreographer in an Olympic year (you're firing Lori Nichol? Lori "Love Story" Nichol? Are you NUTS?) that I took the extreme step of actually reading about this in the skating media. It makes me feel slightly better in that there are no allegations of mistreatment on either side and it seems to have been an amicable breakup, but worse in that the only cause I can assign to it is complete wigging-out on her part. "I just want to do it on my own, without relying on my coach or my father." Uh...Michelle... everyone relies on a coach. That's not a sign of weakness. Go and get your coach back before you totally ruin everyone's chance to see you finally get an Olympic gold medal like you shoulda had in 1998 except Tara "Flash In The Pan" Lipinski robbed it from ya!

    MEOW MIX CATTINESS AWARD: To Dick Button, who is back again and bitchier than ever.

    You know, I hope Dick doesn't have any children, because if he does they probably hate him. The guy just cannot say something good about someone without also tacking on criticism. He was all down on Yagudin's program because he sort of ran out of steam at the end; and sure, he was in fact traveling on the spin, but who fucking cares? It's not that it is not sometimes entertaining when he says what everyone else is thinking--for instance, his comment on Goebel's "American In Paris" program, which was "He's got a long way to go if he's gonna make you think he's Gene Kelly"--but it just is unrelenting, and by the end you're just wishing Scott Hamilton would come back and say something cheerful and vapid, just for old times' sake.

    The funniest moment of all was when he was talking about Pleshenko, and how "he skates with such energy and pizazz and his jumps are so great that you forget all about how his footwork, spins, choreography and posture really suck," only of course I'm paraphrasing because Dick does know enough not to say "suck" on the air. He really worked himself into a lather over the Pleshenko/Yagudin scoring situation, frothing along about how great it was that people were finally recognizing that Yagudin "skates from the heart" and winding up by saying, "Aw, this makes me happy, for once." At least I suppose this means he's becoming slightly self-aware. We can hope.

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