Men's Short Program
Men's Long Program
Ice Dance
Ladies
The Pairs Debacle
Well, all the world is talking about this now. Here's how I called it, as I saw it:
No fucking way, man.
I mean, maybe someone can explain to me why this was just, but even if my head will eventually nod in sage agreement, my gut is still going to be yelling, "Love Story kicked that program's ass!" Now, I have seen them do that program a number of times, and I think that actually they did do it better, once, in the Grand Prix finals, when they made me cry. However, it was pretty fucking good this time around, too, even though I didn't cry. Liza had never seen that program before, though, so she was blown away by it. And so naturally when they gave the gold to the Russians, her disbelief, outrage, and anger was far more voluble and pointed than even Scott Hamilton's.
Anyway, rather than just rant about how skating judging is bought and paid for, I just want to explain why, lovely as it is, and difficult as I'm sure it is, Bereznhaya & Sikuralidzev's program does not impress me the way Love Story does. It's the choreography. Having seen the program a few times now, I've been searching for the source of its emotional impact, and I have come to really respect Lori Nichol. She knows what she's doing.
The easiest place to see that is in the handholds. After the Moment Of Realization, when we get to the point in the movie where Ali McGraw's character is diagnosed with some terminal illness whose exact details I forget (which they register with the big droopy-arms moment, which then leads into a death spiral...get it, it's a DEATH spiral...) the choreography begins slowly separating them. Handholds change more often, and they don't hold them for as long; they move from having a lot of body contact to just having one point of contact to barely touching to *almost* touching but not quite. They spend more and more time separating but reaching for each other across a distance they can't seem to bridge, until it closes with her receding away from him in silence, visible to us as a ghost but not to him. Dick Button talks a lot about getting the "character" in the music, something that, say, Alexander Yagudin is very good at, but which, say, Irina Slutskaya can only do in a crude and cartoonish way. Well, this is way more than getting to the "character." S&P *are* very good at getting into character, and that's one of the reasons they can sell this program. Even when Jamie is landing all her elements, toward the end of hte program, she still looks really sad, and that's because the she's in that "about to die and leave the love of my life a brokenhearted widower" headspace. Same with Pelletier. But beyond their ability to act, there's the fact that Nichol has given them a fully developed, nuanced narrative in which everything that either of them does contributes to the production of a specific and powerful emotional response. That's why that program kicks everything's ass, from a performance perspective. It makes it seem like the only reason they need to do the elements perfectly is that if they screwed one up it would spoil the story.
Bereshnaya and Sikuralidzev are very good at their particular kind of artistry; they're balletic and lyrical, they have beautiful execution and exquisite positions, and of course technically they're perfect, except when they choke. But their program doesn't have the emotional impact of Love Story. That's not their fault; it's an apples and oranges situation, where both pairs are perfect of their kind, but they belong to different categories. So rationally, I can see how you might end up, all other things being equal, scoring B&S ahead of S&P (assuming they are all correct when they say B&S's program is more technically difficult), even though from a performance standpoint, S&P kick a lot more ass.
The thing is, all other things were not equal. Anton had a major bobble in their side-by-sides, and there were a number of other small mistakes that even I noticed, whereas I didn't see S&P make any mistakes (and I've seen this program done a lot). B&S are both so uptight in competition that they have a hard time projecting much emotionally, and their energy wasn't particularly high; partly that's the nature of the program, but partly they just weren't really letting it go the way I have seen them do on occasion. And given all that, the only way I can explain what happened is with the same four words I always come back to when I talk about the skating judges: BOUGHT AND PAID FOR.
It sucks for Sale & Pelletier, who were just so fucking happy after they finished that program, as well they should have been, only to discover that for no reason they could understand they were not rewarded for their performance. It sucks also for Berezhnaya and Sikuralidzev, who are good skaters, who might well have ended up winning it on their own merit but instead are always going to be followed by this controversy. And it sucks for the audience, who I really thought were just going to storm the boxes and kick some judge ass. I think the only reason that didn't happen, actually, was that Shen and Zhao still had to skate. Oh, and I forgot to mention: it sucked for them too, big time. Their thunder got all stolen, and they don't deserve that.
Other people the judges screwed include Ina and Zimmerman, who finally won me over with their program this time, but failed to convince the judges that they were better than that stupid second-string Russian pair, whose West Side Story is a textbook illustration of how *not* to produce the kind of effect that Love Story achieves. But you know what, they know they kicked ass, and that was the best thing about it. They were really happy with how they skated, and so were Sale and Pelletier; and nobody can take that away from them no matter how bought and paid that person might be.
Men's Short Program
Limited as I am to ABC's coverage, I have never seen any of the men's short programs, except for the American skaters, because ABC never shows the short program except for the US Nationals. So I was psyched to see what the boys on the other continents are up to. I was particularly psyched to see Yagudin's short program. He was kind of tense at the beginning, but he really lit up during the footwork sequences, and I just love to see that. He's as driven by the desire for gold as the next Russian quad-landing powerhouse, I suppose, but there are times when you watch him and you can hear him thinking, "Hot damn, I love this sport!" This was one of those times, at least once he landed the quad triple combination. And I like the program. Costume works with the theme, the ice-flinging thing borders on cheese but doesn't actually cross over, love the footwork, and in general I think it just works. Yeah, big surprise. I think Yagudin is starting to enter the Wylie Zone with me. And while I do not want to have Wylie's babies, I would happily watch him skate for hours on end, and I feel the same way about Yagudin.
So we move on to the Other Russian, the wild, wacky and weirdness-wearin' Yevgeny Pleshenko, who per usual slid out onto the ice wrapped in Mylar and covered in rhinestones. For Pleshenko, looking like he's wearing someone's mirrored ceiling is totally normal. Falling on his shiny besparkled ass, though, that's not normal at all. I would suspect foul play, only I don't like him enough. The commentator team was talking about a groin injury; well, when you watch him do a Biellman, you can understand how that kind of thing might easily happen to him. I hope it's not going to turn out that Yagudin somehow slipped him a mickey before he got out there.
Apart from him eating ice in a big way, that short program was actually not bad; Michael Jackson may be a little, you know, '80s, but in "Billie Jean" he has finally found the right context for his crazed flailing, excuse me, naturally exuberant approach to footwork. But the landing on the ass...there's just no way around that. As Scott Hamilton says, "You just can't make mistakes in the short program." And you know why? Because in the short program, the judges have to actually follow RULES and have some STANDARDS. If they could have sleazed Yevgeny into the second spot, they would have done it. They tried their best. But that mandatory 0.4 deduction has kicked his shiny Mylar ass all the way down the ladder, and I just hope Yagudin has relaxed enough to really groove on the schadenfreude.
While on the subject of shiny asses, I must not forget to mention Other Other Russian and prominent fashion criminal, Alexander Abt, who was apparently trying to wear the entire night sky as a garter belt.
Seeing Timothy Goebel start crying after his short program was new. Poor lad, I'm sure he is trying very hard; but he just should not have chosen a sport that requires artistry. He just has none. Dancing ability can be trained and developed; but it cannot be surgically implanted, and that's clearly the only thing that's going to bring Goebel up to speed. However, he can sure jump. Watching Michael Weiss fail to deserve his spot on the Olympic team all over again wasn't new. Nor was watching Todd Eldredge crack under pressure. Poor guy; I want it for him, I really do, but he was just born to be a bridesmaid.
In other news: Elvis is back, Jack! OK, he's out of medal contention because the judges hate his presentation and also now have a taste for Canadian blood, but I haven't seen him skate a real program in a long time, and I'm stoked. It was interesting watching him with Goebel in mind. Elvis is not exactly balletic either; but he has found a way to turn his athleticism an aesthetic, with the help of the martial-arts idiom, and he has a lot more fire, charisma, and commitment than Goebel does. You give me the choice, I'll watch Elvis over Timothy any day, whether or not he lands his quads cleanly.
And as long as I'm talking about men I'm glad to see back, can I just say that I am SO glad Scott Hamilton is doing the commentary and not Dick Button? I just like him better and better. I think the judges are probably going to be hating him bad once they watch the tape; but so what. At last, a commentator who knows when to shut up (i.e., when people are skating), when to get excited, and when to start preaching truth to the ISU. Go Scott!
Men's Long Program
I missed Eldredge's program. Caught Elvis's; he skated with honor, and that's what matters. Very sad that Takeshi Honda didn't medal; he did very well, I thought, although his program is not as exciting as it might be. And then we get to the Top 3.
I never thought I would hear myself say this, but we thought Goebel should have been marked higher than Pleshenko. His artistry is still, in many ways, in the toilet. I've figured out what his problem is: it's his upper body. Unless he's Doing Something with it, he tends to just forget it's there. Mainly you see this in the arms, which, if he's not going into or coming out of a jump, tend to sort of flop around like noodles. He doesn't understand about finishing movements; you can see him going, "OK, put arms here...dum de dum de dum...time to put arms over here now...ya da da ta da..." However, what we've decided is that he actually manages to make the jumps look artistic, largely because he makes them look easy. It's during the jumping passes that he projects a sense of really enjoying what he's doign and being really into it. So the jumping is interesting to watch. The rest of the program, you know, oh well.
Anyhow, so the rest of the field didn't offer that many surprises. Alexander Abt's looking like he was wearing a plastic bag he'd found in a gasoline-soaked puddle was about par for the course. Michael Weiss actually skated well, for once, although I don't know what he thought he was doing with those cuffs. And then we get to Yevgeny "Shiny Metal Ass" Pleshenko.
First of all, it's hilarious that he's doing *Carmen,* which has been so appropriated by female figure skaters over the years that you really have to fight not to superimpose Katarina Witt on his image. He was trying to manly it up by wearing his bullfighter outfit...which looks exactly like the kind of bullfighter outfit you would wear to a drag ball. If you know the opera it's even funnier, because most of the music he's skating to is Carmen's music, and does not belong to either the bullfighter or her male love interest, Don Jose. But if you know the opera, then at least you know what's *supposed* to be going on at the end there when he lunges forward and then steps back. No, he's not killing a bull; he's stabbing poor Carmen for jilting him. Unfortunately, his reaction didn't so much convey pain and remorse at having been led by passion to murder the woman he loved as the kind of panicked startlement you'd expect from a child who had accidentally stabbed a fellow kindergardener because he just wouldn't listen about not running with scissors.
In other words, he's not selling me on this program any better than Goebel sold me on his. If Goebel, in the immortal words of Dick Button, has "a long way to go to make you think he's Gene Kelly," Pleshenko has just as long a way to go to make you think he's either Don Jose or a toreador. I do think it was a good idea to dump that program he pulled out at the Grand Prix; aside from the flailing problem, which is more or less under control in this program, there's the plagiarized footwork. But unless it's an old program recycled, he didn't have very much time to learn it, and that would explain its relative lacklusterness, unless you just want to explain it with disappointment over his short program fiasco.
And on we move to my man Alexei. Scott was talking about him skating conservatively, and "conceding the long program to Pleshenko." Liza's response was, "I don't think he looks like he's conceding anything." OK, sure, he wasn't doing all the combinations he had planned; but better not to fall on your ass, I say, especially if you don't need them for the marks. And he landed all his jumps cleanly, with the exception of one wobble, and of all the men we saw last night he definitely has the best sense of music, drama, and dance. I guess the judges felt the same way; or, as Liza said when she saw the presentation marks go up, "They're not taking any chances." As I said, I don't like this program as much as I liked his Gladiator one, but I guess Gladiator is, like, so '90s now. But he did skate it well. He thought so, anyway, judging by the amount of emoting that happened before he got off the ice. We saw him getting down to kiss the rink and both went, "NO! NO, DON'T DO THAT! IT'S BAD LUCK!" By the time he was sliding on his knees toward the kiss and cry area, we were both going, "Get off the ice! Just get off! Don't make them decide to take you down a peg!"
And the thing about Yagudin is, when he goes into the kiss and cry area, he's not just whistlin' dixie. I've never seen anyone break down like that, even after Sale & Pelletier won Worlds last year. With him and Goebel both, this Olympics has been very revealing in terms of just how much pressure these people are under. I think it also explains why I like him better than Pleshenko, aside from the fashion problems and the haircut. Sure, there's the whole Russian vs. Russian rivalry, but you get the sense, especially from last night's coverage, that for him it's not about beating Pleshenko so much as it is about beating himself. (All right, get your minds OUT of the gutter.) He knows that he has potential that for whatever reason, his own personality is not allowing him to realize, and this past couple years has been about whipping himself into shape; and now it's finally all paid off. In his little post-win interview, when he was obviously too shocked and overcome to be paying attention to what he said, he talked about how this season has been hell for him, and you could sort of tell all along that it had been but he's always at least made a nominal effort to keep a stiff upper lip about it. It did get kind of ridiculous during the medal ceremony--dude, stop bouncing! Do you see anyone else bouncing?--but still. I'm happy to see him finally do his best and get the gold. And I'm happy to see Yevgeny standing there in the silver medal spot looking like he's trying to swallow a slug.
And I'm glad Goebel medaled. I feel like he deserves it now. I dunno why, exactly. But he was so psyched to be on the podium at all, it's just kind of refreshing, especially when you look over at Yevgeny.
Ice Dance
The fact that I agree with the decision to give the gold to Anisina and Peiserat says something about how uninspiring the whole evening was. For you see, I cannot stand that "Anthem to Liberty" program, for reasons I have already gone over on the Grand Prix page. And yet, the Italians not only butchered "I Will Survive" but had a major fall--or at least a fall that looked major until Bourne and Kratz finished up their program by falling flat on their backs and lying there as if stunned, which perhaps they were. Up to that point, we were really rooting for them, especially as it had clearly been predetermined that they would come in fourth again this time. Meanwhile the Russian pair that got the silver was at least more respectful to their "theme" than Anisina and Peiserat were to poor Martin Luther King Jr., even if their program was not exactly setting the world on fire.
Lang and Chernechev were the ones we most enjoyed watching, really, although Bourne and Kratz were a close second until they took their spill. That's going to be an embarrassing moment in the family video album--the clueless guy commentator going, "That was planned, right?" and the veteran woman commentator saying, after a moment of shocked paralysis, "Oh my God, that was NOT planned." I thought it had to be a desired effect too, although I also knew that there had been rules implemented in the wake of the raft of Bolero copycats against ending a program by dying on the ice. However, nobody seems to be following the rules against naughty lifts, so I thought maybe they had just decided to ignore it.
Meanwhile, the Lithuanian team gets shafted ONCE AGAIN. It is a sad commentary on this sport that even though the two teams directly ahead of them in the standings had major falls--something that you hardly ever see in ice dance--the Lithuanians did not move up at all. As the NBC team helpfully pointed out, amongst the top 10 the standings had not changed at all from the first compulsory dance to the end of the free dance. This is fixing at a level that pairs skating can only dream of. The woman on the Italian team was crying over her partner having stumbled, but we were going, "It's OK, Barbara--it's not going to make a difference!" And indeed, it didn't.
All of which has brought us both around to the opinion that ice dance is not a sport, and is better off relegated to theatrical venues and exhibition programs where people can just enjoy it for the drama and whatnot and not be constantly pissed off when deserving teams from small and underpowerful countries get shafted in the standings ONCE AGAIN so that the Big Three can sweep the podium no matter how many asses they fall on.
Also, can I point out that it looked to us as if both Russian teams and the Lithuanians look like they all ran afoul of the same paper shredder on their way to the arena?
Meanwhile, I hear the French judge is now claiming that she was not pressured to vote for the Russians at all, but was 'physically and emotionally threatened' by one of the British alternates into claiming that she had been. The British alternate, from the way she responded to questions about this, clearly thinks that the French judge has completely lost her mind. Ottavio Cinquanta points out that even if she hasn't lost her mind, she certainly has perjured herself. I think this woman needs a long vacation.
Holy shit, man.
Never has skating justice been dealt out so harshly! It says something about this sport that we were both so flabbergasted to see Sarah Hughes win the gold medal when both of us admitted she had skated the best long program. We're so used to judging being done on the seniority/lifetime achievement model that to have Michelle actually getting the bronze medal just because she happened to fall on her ass during her long program really felt just...I dunno...wrong. And yet, there it is: Sarah skated perfectly and her program was harder, and Irina also had a harder program and maybe she didn't skate it quite so well but she did pull it off more successfully than Kwan did, and so there they all are, Hughes at the top, Michelle at the bottom, and Irina in the middle going, "You know, I figured I might end up with silver, but I was really expecting that would be Michelle Kwan up there gloating on me, not this flutzing teenage pipsqueak from nowhere."
I just cannot imagine how much it must suck to be Michelle Kwan right now. We really, really wanted her to win, partly because we feel that her having lost the gold to Tara Lipinski in Nagano in 1998 was a great cosmic injustice. Unfortunately, she peaked between Olympics, and this is the result. When she dumped Frank Carroll and switched choreographers, there was a lot of talk about how maybe she was starting to lose her fire, and not taking joy in skating any more, and so on, and then when she won Nationals everyone was all, "Hey, look, Michelle's back!" including me. Well, I guess she wasn't all the way back. Our theory on this is actually that the luck of the draw had a lot to do with it. Sarah Hughes went before the top three, and the response to her program must have really rattled everyone else, because none of them did their best. Sasha Cohen also fell on her ass--what the hell, she's seventeen, she's got years of ass-landings left in her, she'll be back in 2006--and Irina and Michelle both looked reeeeeeeally nervous when they came out on the ice.
Liza reports having felt very nervous for Michelle when she came out, and so did I. And as soon as she started it didn't really feel right to me. I don't know if I can explain this, but I'll give it a shot:
One epiphany I had one time listening to my piano teacher give his masters' recital was that in terms of mastery, it's not really a continuum. There is the realm occupied by people like me who worry about missing notes, rushing things, and otherwise failing to hit all the keys properly in the right order, and then there is the realm occupied by people like my then-piano teacher, for whom that kind of mistake is just an impossibility. It's like for whatever reason, they're in some kind of Virtuouso Zone where mistakes just do not take place, and from the moment they start to the moment they finish the whole performance has this kind of inevitability. The expression might change from performance to performance but when it comes to the technical aspects, they just can do no wrong.
In figure skating it seems to be very hard for people to get to that point. Even the best will screw up sometimes, and that's what makes it all so hard on the nerves, for them and for the people watching at home. But some people can do it. Timothy Goebel is like that as regards the jumps. You never worry about him falling because it's just clear that he doesn't do that any more. Yevgeny Pleshenko used to be like that as regards the jumps, till the Shiny Metal Ass Incident in this year's short program. And at her best, Michelle Kwan was like that--not just with the jumps, but with everything. The jumps, the spirals, the spins, the artistic interpretation, the whole package. She would get started, and instead of going, "oh man, I hope she lands that triple combination!" you'd just be sitting there slack-jawed going "Wow." There was this free skate she did to what I think was a Massenet string quartet a couple years ago--the one where she revived the charlotte. That program was just *boss,* and as soon as she got started it was like, "OK, kids, step back and let the master show you how it's done." And just from the way it sounded when she landed the jumps it was clear that everything was totally under control, and that she was never going to make a mistake because she just wasn't in that universe any more.
Well, unfortunately her time in that zone was up before the next Olympics rolled around; and I was afeared as soon as she got into position that things were not going to go her way. After the skate they showed footage of a bunch of people gathered out at Lake Arrowhead where she trains, watching the performance on TV, and it was startling--as soon as she fell, every single one of them let out the exact same gasp of horror and put their hands up to their mouths with the exact same gesture of dismay and grief. You could hear the same reaction in the arena, too. I don't really know how any of them stand that kind of pressure, really; and for her, it's been building for years. At least it sustained her through the rest of the program, as she could hear the audience pulling for her to get it back together. But when you're not in the zone, of course knowing that someone much younger than you has just skated a history making kick-ass program that has the potential to hose you out of your gold medal *once again* is going to rattle you, and rattling is not good for those jumps.
Meanwhile, Sarah Hughes entered the zone suddenly and unexpectedly, and apparently with the help of some kind of higher skating power. It's like the gods saw her out there and decided to switch allegiances just to make things interesting. Being sixteen, I guess, all she could do once she got off the ice was keep frothing about how totally shocked she was at her own performance. "Oh my God, I've never skated that well in my WHOLE LIFE!" Yeah, all sixteen years of it...but anyway. If I hadn't been so sad about poor Michelle, I would have been laughing pretty hard at the footage of Hughes and her coach reacting to the news. Her coach, in particular, looked exactly the way people look in cartoons when something impossible has just happened. She was just staring into space as if she'd just seen a hippopotamus fall out of the sky, put on a hat, deliver the Gettysburg Address, and then sprout wings and fly away. And then she kept trying to calm herself down..."All right...all right...I'm calm...all right...OH MY GOD! YOU JUST WON A GOLD MEDAL AT THE OLYMPICS! AAAAAGH!!!!"
One of the commentators was saying that Hughes ought to send Irina Slustkaya flowers for the rest of her life, since it was only because Slutskaya beat Kwan that Hughes could advance to the gold medal spot. I think she also ought to be sending flowers to Sale and Pelletier, because that's what this was really about. There would have been no credible way for them to mark Kwan higher than Hughes for her program, what with the fall. However, it would have been possible for them to mark Kwan ahead of Slutskaya, using the presentation marks; and if they had, because of the short program standings, Kwan would have gotten the gold. But they didn't; and you have to think it's because they were disinclined, knowing they were under that much scrutiny, to go sleazing the favorite into the top spot. And so there it is. Sarah Hughes has just won a gold medal she never in a million years thought she could get her hands on, and Kwan gets the *bronze.* The bronze, man! O fortuna! Velut luna!
Ladies
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