AshleyN

Paul's sleeves on the other hand...

I think this Italian woman wins for worst costume.

I'm sure that there's disagreement on scores when it comes to those other sports (for example, after the men's snowboard slopestyle our commentator seemed to be trying to find the most diplomatic way of saying that he thought Mark McMorris should have won), but a big part of the problem in figure skating is powerful national federations jostling behind the scenes, which due to the structure of those other sports (snowboarding in particular), doesn't seem to be the same issue.

I'm pretty sure people have been calling it that since Carmen.

It was a long time ago, but wasn't this actually a factor in Salt Lake City? I seem to recall that the France didn't have a judge on the Ice Dance panel while Russia did, hence the quid pro quo agreement. Or am I remembering that all wrong?

Reading the responses to that second tweet, it seems that the current head of the French federation is the SAME GUY who was at the middle of the Salt Lake City mess? WTF? I would have thought that conspiring to fix an Olympic event would earn you an automatic lifetime ban. Do these people care at all about how their sport is perceived? It's a shame, because the athletes are so impressive and don't deserve to have their achievements undermined with this BS.

Goddamn, Norway did not come to mess around these Games.

Didn't Miki Ando land a quad years ago? I don't think anyone has done it since though.

I don't follow the sport closely, but these Games kind of feel like a passing of the torch for Canada, don't they?

Tracy Wilson is coaching now? I guess that explains why she's not on the commentary team.

Didn't one of their pairs teams skate to Star Wars too? I remember thinking the same thing then.

Heh, I've already resigned myself to the fact that the jumps aren't happening and I'm going to try to just appreciate his lovely skating one last time. Okay I just googled to see who his current wife is and fucking EWWWW Nikolai:

For what it's worth the Canadian commentators seemed similarly baffled at what happened there. All throughout the race they were pointing out Svindal's mistakes, and when he finished and his time came up it sounded like they more or less threw up their hands and were like "Welp, that's Aksel". The conclusion seemed to be that only he could win a downhill in that fashion. And yeah, it was pretty funny there too.

So there's been some talk of Scott Hamilton here, and being Canadian my exposure to him is fairly limited (mostly to watching Youtube videos of old skating performances). Anyways, my lasting impression of him comes from when I was re-watching Alexei Yagudin's Salt Lake City performances, where after Yagudin's free skate Hamilton tried to claim that not only would it surely go behind Evgeni Plushenko but that the REAL question was whether he would place ahead of Timothy Goebel, only for Yagudin to receive first place marks from every single judge, including four 6.0s. I mean, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was just trying to maintain some suspense, but the idea that Timothy Goebel would ever, even on his very best day, beat a clean Yagudin is...lol. It was fun when some time later I found a version of that skate with Canadian commentary, where they're basically marveling over him and the second it's over are all "Yep, there's your gold medalist."

I feel like there have been a few programs here were I've been thinking about how much I liked the choreography, only for them to say Jeff Buttle was responsible for it. Good for him, I always really liked his skating.

Oh my, Hanyu's not going to give up that Olympic title easily.

Oh Patrick...the triple axel was always his nemisis, but he seems to have lost it completely at this point. I still do love to watch his pure skating though. Just gorgeous.

Feels like the Russians made a mistake not using that guy in the Team Event.

If we're talking about multiple medalists, I believe both Max Parrot and Mark McMorris (silver and bronze in Slopestyle) are among the favourites in Big Air as well. McMorris in particular would be a really strong candidate if he were to win it, given what he's come back from this year.

I think it's PJ Kwong, who's done the arena announcing at a lot of events over the years.

For those interested, there was a really nice article in the Toronto Star about Radford yesterday:

Apparently there was a television in the warm-up area that was showing CNN International.

I've been watching other stuff and haven't caught their matches, but that's an...unexpected start for Rachel Homan.

FYI, Canadian TV is showing the flower (or stuffed animal I guess) ceremony right now. I assume the medals will be given out in the later ceremony. Aww, the Chinese team looks so disappointed. It must hurt to come second knowing that it was yours to lose.

This should be behind Duhamel/Radford.