specialj67

Why couldn’t this have been a meme the way Ashley Wagner’s reasction face from Sochi was?!

I know I’m not the only one who thinks every time Deanna and Nathan go out to perform “Deanna is a damn STAR—don’t mess this up for her, Nathan!” I really love that she expresses every last emotion, and you are NOT in doubt about how she thinks the performance went.

Oh no! Just checked the live results of the men from Euros, and Mikhail Kolyada placed 11th in the free—and fell to 5th overall. So Javi won (!), Alexander Samarin is 2nd, Matteo Rizzo is 3rd , and Kevin Aymoz finished 4th. Honestly, I look forward to watching 3 out of the 5 of those guys later. I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch Kolyada fall that many times, and I find Samarin’s skating boring.

I was never really a Mariah Bell fan before this season. Her skating always struck me as blandly nice. But Mariah Bell’s LP this season has shown me how wonderful a skater and performer she can be. Even with the fall, her performance this evening was my favorite. I can’t imagine her not being named to the US team for Worlds. Even more than Alysa Liu, I was pleasantly surprised by Ting Cui and Hannah Harrell in their senior nationals debuts. Sure, they’re still young and their style isn’t fully formed yet, but they each had their own kind of pizzazz that made them interesting to watch between the jumps. I feel like a bit of a shithead for not being as enamored by Alysa Liu as the NBC hype machine tells me I should. When I look at her 3A compared to Rika Kihira’s, it doesn’t have the same wow factor. Especially the second one in her free skate—looked like she barely eked it out. I sincerely hope she stays in good health and competitive spirit, because I genuinely do want to see how she grows as a skater. If she can maintain the tech. content she has now and improve her delivery and PCS, she really could be a powerhouse in the future.

I know there’s no good or satisfying answer, but HOW/WHY did Alina Zagitova have the highest PCS in the women’s field at Euros? I just needed to say this into the void to get it out of my system...

I was thinking, rather troll-y, yesterday while watching her SP that I’d love for her to Burleqsue her way to a win. I look forward to watching it later.

Just finished watching the men’s SP from Euros, and I have to say, I’m very impressed with how well Javi did considering he hasn’t competed in nearly a year. On a personal taste level, I’d put him above Samarin, but I can’t argue the dings in his technical score. Also? Where has THIS Kolyada been for much of the season?! I hope he brings it just as much in the free. He truly is one of the best in this discipline when he skates to his potential.

To be fair, none of the teams in the first 2 groups are national medal contenders. It should hopefully get better with the group warming up now and the final group after that.

Watching the US pairs short is tough, given what’s been happening in the skating world this past week. Apparently a number of skaters are wearing Kansas City Chiefs hats in honor of John Coughlin? That’s what I gleaned from the commentators on the NBC Sports stream, anyway. It fills me with a lot of mixed up, complicated emotions.

Just finished the Christine Brennan interview on TSL about reporting on the John Coughlin story, and Dave does directly address why he took down the first interview video. At the very end, around the 51:30 mark.

I’m not surprised the TSL video was taken down—glad I was able to watch it while it was up. While there were numerous awkward parts and irrelevant asides, I agree with one of the main points: there should be greater transparency about what actually IS their process/protocols for investigating complaints. I would hope that if people were more informed about, jutst like, the process itself, there wouldn’t be as much rushing to judgment or evidence-free speculation about these kinds of things.

I believe if you have the NBC Sports Gold streaming subscription you can.

I’m an unabashed Kaori fan, so the fact that she won was thrilling for me. I really love her speed and flow across the ice, and the fact that she was able to bring it in a stacked field. Yay! I mean, really, I love a lot of the top Japanese women skaters, but Kaori is my fave of faves. I’m impressed with what Daisuke Takahashi has done considering how long he’s been out of the competitive game. It’s hard to imagine a skater turning down a world team spot absent a serious injury or illness. Although, honestly, will Keiji do any better than Daisuke might have? The selfish skating fan in me would rather watch a technically imperfect, yet aesthetically pleasing, Daisuke over a wildly inconsistent Keiji.

Got Adam Rippon. I ain’t mad at that arbitrary result.

I’m fortunate I’m in a position to be able to pony up for NBC’s Sports Gold streaming service. Watching this season on my own time without any commentary whatsoever has been a delight.

The only 2 US women even remotely qualified to be in the mix are Bradie Tennell and Mariah Bell. But Bradie’s still somewhat limited PCS scores and Mariah’s competitive inconsistency are what’s keeping them from being championship medal contenders.

I don’t care for the first half of Samodurova’s program, but she really brought it in th second half, which I admired for the first time ever. I look forward to seeing what she can do in a year or two—if she can improve her performance execution and interpretation. Miyahara was beautiful and fierce, but too bad on the underrotations, I guess? I have an irrational love for Kaori Sakamoto, so I feel she was underscored here. Her deep edges, man! The ride-out on some of those landings! Come on! As for the medalists, I would have rated Tuktamysheva over Zagitova, just for the fun performance factor. I get that the judges were rewarding Zagitova’s difficulty with all of the cluttered choreography, but it just comes across as rushed to me. Also, all of that hunching and breaking at the waist on jump landings! Everything in this program looks labored and/or rushed. Anyhow...Kihira was lovely, and it’s too bad she had the fall on the opening axel— that is such a perfect LP for her. I was glad to see her rise to the occasion after that opening mistake. ETA: as much as I still feel their La La Land selections make for a passé program, Guignard and Fabbri’s jubilant reaction to their score in the final was an absolute delight. I really do enjoy watching them perform, even if the styling and music aren’t my fave. Also pleased Hubbell and Donohue did well enough to win. Their performance in the free was better here than in their previous competitions, but I still don’t think this program serves them as well, stylistically, as some of their previous ones. Bummed that Stepanova and Bukin didn’t medal. I really dig their performance energy.

The men’s final was a bit rough to watch. I don’t think any of them did a completely clean program? As much as I was rooting for Brezina because he’s one of the veterans and has had a super solid comeback season, it was awesome to see Cha earn bronze. And as far as Uno vs. Chen, as much as I like a lot of aspects of Uno’s skating—his commitment to choreography, fluidity in the connecting steps—his jump landings are so borderline a lot of the time that I can’t really sit back and enjoy the performance because I never know if he’s going to be able to pull out clean landings. His free leg is so low to the ice! Also, now that it’s been pointed out, I can’t not see how trash his 4-flip take-off is. I wish Nathan would clean up some of his landings too, honestly, but I’m less in doubt about them, watching him. I also like that they’re leaning hard into a modern, less structured aesthetic for his programs this year— I think it works better for him right now. Just—clean up the landings! Also, it’s so weird that this season the triple axel has been one of his most consistent jumps. IDK what he’s been doing to fix that, but props!

My understanding of the new rules is that the judges/callers/technical specialists are no longer awarding full base value for any jump if it’s not fully rotated before the landing blade touches the ice. Before, skaters could get full credit if the blade was up to 1/4 of a turn from being fully rotated. Now, that 1/4 turn cushion is supposedly gone. Of course, as with other things, like edge calls, we’ll have to see if the callers actually call skaters consistently and judges score skaters appropriately for things like being a 1/4 turn under. I’ve been looking at the scores of some of the singles skaters after events, and I do see a fair number of marks for underrotated jumps this season, including for Alina Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva. The new -5/+5 grade of execution rules also mean there is a greater point penalty for falls on required elements. A fall on a jump is an automatic -5 GOE, which translates to losing 50% of the base value of the jump. Plus the -1 point off the final score for the fall. The judges now have greater leeway to reward great elements and penalize bad ones. Personally, I’m also a fan of the changes, and hope the judges and officials apply them consistently in an effort to raise the overall quality of skating.

I don’t doubt P/C were the best in the dance field for this competition, but can someone explain how/why they are scored SO MUCH higher than the other top teams? The judges stratospheric scores for them continue to baffle me.

I’ll admit, I’d kind written off Jason Brown for this season. But his performance proved me wrong, at least for today.

Re: Japanese pairs Japan did have an up-and-coming pair in Takahashi/Tran 7-8 years ago. However, he (Tran) is Canadian, so getting Japanese citizenship so they could compete at the Olympics was always going to be an issue. They won the bronze at 2012 Worlds, then Takahashi had an injury that meant missing most of the next season, and they split up in late 2012. Bummer.

Alina won’t change anything as long as she’s coached by Eteri and team. There’s no immediate incentive for her to do so right now, since she’s still regularly winning competitions. I also like aspects of Alina’s skating but can’t stand that they’re being overrun by iffy technique, choppy/busy choreography and terrible music choices. As for Gracie, I put at least some of the blame on USFSA. They could have done something to stop the Rostelecom Cup organizers from inviting her when she’s clearly not ready for that level of international competition. They could have insisted that she do some of the lower-level sectionals and regionals events in order to make her way back to nationals.

I just checked the start order for the RC women’s free skate, and it seems Gracie Gold withdrew? That’s disappointing but not entirely surprising.

Eeesh, that Rostelecom Cup men’s short was rough, aside from Hanyu.