Skating Wars
As I've indicated I really enjoy watching the Olympics. So I've been following the figure skating spat that has arisen. Last night I watched Evan Lysachek give the most elegant, diplomatic and nuanced response to an interviewer last night.
Plushenko, the Russian who won the gold last time in Torino, and won a silver at these games has been giving snarky interviews to anyone who will listen which basically amounts to -- "I did a quadruple jump so I should have won even though overall I wasn't as good as the other guy."
As is the wont with modern journalists they are trying to get a fight started, and Lysachek was having none of it. He was so gracious talking about how Plushenko was an inspiration to him, how well his rival skated, how for him it was about attaining his personal goals, etc.
All I could think while watching this was -- "Quick, Hillary, hire him for the State Department."
I watched the Super G while making dinner, and these men are crazy. They appeared to be skiing on ice, going 70 miles an hour, and occasionally flying through the air for hundreds of feet.
I tried to watch the ice dancing, but it was really boring. More so because they were doing a compulsory dance. I don't particularly enjoy the women's figure skating either. As with gymnastics I like to watch really fit, handsome men in tight outfits performing feats of strength and agility. Yes, I like boys.
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written by Melindas, February 21, 2010
My beef is with Pleshenko's lack of sportsmanship. There is still something to be said for basic courtesy. Going out and bad mouthing the winner doesn't present a person in the best light. Blame the judges -- their the ones who gave the edge to the other guy. But that might be dangerous to attack the people who will judge you again. So, if you don't want to piss off the judges, and you don't want to be petty follow Thumper's mother's advice in Bambi -- "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."
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It's easy to see why Plushenko would be annoyed at losing. He didn't lose because he didn't skate cleanly -- the minuses he got would not have put him over Lysacek if he hadn't gotten them -- nor because of poor performance -- his performance score was exactly the same as Lysacek's -- but because of the fact that the system has some problems in scoring quads properly.
I can't blame the system for existing in its current form, as such, because it's really difficult to find a perfect system and this one has attempted to mitigate the infamous issues that the previous system had. Maybe it's inevitable that there'll never be an absolute perfect system.
But, the problem is, it's made skaters skate way too tactically. There's so many rules about the things they can or can't do, that performances are starting to look awfully similar, as they all aim at doing the same procession of moves in similar ways at similar times to eke out maximum points.
The excitement of seeing Yagudin or Plushenko playing to their strengths in 2002 has been dampened a fair bit because there's no longer that room for allowing skaters to skate their very best.
A single double on top of his triple-double -- and Plushenko can do these in his sleep -- and he would have won it handily. That he failed to do it is, IMO, because the system has become way too intricate for anyone to figure out what exactly was going to be needed.
I expect Plushenko to take part in Worlds, and I'm going to guess he's not going to make the same mistake twice.