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Sunday, February 28, 2010

10 Things I Learned from the 2010 Winter Olympics
Posted by Jill | 2:37 PM
10. Stephen Colbert is a bigger draw in Vancouver than Ann Curry, Meredith Viera and Matt Lauer huddled like homeless people in front of a garbage can fire.

9. Scott Hamilton obviously does NOT watch The Colbert Report.

8. All Bode Miller needed was to grow up a bit.

7. The awesomeness of Shaun White abides.

6. The Russian skating federation and Evgeni Plushenko may be the worst sore losers in the history of the games, but the U.S. obsession with "the medal count" shows that it's us who are still fighting the Cold War.

5. Sometimes there is freedom in losing. By not medaling, Johnny Weir was free to rise above his own sport.

4. Opening ceremonies will ALWAYS look and play like tributes to Leni Riefenstahl.

3. Somewhere in the new scoring system is a requirement that female solo figure skaters must display their crotches to the judges.

2. Dead mothers trump dead athletes.

1. Halt! Or How I Learned to Stop Sneering and Love Watching Curling. Which way to the Bergen County Curling Club?

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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

How they do[n't] do it: figure skating edition
Posted by Jill | 4:59 AM
For those who don't understand the talk of underrotation of jumps that seems to often wreak havoc in the figure skating standings, check out this terrific New York Times interactive feature. Even the most avid figure skating viewer (at least those of us who aren't skaters) are often baffled at why deductions for underrotation take place, or why a skater is penalized for launching off the wrong edge. The linked feature not only shows you the mechanics for such underrotation, but also gives you the lowdown on who the skaters are who have been dinged most (and least) often for underrotation of jumps. Indeed, if the Olympic women's competition standings were based SOLELY on deductions for underrotation over the last four years, here's who the top three would be:

Joannie Rochette (Canada), with only 2% of jumps underrotated
Rachael Flatt (US), 3%
Carolina Kostner (Germany), 4%

Current leader after the short program, Kim Yu-Na, would be tied in 4th place with Russia's Elena Leonova and Japan's Akiko Suzuki. Only sentimental favorite Joannie Rochette, the unexpected and sudden death of whose mother sets up a textbook media "win one for the Gipper" moment for Thursday night's final, is currently in the top three.

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Monday, February 22, 2010

It isn't just the offensive costumes, it's that they stole the program
Posted by Jill | 5:15 AM
Perhaps ice dance just shouldn't have "country/folk" as its original dance theme. In this whitest event in the whitest sport, one which has seen no end of Carmens and Scheherezades and Don Quixotes as envisioned by Russian composer Ludwig Minkus and Bravehearts and Henry V's, perhaps the folk dances of indigenous peoples are best left alone. What a strange parade of hillbillies and extras from Fiddler on the Roof and flamenco dancers that was. Did it make you as uncomfortable as it made me? Even the mournful and listless rendition of "Have Nagila", though performed by Actual Real Israelis seemed kitschy.

The only reason I don't put Meryl Davis and Charlie White's Devdas program into the same category is that it isn't some white person's broad-brush interpretation of Indian folk dance; they did it right, with an Indian choreographer -- and the program has been embraced by the experts -- the people of India:

Check the statistics on the OD videos that have been posted on YouTube, and most of the views are by people in India. The program is mentioned on several Web sites celebrating Indian culture. Some of Rajendra's own friends even got e-mails from people in India, telling them they had to check out these American ice dancers.

Like most winter sports, skating isn't very big in India. But people there were impressed — and proud — that American skaters were showcasing their culture.

"This is the new world......of globalization! I am so proud of my heritage! way to go!!," one person who watched the video on YouTube wrote.

"It makes me feel good that something Indian is being shown," said Dr. Shekar Pushpala, a doctor in Indianapolis who was sent the video by a friend in India.

By the end of October, eight or nine people had sent Usman Ahmed links to the video, urging him to post it on his "My Life is Desi" Web site, which is devoted to South Asian culture.

Perhaps it's a shame that it takes white people to bring another culture into the white mainstream, but the process with Indian culture was already underway last year when a white British director's film set in Mumbai, Slumdog Millionaire, took home an armload of Academy Awards.

But then there's Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, whose "aboriginal"-themed costumes, though toned down from early-season competitions in which the flesh-colored "illusion" was much darker, giving the whole thing an even stronger air of minstrelsy, still looked like something that would be right at home in one of those racially-broad 1940's Warner Bros. cartoons.

Here's their program, and the pre-uproar costumes, from an earlier competition:



Give them credit for doing something really, really different, but I think the same effect could have been achieved with makeup and less minstrely costumes. Still, while I was watching the program, I couldn't help but have the sense that I'd seen this program before -- or something very, very similar. And indeed, we did -- in 1988. It was Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay, but it was their Christopher Dean-choreographed program, not their costumes, that created the uproar.

Here's the Duchesnays' program from the 1988 World Championships.



You decide.

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Friday, February 19, 2010

The USFSA is thrilled beyond measure today
Posted by Jill | 5:13 AM
The USFSA, of course, is the United States Figure Skating Association. The reason they are thrilled is that after years of fretting that the uncategorizable Johnny Weir was becoming the face of U.S. men's figure skating, and decades of fretting about skating's reputation as a "gay sport", the USFSA's dream has finally come true -- they finally have a straight male who is Olympic figure skating champion.

Unfortunately, because of NBC's putting its video behind the Silverlight wall so that you have to go along with Microsoft dipping into your computer any time they want to in order to update it, I can't post video of the performances last night. But while you have to be pleased with the way Evan Lysacek got it together at this competition after falling apart in Torino four years ago, there was something magical about what Johnny Weir presented last night.

It can't be easy being Johnny Weir. Of course it takes guts to take your sport's greatest fear and turn it on its ear with every move you make, and it takes a hell of a lot of guts to do the training required to be an elite-level skater, no matter how much fur and high heels you like to wear. I think Weir had long since gotten over any idea that he would win a medal at these Olympics. But after finishing the short program in sixth place, with eventual bronze medalist Daisuki Takahashi fall on his face in his opening jump, and watching the other long-shots like Stephane Lambiel stumble badly in their programs, the door was certainly open for Johnny Weir.

Lysacek and Plushenko both did what was expected of them. Lysacek came out like the warrior he's been painted as in the media, and while I'm not fond of the flailing stiff arms that hetero skaters like Canada's Elvis Stojko regard as "masculine", he looked like a guy who would put a blade two inches into your skull if you got into his way. If you wanted butch from an American skater, you got it last night. You also have to keep in mind that this guy is over six feet tall, and it's impossible to fathom how hard it must be for something who creates that much wind resistance to get enough lift and rotation to do a triple axel.

Plushenko strutted out there like the defending champion he is, and frankly, I thought he did better here than he did in the short program, even if his program seemed in places as if a conscious decision had been made to put some Weirisms into the program. When Plushenko was done, he clearly thought he had nailed it, and in fact the decision could have gone either way. But while I have no beef with Plushenko as a skater, his smug certainty had me fervently rooting for Lysacek to prevail in the scores, if only to wipe that smug smirk off his face, something that occurred not long afterwards, at the medals ceremony, where I almost felt badly for him. Plushenko is the last elite men's event skater of the old Soviet system that cranked out champions out of its sports factory, and going out in a blaze of silver wasn't exactly what he had in mind. He wasn't exactly a gracious second-place finisher, either:


and...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/olympics_blog/2010/02/for-lysacek-celebrity-whirlwind-starts-fast.html

For Plushenko, though, the performance was not a complete disappointment. He had landed the quadruple jump, which requires four full rotations and is the hardest jump in the sport. He had added a third Olympic medal to his booty.

“I said I would be happy with second, third or even fifth place after not skating for three and a half years before this,” he said. “So this is not bad, not bad at all.”

Still, he and his coach, Aleksei Mishin, continued to say that male skaters who did not try the quad were basically wimps. Their theory is that no-quad performances are setting the sport back at least a decade. Mishin said “a real champion should execute quadruple jumps.” Plushenko hinted that Lysacek’s performance was subpar.

“If the Olympic champion doesn’t know how to jump a quad, I don’t know,” Plushenko said. “Now it’s not men’s figure skating. It’s dancing. Maybe figure skating needs a new name.”


Ever heard the Aesop's fable about the fox and the grapes, there, dude?

But while Plushenko and Lysacek skated like warriors, giving the judges what they wanted, and even showing some personality, Johnny Weir, whom the judges only moved up one place into a fifth place finish, ripped his heart out of his own chest and his soul out of his body and put it out there for the entire world to see. Why one very small bobble on a spin wasn't offset by beautiful jumps at the end of the program (in the "bonus zone", as described by Scott Hamilton), I have no idea, except that it's clear that figure skating judges didn't want to give a medal to a guy with his own reality documentary series who's been filmed in a bathtub wearing a blonde wig and glasses, looking (and sounding) alarmingly like Orly Taitz, calling himself a pussy on the ice in a mock interview with his "best friend" about himself.

While the scoring system has changed for the better, so that a skater who makes a mistake early in the program is allowed to compensate for it later on, it's clear that the people who do the scoring haven't changed one iota. For while Johnny Weir may love all things Russian, and may skate like the Balanchine balletic Russian skaters of the old Soviet system, that system has collapsed. And you can skate a program that moves people to tears now, and the scoring system can still be rigged in the free program so that you can still lose the bronze to even marginally more "macho" skaters who fall on their faces.

And so the USFSA finally has the straight male as champion that they can put forth to a nation in which there are any number of sports with various degrees of macho that young boys can choose. And as good as he was, I don't think Evan Lysacek is going to be able to hold a candle to the awesome and adorable Shaun White in terms of über cool. But whatever. Frank Carroll, looking hardly different over two decades after Chris Bowman drove him to distraction and watching his skaters win silver (Linda Fratianne and Michelle Kwan) and bronze (Tim Goebel), finally has his champion.

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Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Psssst....Hey journalists....the Cold War is over...
Posted by Jill | 5:27 AM
There are few things that underscore this country's status as a fading empire than the continuing obsession in Olympics coverage with the medal count. Counting medals was a Very Big Deal during the Cold War, as if the number of Olympics medals a bunch of kids brought home was going to tilt the balance of power between two nations.

Today, there's no Cold War, Olympic athletes are emblazoned with corporate logos, and does it really matter how many medals American athletes bring home, especially in a world where any athlete can compete for just about any country? I don't follow skiing or other Olympic sports that much, but when Kim Yu-na, the South Korean favorite to win the gold medal in the women's figure skating event lives in Canada and is coached by Canadian Brian Orser; and Johnny Weir is coached in Wayne, NJ by Oksana Baiul's old coach, Galina Zmievskaya and her son-in-law Viktor Petrenko, who has his own gold medal and was himself one of the last beneficiaries of the old Soviet system; the whole concept of medal counts saying something about a country has been turned on its ear. It was all horsepuckey anyway, especially the more we learned about East German doping and other scandals.

So why does every news update about the Olympics start with crowing about the U.S. medal count? And why does Jere Longman in the New York Times, who's been around long enough to be able to string two coherent thoughts together, realize that smugness about an end to Russian domination of pairs skating when a Chinese pair in their thirties won the gold medal, is just a wee tad ironic?
China won its first Olympic figure skating gold medal on Monday when Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo took the pairs title at the Vancouver Games. Their countrymen, Pang Qing and Tong Jian, took the silver medal. A German pair, Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy, won the bronze.

“My belief is, records are set to be broken,” Zhao said. “I think this is the embodiment of the Olympic spirit and the attraction of the Olympic Games.”

The best the Russian pair of Yuko Kavaguti and Alexander Smirnov could manage was a distant fourth after a shattering performance in the free skate.

“We were prepared for this sad moment,” Oleg Vasiliev, a 1984 Olympic pairs champion with his partner, Elena Valova, and now a coach, said after Sunday’s short program. “Still, it hurts the heart.”

The breakup of the Soviet Union essentially cost Russia a generation of pairs skaters, Vasiliev and other coaches said. The pipeline of government funding — free flowing in the sports-as-propaganda time of communism — began to dry up. Rinks closed to be transformed into other business, like car dealerships and shopping malls. Some top coaches left to work in the United States, where they could be assured of teaching private lessons and getting paid.

As the social safety net became frayed with the unraveling of the Soviet Union, “Many people had so little money, they had a choice — buy bread or put their kids in activities like skating or other sports,” Vasiliev said. “We went through a messy situation. Unfortunately, we now have a gap.”

Vulnerability became apparent when dual golds were awarded to a Canadian pair at the 2002 Winter Games during the judging scandal in Salt Lake City. The gap began to show dramatically in pairs skating after the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy. It has now reached the point that the top Russian women’s pairs skater, Kavaguti, is a native of Japan. She modified her family name of Kawaguchi after gaining Russian citizenship.

“This is the kind of leftovers from what we had,” said Tamara Moskvina, Kavaguti’s coach, who has tutored four previous Soviet/Russian pairs to Olympic gold medals. “It is a weak generation.”

[snip]

The Chinese victory was seen by many as a democratizing milestone. Debi Thomas, who won a bronze medal in women’s skating at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary and is now an orthopedic surgeon, said, “Given that I’m a Chicago Cubs fan, there’s hope.”

Ingo Steuer, coach of the German bronze medalists and the winner of a similar medal competing in pairs at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, said, “It’s good for the sport to see someone else on the list.”

Vasiliev agreed that it was healthy that “other countries can see it is possible to win; it adds geography to the sport.” Yet Russia is not conceding anything.

It will host the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi and plans to return to the top of the podium. Public and private funding are on the rise, rinks are opening regularly, parents can increasingly afford lessons and some top coaches have moved back home.

“Unfortunately, we only have a few pairs who are competitive internationally,” Vasiliev said. “The rest are still young with not much experience. But we hope by the next Olympics we can get our gold medal back.”

I can cut Debi Thomas some slack for having a sizable emotional investment in seeing someone...anyone...who isn't Russian stand at the top of the podium. I always thought some of it was because she was black in this whitest of sports. But when she fell apart after two-footing her opening triple-triple combination in 1988 and finished with "only" a bronze after Katarina Witt preened and flirted her way through a nothing-special free skate to capture the gold and Canada's Liz Manley skated the program of her life to win the silver, you'd have thought by the press coverage that Thomas had sold nuclear secrets to the Kremlin. Today a bronze medal is treated like a medal, but back then, her bronze medal was regarded as a crushing defeat.

Given the increasing influence of China on the world stage, and given that China is essentially propping us up by buying our debt, it seems silly ato be crowing about the achievement of Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, two Chinese skaters in their thirties who really are that good, as if it were still the early 1980s and "the fall of Russian pairs skating" means anything to international relations at all.

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