Managed to watch most of this event(I overslept and missed most of the pairs free this morning), along with my Twitter feed, which is showing a disturbing level of hate and conspiracy theorizing directed at Gracie Gold. Though that bothered me a lot less after watching her skate her free; nothing they say can make her less exquisite. The highlight of the event, really, was watching all three of her, Ashley Wagner, and Akiko Suzuki show what they really can do when all three of them had left us with varying levels of doubt. One only wishes Jeremy Abbott had similarly taken advantage of this event…
Deeply sorry for what happened to Kostya, but you can’t say it didn’t serve Russia right. They snubbed him, they threw him this bone, he likely would’ve beaten Kovtun had he not had that fall, and now without him they couldn’t medal. But while one would hope he would recover quickly, as his age and history you seriously wonder if this could be it for him.
I am also getting more and more thoughts about the Russian baby ballerines lately, but that’s long enough I might eventually give it its own post, and it’s not really directly related to the WTT anyway.
Is it just me, or are there more instances lately of pairs events being more cleanly skated than singles events? Of course, when there are only five pairs, there’s less chance for messes. And of course, the ladies event suddenly turned good near the end anyway.
It seems things still can’t go quite right for Kaitlyn Weaver & Andrew Poje. This may just be the team event, but you still wonder how much being beaten by Chock & Bates damages their Olympic medal chances, or even their prospects if they choose to stay after Sochi. But there really need to be more events to send Ksenia Monko & Kirill Khalavian to.
Worlds:
Qualifiers for World Team Trophy
David Dore speaks on new rules & team competition
2015 short dance details announced
Purich & Tran confirmed
Yeah, I know, I know, everybody’s watching the Super Bowl instead. But I’ve still done it, did most of it in the afternoon because I had a date tonight, finished up-then did an edit after saving the initial mp3 file because the news had literally just broken of Adam Rippon’s withdrawal, and it’s up: January 28-February 3, 2013
Czisny injured in warmup competition
Korpi, others withdraw
Dubé & Wolfe retire
Tobias denied Lithuanian citizenship
Kovtun retains spot on European team
Small international & intranational competitions
American and Canadian teleconferences
Second week of Dancing on Ice
van der Perren wins Belgian Dancing With the Stars
More skating babies
Actually, the only news I paid attention for much of the day was the lockout ending, but I found time to do a short one: December 31, 2012-January 6, 2013
