Pick your poison

With the ubiquity of the recycling logo and the proliferation of recycling bins everywhere, recycling has long been in vogue for many people.....including the denizens that populate the world of figure skating, it appears! Instead of paper and aluminum cans, however, what is often recycled in figure skating are music cuts, program concepts and even choreography in some particularly sad cases.

So what are we to do as bewildered spectators? Vote in frivolous polls to compare the programs, of course!  Today we will focus on the environmentally-friendly works of noted skating choreographer Lori Nichol. Under the cut is a nowhere-near-exhaustive list of programs all choreographed by Ms. Nichol. Please vote and feel free to justify your choices, etc., in the comments. I will also write a follow-up post next week with my opinions of the programs.....

Playing Favorites

My answer to the question 'what is your favorite Michelle Kwan short program' is somewhat like my answer to the question 'what is your favorite book': I don't really have one. In truth, both answers are heavily dependent on the attendant peculiarities of emotion, mood and circumstance. In the beginning, like almost everyone else, I worshipped at the altar of Ms. Kwan's 1997-8 Rachmaninoff short program. Then the answer became East of Eden....then shifted to Spartacus...and so on. For most of the past year, I was convinced the correct answer was indeed Dream of Desdemona, but most recently, the pendulum has swung back to Romanza, Ms. Kwan's short program from her 1995-6 season.

o i c wat u did thar: Kostner vs. Nagasu

Battle royale 

The year is 2007. The World Figure Skating Championships are scheduled to be held in Tokyo, Japan. "Noted skating choreographer" Lori Nichol, probably cognizant of this fact, accordingly choreographs a long program for Carolina Kostner to the music of the film Memoirs of a Geisha, despite the fact that the film's soundtrack was composed by an American, John Williams. But whatever, it sounds vaguely Eastern enough.

Fast-forward to 2011. The World Figure Skating Championships are scheduled to be held in Tokyo, Japan. "Noted skating choreographer" Lori Nichol, probably cognizant of this fact, accordingly choreographs a long program for Mirai Nagasu to the music of the film Memoirs of a Geisha, despite the fact that the film's soundtrack was composed by an American, John Williams. But whatever, it sounds vaguely Eastern enough.

Oh Lori



Too good to last

In the beginning...there was the golden triumvirate of Michelle Kwan, Frank Carroll and Lori Nichol. In this potent trio combined a skater with an insane amount of talent and work ethic with a coach and a choreographer that possessed the strength of vision and creativity to do something about it.

It was the stuff of dreams. It was skating's version of Fonteyn and Nureyev, of champagne and caviar. Season after season, the triumvirate consistently produced programs that quickly ascended to iconic status in figure skating: