Happy 4th of July! FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!
In honor of this most American of holidays, we will celebrate that fine specimen of figure skating: the American ladies skater.
For decades, the US of A dominated the topmost echelons of ladies figure skating. American ladies world and Olympic champions were a dime a dozen, and even when the American ladies skated abysmally, at least one of them was sure to remain on the international podiums. This impressive streak of success in American ladies skating is reflected by the intense, near-myopic focus on ladies skating in the American collective consciousness. Sure, Evan Lysacek and Davis/White could win Olympic and World titles, but their faces would never be immortalized on a Campbell's soup can or a Wheaties box. No, of course not--that honor is strictly reserved for a champion American ladies skater, the only type of figure skater that really matters to many an average Jim-Bob.
But the times we live in are dark and full of terror, as the World and Olympic podiums have been conspicuously absent of American ladies for almost an entire decade. The times have been so dark and desperate to the extent that even a Canadian lady has been able to get onto a World and Olympic podium in the vacuum created by the most recent generation of bumbling American ladies. The horror, the horror! To help assuage the painful memories of such dark and terrible times, let's use this occasion to celebrate the beauty, grace, and skill of past American ladies skaters: