Unsung; Unforgettable

Fantastic figure skating performances often earn their just rewards in the form of a medal, but the paucity of available medals inevitably results in some fine performances left empty-handed.  Unrewarded they may be, but not forgotten--here's a non-exhaustive list of some of my favorite relatively obscure(ish) performances that did not result in a medal, except perhaps in my heart:

Mediocre Men

Note: I wrote the following post around January 2018, but never published it for various reasons.  Thankfully, my dim prognosis of the men's event at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics turned out to be incorrect: contrary to my gloomy expectations, the men for the most part skated well, and the most well-rounded and complete men's performances even made it to the podium (!).

For entertainment purposes, I've decided to dust this post off and publish it now . . .

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With the uppermost echelons of the men's discipline firmly engaged in the high-risk, high-rewards quads arms race, the judges improperly lumping together the skaters' Program Components Scores with insufficient differentiation between the skaters, and a storied history of major implosions and/or nerves among the top competitors, there is a good chance that the men's event at the Pyeongchang Olympics will be a splatfest of major proportions.

This is disappointing, not only because it is painful to watch skaters' lifelong, Olympic-themed dreams crumble amidst bitter tears and the gnashing of teeth in front of literal millions, but also because the men's event at the past three Olympic games have also been absolutely dismal, featuring not only poor performances in terms of completed content but also mediocre programs and choreography.*  Let's take an unpleasant, but mercifully brief, stroll down memory lane . . .

Smooth Moves

One aspect of skating that has particularly received a great deal of attention (disproportionate attention, some would say!) in the IJS era is transitions--particularly transitions before jump elements.  With pre-jump transitions being doubly rewarded in both the Program Components Scores as well as in the grade of execution scores, it behooves skaters to cram in something before a jump so that the judges can accordingly reach for the upper registers on their scoresheets. Unfortunately, this tendency towards rewarding transitions before jumping passes has often resulted in careless, split-second moves in the field elements or sloppy steps wedged in before jumps that fail to reflect the music or overall choreography . . . but that is a subject for another day.  Instead, today we will reflect on the pre-jump transitions that thrill and excite, and/or memorably serve some higher interpretative purpose.  In that vein, the following list includes some of my favorite pre-jump transitions from both the 6.0 and IJS eras:

Old Times

With features of contemporary life such as fifth generation mobile networks, Amazon Same-Day Delivery and Verizon Fios becoming increasingly ubiquitous in this present year of 2017 anno Domini, it's difficult to deny that we live in a culture that aspires towards instant gratification.

But there are dinosaurs among us that remember slower times. I started watching figure skating seriously over ten years ago, practically a lifetime for any self-respecting millennial. Admittedly, this was still considerably after the truly ancient days when figure skating fans presumably shared footage of figure skating competitions and shows by swapping videocasettes wrapped in brown paper tied with twine behind abandoned warehouses, but I distinctly remember staying up at odd hours patiently refreshing online figure skating forums so I could find out--from an intrepid poster's written report posted on the forum after returning to their hotel/home, of course--how, say, Stephane Lambiel skated at Swiss Nationals last night. These days, footage of Mr. Lambiel's Nationals skates would be dutifully streamed from Periscope live, or at the very least, uploaded onto the likes of Instagram, Twitter, or Youtube within mere minutes of the performance for immediate worldwide consumption. The idea of waiting hours, much less an entire day, to watch how skaters performed at a skating competition seems like a herculean feat of patience now.

Super Steps

**This post is dedicated to Hakkai**

Given how fashionable it is to blame IJS for a wide assortment of figure skating maladies (including but not limited to ruining spins in the ever-contorted quest for levels, fan spirals, and the sorry state of pairs skating), I am aware of the fact that having the opinion that IJS step sequences are generally an improvement on their 6.0 counterparts is a controversial one likely to draw scorn, something akin to believing in the tooth fairy as an adult or thinking that tartan pairs very well with paisley. But that is indeed an opinion I hold, and I will now defend it the only way I know how: verbiage with bits of video footage liberally interspersed in between.

In the Mood for Love

Valentine's Day is drawing near, and so too, does the swarm of heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, cutesy social media status updates, and pink- and red-festooned cards, all of which signals ROMANCE! LOVE! PASSION! in our current milieu. Indeed, nothing says "I love you" more than commemorating the martyrdom of a Roman saint prone to bouts of illegal proselytizing.

However, if musing on the martyrdom of St. Valentine isn't enough to get you properly in the mood for Valentine's Day this year, watch the following figure skating programs:

Melancholia

Sometimes, there are days in which life feels like just another facet of shitty. In lieu of hurling myself off the nearest tall building or sticking my head into the closest aptly-sized kitchen appliance, I turn to my most convenient non-self destructive outlet for catharsis: figure skating.

Facta, non verba

Approximately two years ago, I wrote a sincerely gushy blog post about a young and promising dance team: Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov.

However, I have since attributed that blog post to the vagaries of youthful indiscretion, something akin to past follies like wearing sweatpants out in public and getting into drinking contests with a bunch of frat boys twice my size.

681958171385th Lambiel Adoration Post

How to win my everlasting adoration in several easy steps, a video guide featuring Stephane Lambiel:

Favorite Fluff

As their name implies, figure skating fluff pieces are not exactly among the most intellectually demanding things aired on television. In the rush to seek out the lowest common denominator to broaden the appeal of figure skating to the unconverted masses, many fluff pieces tend to be high on melodrama and cheese but low on actual information (particularly of the technical variety needed to fully understand CoP) about the sport itself. Though some of the die-hard skating faithful bemoan the lost opportunity for educating the masses, there is nonetheless a special place in my heart for the typical cheesy fluff piece. Here are some of my favorites that have survived the copyright purges on Youtube:

As clean as driven snow

Given the mind-wracking pressures of competition and the small margin of error when it comes to jumping, clean programs tend to be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to figure skating. Indeed, a skater failing to go clean for the entire run of a program is not exactly an uncommon scenario, but it is an unfortunate one when the programs being skated to are as of superlative artistic quality as the ones listed below. Yes, a program can still be of high quality and even be utterly beguiling with mistakes on the technical elements, but the allure of a pristine performance is undeniable.

The following is a nowhere-near-exhaustive list of seven programs the neurotic, perfectionist side of me has always wanted to see clean. Perfectionism may be a good servant but a bad master, but I'd always wished that perfectionism cracked its whip just a bit harder for these programs:

Monochrome Men

Approved by the King of Monochrome himself

Venture into the men's grooming section of a typical store and you will find that the vast majority of men's skin and hair care products are packaged with the same sober, manly colors: gunmetal grey, bleak black and minimalist white with the occasional daring forays into colors such as navy blue and Chernobyl orange, the latter two colors suggestive of the ruggedly manly endeavors of military service and donning a radiation suit to heroically battle through clouds of radioactive smoke respectively. Contrast this to the women's grooming section, where you will find near-identical products packaged in a much broader and vibrant spectrum of colors ranging from delicate pastels to vivid jewel tones. Indeed, somewhere along the passage of time, the culturally normative ideal of masculinity in the Western world has shifted from the colorfully bewigged, ruffled and powdered aristos of old world Europe (think Louis XIV, or perhaps the Swiss Guard) to the comparatively far more drab dudebro-type creature today. This is perhaps indicative of how far we as a species have diverged from our animal kin, as it is the males of the animal kingdom that tend towards biological ornamentation (e.g. the peacock vs. the peahen). Exactly how and why this shift has occurred is best left as a subject for another blog, but what I'd always enjoyed about figure skating was the fact that it was a rare exception to the contemporary sea of male drabness, where a man could wear something like this on a mainstream international public broadcast and still be taken (somewhat) seriously:

Hasta la vista, baby

The year is 2012. Turns out that certain doomsday-minded interpretations of the Mayans' Long Count calendar were indeed correct and the end of civilization as we know it is nigh at last in the form of some complicated galactic alignment...thingy...involving the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* and the hapless planet Earth. Yet all is not quite lost: you have in your hand one valid ticket for the last rocket out of Earth headed towards Saturn's icy moon Titan. The rocket is fuelled and ready, and you have ten minutes left to fill the remaining empty space of your external hard drive with ten figure skating videos. Choose carefully, for these ten videos are to be used to proselyte the gospel of figure skating to the goodly creatures of the brave new world of Titan. What ten videos would you pick?

An Orison

Sometimes....a little magic is needed in our quotidian existences.

Yet Another Lambiel Post

Fly free, young zebra

Stephane Lambiel recently performed at All That Skate Summer, reinforcing my belief that he is simply the greatest show skater on this planet right now.

If Stars on Ice in the US had any taste (or an ounce of business sense, for that matter) they would hire Mr. Lambiel to perform in their beleaguered tour. Actually, any skating show with any interest in audience retention should hire Mr. Lambiel. Although Mr. Lambiel could be magnificent when he was competing, he is absolutely sublime now that he is emancipated from the suffocating minutiae of CoP and the necessity of training triple axels. Mr. Lambiel's show programs are diverse in style and are clearly not the products of a couple hours of 'choreographing' over a few beers and smoke breaks. In fact, his programs single-handedly justify the entire existence of show programs by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to have show programs that contain difficult elements, show off skills unseen in competition programs and still manage to be entertaining. He actually PERFORMS and appears to be capable of bringing audiences to their knees at will (or at the very least, he is capable of awakening them from the stupor caused by enduring so many other programs consisting of 5928 crossovers and posing). As further proof of his superior abilities, Mr. Lambiel even makes Evanescence somewhat palatable, a near-impossible feat given all the highly embarrassing adolescent associations attached to the song Bring Me to Life:

Stephane Lambiel, Spanish Caravan

Stephane Lambiel, Spanish Caravan SP (2005 World Championships)
**** - Joy 
At first glance, Stephane Lambiel's Spanish Caravan short program appears to be nothing special. This program,  performed relatively early in Mr. Lambiel's senior career, is so easily eclipsed by the cavalcade of widely-acclaimed masterpieces that followed soon after: Dralion, Four Seasons, Carne Cruda, Poeta. After all, Spanish Caravan was a program set to twinkly piano music like so many others. It did not use any stunningly original choreography or set forth a novel new theme. The program had a fairly standard chassis of mostly jumping passes in the first half and footwork and spins in its second half. It harbored no lofty ambitions in regards to its intent, which was simply to have Mr. Lambiel dance to twinkly piano music.

Good-night, sweet prince

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

Mr. Lambiel sure knows how to work them fangirls. Case in point: his Romeo and Juliet exhibition.

Magical Sparkly Creature Stephane Lambiel

I admit, I have a slightly masochistic penchant for a certain type of skater—that is, the heart-breaking, utterly expressive type of skater who moves so beautifully across the ice, dancing to their music in a way that makes the rink seem more a watery than frozen medium...but who also can’t jump to save their lives. Without the ever-important jumps, these skaters, no matter how beautiful their other aspects of skating are, are usually doomed to languish at the bottom of the senior ranks, seen mostly in shaky, hand-held videos filmed by diligent fans at obscure senior B competitions, or a Grand Prix event or two.

But once in a blue moon, one of these skaters is blessed by the skategods and possesses enough technical acumen to ascend to the highest echelons of the sport.

For much of the past two Olympic cycles, this skater has been Stephane Lambiel.  

A Menu of Options

Like services that arrange dates between compatible people, it can be extremely amusing at times to mate food with skating in a similar manner. As the popular pastime of pairing food with wine demonstrates, it is evident that every dish has a certain personality as does every skater.

2011 European Championships: the Warm and the Fuzzy

 

Anyone still not convinced--even so many years after World War II--that the world's balance of power had shifted outside of its former nest in Europe needs only to look at the ladies' and men's disciplines in figure skating to dispel any remaining delusions.