Ode to the Right Leg

Everything looks better with a pretty photo of Stephane Lambiel. 

Sometimes, the things that we encounter in our quotidian existences just seem better after a vacation, however brief said vacation may be. Your home may appear to be the very lap of quiet luxury after a few days of sharing a grubby hostel room the size of a shoebox with a bunch of rowdy, permanently-inebriated Australians. Similarly, after excising figure skating from my life for the past while, the ISU now seems to resemble shining beacons of reason more than the doddery old bunch of apparatchiks I usually fondly think of them as....particularly after reading through some of the most recent technical proposals set forth to be decided at the upcoming 54th ISU Congress. Namely, I am most excited about the proposed elimination of the "at least half a pattern on one foot only" bulletpoint as a level feature for step sequences. May it be officially excised from the ISU technical handbook soon!

Skate America 2011: Ze Menfolk

Like coronaviruses and taxes, the Grand Prix season has inflicted itself upon us once more, albeit with (hopefully) cheerier results. Hurray! This year's Grand Prix has kicked off with Skate America, held in Ontario, California, which, judging by the rather empty arena, is a rather Laodicean place unfortunately largely uncoverted to the great religion that is Figure Skating. But we faithful still continue chanting our hymns and whirling our dervishes in hope for the glory days of the early 90s.....(end non sequitur)

Anyway, I for one am extremely glad I did not make public my woefully incorrect predictions for the men's podium at Skate America.


Michal Brezina placed first overall at Skate America--his first Grand Prix victory--albeit with a third-place free skate. With a 9-point lead coming into the short, Mr. Brezina would have to bungle up his free skate quite significantly to give the title away, and he really made it much closer than it should have been. If Mr. Kozuka was really on his proverbial game during the free skate, Mr. Brezina's gold medal would have been toast. It's understandable why Mr. Brezina would go conservative and skate in order to not lose, but it really makes for an anti-climatic event. Plus the jump content Mr. Brezina ended up doing is just embarrassing for a skater with his natural jumping ability. Gorgeous jumps when he's on, but Mr. Brezina really ran out of steam at the end with those pops and the fall--this seems to be a trend. Is it an injury problem? Lack of double run-throughs to build stamina?

I know I've said this before, but Mr. Brezina really needs some better choreography. His new program really isn't much of an improvement from An American in Paris in terms of choreographic sophistication and intricacy. Mr. Brezina was apparently portraying a mixture of the detective from the Untouchables (Good) versus the proverbial devil on one's shoulder (Evil)--hence the split costume, etc--but frankly, I would never have realized this if Kurt Browning wasn't there to enlighten me on this via his commentary. Really blah performance overall by Mr. Brezina. However, what I'm truly puzzled about is where all that techno music is from--if I recall correctly, Ennio Morricone didn't exactly dabble in techno at all. Overall, Mr. Brezina was definitely lucky to be that generously awarded in PCS, especially in comparison with what Takahiko Kozuka received.....