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2006 World Championships BlogTuesday, March 21General disclaimer: I am not in Calgary. The following thoughts are coming to you direct from Lansing, Michigan, where I am stuck this week, largely because of school and debt. But both of those can be postponed if you want to fly me to Calgary. I can sneak into the Saddledome and sleep on a park bench, so really, all I need is the plane ticket. Just let me know. Day Two promises to be interesting, right from the start. A quick check of the boards reveals that everything is the same as I left them last night, meaning that discussions are revolving around whether or not the Canadians are being held up. But that's not the interesting part. No, the best part of today is that dance is beginning, and beginning with the compulsories! Yes, I'm twisted enough to be excited by the prospect of thirty Ravensburger Waltzes. I can't help it; I love compulsories, and dance got exciting once the LOM (lack-of-movement) judging system faded into oblivion. We're kicking things off with Chait & Sakhnovski, and CCTV5 is supposed to be showing this live, but some golf event is on the 17th hole and a Swedish guy is annihilating the rest of the field. I guess they skated well, and it was better than Torino, since they stayed on their feet. Perhaps this is a good omen. I'm considerably clenched for the next team, Marie-France Dubreuil & Patrice Lauzon, or as I like to refer to them, the second cutest couple in ice dance. Holy mackerel, 38.31 is quite a score, and I'm thrilled! Reports indicate that it was beautiful, and CCTV5 picks up the broadcast with them in the kiss and cry. They look pretty, adorable, and happy, just the way I like them. Unfortunately, the only thing keeping me awake through the next group and half is that I'm recording the live stream from CCTV5 and making clips of the dances, all for my own personal use, naturally. Delobel & Schoenfelder do sneak in there with a solid waltz that has them in fourth place at the end of the afternoon, and I'm pleased about that as well. Tanith Belbin & Benjamin Agosto give us the first taste of a golden rivalry when they go into second, less than a point behind the Canadian champions. The U.S. national champions will find themselves in third place at the end of the event, within a point of gold medal position with their best dances still to come. The rest of groups three and four don't make any impact on the top ten, and finally, it's time for the fifth group, also known as Mel's UlcerFest of the Day. Skating second in the fifth group, Domnina & Shabalin's performance was debated a bit. Some felt it was very strong, some felt it was weak in portions, and I don't know nearly enough about compulsory dances to distinguish a fairly good dance from a somewhat good dance, so I keep my mouth shut and notice that with 34.11 points, they are only .66 behind Chait & Sakhnovski. Two couples later, Drobiazko & Vanagas begin the final competition of their comeback season with a respectable waltz that will put them in fifth place when all is said and done. Finally, we're up to the last couple in group five, and I am literally about to pass out because I keep forgetting to breathe. Though Megan Wing & Aaron Lowe skated a Ravens that wasn't quite up to par of the beauty that they turned in at the Olympics, it's still an excellent effort from them, and miraculously, I'm breathing again even before the marks come up. The seventh place ranking elicits a couple of loud squeaks from me, even though I'm watching the action unfold from a coffee shop and I get a lot of questioning looks. I'm having a moment, okay?! For pete's sake. Immediately, I pick up my phone and text a friend the good news - Megan & Aaron are probably going to end up eighth, which they did. The last group is highlighted by Denkova & Staviyski and after such an enchanting compulsory dance at the Olympics, I'm expecting a real treat. Thankfully, they did not disappoint, and they take the lead, just edging past Dubreuil & Lauzon with a margin of .15. Both teams were excellent, and I could have seen the results going either way. If Marie-France and Patrice had skated after Albena & Maxim, they probably would have been ahead, but like I said, both teams were deserving of their high scores and the great thing about Code of Points is that a .15 margin really doesn't matter. With just over a point separating first through fourth, a great battle for the medals has been staged. I'm still betting (and hoping) that Dubreuil & Lauzon leave Calgary with a world title, but I'm inclined to guess that Belbin & Agosto will take the lead after the original dance. Still, it's anyone's game and skating clean is really going to count. Suddenly the highly predictable contests of the ice dancing days of old are just a distant memory. Would you believe it? The men's short is scheduled to start at 5.54 pm, Eastern time, and I have a class that begins at 6.10 and is scheduled to last until 9. Armed with my cell phone so I could call a friend for updates during the break at the halfway mark of my class, I grudgingly make the trek into downtown Lansing for my Writing for Publication class. I toss around the idea of saying that I was doing "research" for my manuscript (I'm writing about the popularity of ice dance in the next quadrennium), but then I remember that I missed last week, and besides, I like writing class and me refreshing IceCalc isn't going to change a thing as far as how people skate. Music to my ears! My instructor announces that we're going to end class halfway through the timeslot, and she's going to have conferences with the people that turned in drafts last week. Since I only turned in my draft today, I make an appointment to get feedback from her next Monday, and break into a spring on the way to my car. It's only 7.30. I couldn't possibly have missed more than two or three groups. As soon as I'm on the highway, I get a hold of a friend on the phone, and she breaks the news that Shawn Sawyer may not make the cut for the long program. I'm shocked, to say the least. After such a strong twelfth place showing in Torino, I'd had high hopes for him to make a move back towards that position again. She assures me that I'm not going to miss Emanuel Sandhu and says that if I drive fast, I'll make it home in time for Matt Savoie as well, so I hang up the phone and point my 99 Nissan towards my humble abode. Not breaking any traffic laws, of course. Honestly...I don't need to. If you take the right roads, you can get anywhere in Lansing in twenty minutes, one of its biggest advantages over Chicago that I have discovered in the past two and a half months. It takes a while for me to get my laptop up and running, open up the scores page and my MSN Messenger, and the thread on FSUniverse, but when I do, I see a magical one line post that says something like, "Savoie...magical!! Standing O!!" Good grief, it's about all I can do to keep from bursting into tears for my favourite skater from my home state. I eventually got a chance to see his program, and the person was right. Magical is really the only way to describe the way that Savoie captivated with his program. I wish that he'd managed a triple toe instead of a double at the end of his combo. I doubt it would have made enough of a difference to vault him into the final flight, but it would have put him within closer striking distance. What would have made a difference would have been if the judges had properly scored his components. I know I whined about it yesterday, but I still don't get it. Yes, he was skating in the third group, but that shouldn't matter! Judge what you see. It really pisses me off, to say the least. As it stands, he is in tenth place now, and I suppose there were some good performances tonight, so that's all right, but it still bugs me that someone like Matt Savoie is only getting in the high sixes for components when he's almost uninamously described as a "skater's skater." I rambled on for an entire paragraph about Matt Savoie, but that's what being a skating fan who originally hails from rural central Illinois (the kind of place where you consider Peoria, Savoie's hometown, to be a metropolis) will do to you. I'm probably about to ramble on for an entire paragraph about this next skater, because I'm a fan of Canadian skating who, for some reason or another, consistently has a renewed faith in Emanuel Sandhu. Though he's so wildly inconsistent, I think I look at every performance as a fresh opportunity. It doesn't matter that his qualifying skate was, pretty much, terrible, because everything is a clean slate with him. And for some reason, I was convinced that this was going to be his first clean short in something like three or four years. I was so close. He was so close. But if you're going to fall on a jump in the short, you'd might as well rotate it and make it the jump out of footwork, after you'd already landed your quad toe-triple toe combination, followed up by a triple axel, something he's been struggling with all season. He made a gigantic leap with this program, finishing second in the short at the end of the night, and finding himself in fifth place overall. I challenge the naysayers to actually watch his program, and watch the programs given by the men that he leapt over. Yes, he was penalized for the fall. Without the fall, he would have scored over 80, and he would have deserved it. The fall only cost him about 4-5 points. It was the rest of the program that vaulted him into the lead for a good portion of the night, the spins, the footwork, the delivery, the performance, the interpretation, and the way that he carried himself with such conviction, even after the mistake. Okay, maybe the judges were caught up in the moment as well, but let's not forget where the judges sit. They're on the other sides of the boards, making them members of the audience, and they're human, just like everyone else in the room. You have to win them over. And they're so caught up in watching every tiny movement of your feet and the way you use your upper body, and they're all bent over their little touch screens, so if you can manage to get them involved in your program, if you can make them feel in their hearts the desire to clap along (even though they can't, because that would be so incredibly sketch and the boards would explode with 302394823 page long threads about it), if you can do that, then, well...you're one heck of a skater. Emanuel Sandhu is one heck of a skater and Emanuel Sandhu deserved every single tenth of his 78.41 points. After Savoie and Sandhu, I was in some otherworldly state, scarcely able to concentrate on the fact that there was a zamboni break for a reason, that reason being that the top six men were still waiting for their chance to show their stuff in the short program. It was an excellent group, and I was actually fairly crazy about three of the six guys that were about to skate, but I just kept looking at the pictures of Emanuel in the kiss and cry and I couldn't stop grinning, mostly because he appeared to have the same problem. Evan Lysacek started things off. I like Lysacek a lot, because he's from Naperville and Naperville is about an hour away from my family's home in the Chicago suburbs. I went to school in Wheaton for a year and a half, and Wheaton is just north of Naperville, and I used to go to this awesome Japanese grocery store in Naperville to buy pocky and Ramune, but this is all beside the point, because unfortunately, Lysacek was not at his best last night and unlike the free, there wasn't enough time in the short program for him to get into the program and make up for the mistakes and sell, sell, sell. I'll also go out on a limb and say that, sticking to my "judges are audience members" theory, trying to convince the judges to reward you with a program that they've been seeing since you learned a double axel may not be the best strategy. I know change is hard, Evan, but really...it's time to say goodbye. All good things must come to an end. You've had two(!) new free programs this year. Let's try a new short program. Evan's decent effort left him in eighth place in the short, and seventh overall, leaving him just out of the final flight, which is too bad, but remember what he did at the Olympics from the penultimate flight? I haven't counted him out of the top five just yet. Nobunari Oda followed Lysacek, and really laid it down. His 78.25 was just barely off of Sandhu's, and he ended up in second place overall. What a cute kid. I can't wait to see the program, and more importantly, the kiss and cry, because I love how he just explodes when he gets his marks. Guys, take a lesson from Nobu. Girls think it's cute when you show your emotions. Then again, guys who have trouble showing their emotions probably aren't reading my figure skating blog in the first place, but you never know. Maybe someone googled the name of a pretty ice dancer and wound up here, and kept reading because I'm just that engaging. Probably not, but let me think that, all right? Ilia Klimkin had the task of following the cute Japanese kid, and unfortunately, that didn't work so well for him, because he plumetted to tenth place in the short, and down to the penultimate flight. I've never been much of a Klimkin fan myself, but it was sad to see him sink in the rankings after such a good showing in the qualifying. Still, it's points, not rankings, that matter now, and anything can happen. I took a bit of a breather during Klimkin, because, you know, refreshing IceCalc gets a little hard on the fingers after a while, and I ate my chicken and broccoli with rice dinner. After being home in Chicago for the weekend, which boasts the best food in the world in my opinion, everything I make this week is kinda just ehhhh. Enough about my dinner, though, let's move on to Stéphane Lambiel, who lit up the Saddledome, my apartment, and the country of Switzerland yesterday with one of the best skates of his life...during qualifying. So the triple axel wasn't as great as it was in quals and he struggled a bit, but it was still darn good and good enough to leave him fourth place in the free with 77.41, and he is still leading the field, but only by about three points. I really, really like Lambiel, and I have for a few years now. I would love to see him defend his title, but it's not going to be a cakewalk for him. The penultimate spot of the night fell to Brian Joubert, and well, "wow" is about the only word I have to accurately describe how I feel about Joubert tonight. He was supposed to be one of the stars of this quad...remember the way he captured our hearts at 2002 Skate America? But after his victory at the 2004 European Championships and a silver medal at 2004 Worlds, he really fizzled out last season. Dressing up like a wooden creation and skating to music that has been done so many times before did not really benefit him, nor did a real meltdown at last year's Worlds. This year, I've felt like he's started delivering again, but the judges have been hesitant about it. He's had the misfortune of delivering on nights when many of his competitors were delivering as well, and I felt like Brian was just lacking the spark that his peers could find. I understood the judges' hesitation. There was no hesitation tonight, neither from Brian nor the judges. Reports from the arena and from the fortunate Canadians who were getting the action live on CBC were nearly unanimous - it had been a long time since Brian Joubert had skated like that. Justly rewarded, he squeaked past Sandhu to take first in the short and he's in a very, very close third overall, just .12 behind Oda. The challenge of following Joubert's 007 performance fell to Jeff Buttle and if someone had to do it, you might as well ask the home crowd's national champion to rise to the occasion. But Jeff didn't really rise. In fact, even with his solid PCS scores, a seventh place short program dropped him to fourth place, just .42 ahead of his teammate, Emanuel Sandhu, in the best rivalry to touch Canadian men's skating since Kurt and Elvis in '94. Buttle and Sandhu are seven points off the pace of the top three, but you have to remember that they consistently receive some of the highest PCS marks in men's skating, and if they deliver on Thursday night, they're definite podium threats. In fact, while you're remembering that, also feel free to remember that Sandhu's version of "striking distance" is quite different from thaverage person's version. Thursday is going to be one heck of a free skate. I just realized that I wrote four paragraphs about the men's short, but neglected to mention Johnny Weir, who is sitting in sixth and rounding out the final flight. His scores were hotly contested by his maniacal fans on the message boards, but I can understand them. It's not like he was twenty points back, or anything, and I'm sorry, but the guy fell out of his last spin. Besides the points lost on the technical side, falling out of your last element, a spin, is not the best way to convince the judges to award you high components scores. But it's not the end of the world. Yes, he has his work cut out for him, but he can't be counted out yet, especially skating in the penultimate spot in the free. I should also mention Chengjiang Li. I have this secret respect for Li and the way that he's really worked on the artistic side of his skating and taken the criticisms that he has received over the years into consideration. It was nice moment of pride to see him skate so well tonight, to move up into sixth place in the short, and to see him in eighth overall. I think he really deserved it. Well, if you've made it this far, it's time to give out the Rockstar of the Day Award! It took considerable thought, but today's rockstar is Brian Joubert. A number of skaters gave courageous efforts and made comebacks today, but it's kind of hard to consider a Ravensburger Waltz to be a rockstar performance, and in the men's short, it was Joubert who outclassed the rest of the field. It was a real privilege to see him fighting the way that he did, and I honestly hope that he gives another inspiring effort in the free skate. And with that, I leave you. Tomorrow's events are the ladies' qualification rounds, again beginning at the dreadful hour of 9.15 am, and tomorrow morning's sympathy award is given to Elena Sokolova, who has the honour of skating first. Here's hoping she starts the morning off to a great start. Tomorrow's banner event is the first championship skate of the week, the pairs' free. To say I'm anxious and nervous would be to grossly understate the way that I am feeling. And I have the misfortune of starting my new job at 4 pm, precisely when the first pairs will be taking the ice. Just peachy. I hope I'm not so much of a spaz that they think that hiring me was a mistake! Until tomorrow night... Archives -- Contact -- Features -- Guestbook -- Links -- Webmistress (c)2004-7 Melanie L. Hoyt All rights reserved. |