The Olympics are over, but I did finally watch all of the Women's Free Skate, which all of you already probably...
The Olympics are over, but I did finally watch all of the Women's Free Skate, which all of you already probably discussed, but ...
1) Unless something has changed, judges have discretion and they knew they weren't giving Medvedeva enough of a win on non-technical marks when she won the free skate but lost the gold medal. I would have given her the win.
2) I've seen Zagitova skate this program many times, now, and she is exceptionally consistent but it is not an artistically balanced program and there's nothing much to interpret. It is music with jumps and spins. Beautiful, difficult, but just athletics. If that's the direction judges want the sport to go, be careful what they wish for. The perennial debate is raging once again in men's and women's figure skating.
3) Interesting commentary that the US did not change its internal judging to be consistent with the international judging until about 5 years after the fact. Also about coaching and other aspects of US training program. May have a lot to do with who makes it up the ranks in the US and is therefore internationally competitive.
4) For whatever reason, Sotskova's costume was one of the very few that really seemed seamless with her music and the artistic whole of her program. (Debussy's "Clair de lune")
5) So much beautiful skating from the Korean and Japanese skaters. <3
6) I still absolutely think "Carmen" should be banned, and am pretty close on "Swan Lake". However, Kaetlyn Osmond skated the heck out of her program with virtually every maneuver, every arm movement precisely on the music. She deserved her medal; she earned it.
So, yeah. All the feels for Medvedeva. She's still Sailor Moon to me.
1) Unless something has changed, judges have discretion and they knew they weren't giving Medvedeva enough of a win on non-technical marks when she won the free skate but lost the gold medal. I would have given her the win.
2) I've seen Zagitova skate this program many times, now, and she is exceptionally consistent but it is not an artistically balanced program and there's nothing much to interpret. It is music with jumps and spins. Beautiful, difficult, but just athletics. If that's the direction judges want the sport to go, be careful what they wish for. The perennial debate is raging once again in men's and women's figure skating.
3) Interesting commentary that the US did not change its internal judging to be consistent with the international judging until about 5 years after the fact. Also about coaching and other aspects of US training program. May have a lot to do with who makes it up the ranks in the US and is therefore internationally competitive.
4) For whatever reason, Sotskova's costume was one of the very few that really seemed seamless with her music and the artistic whole of her program. (Debussy's "Clair de lune")
5) So much beautiful skating from the Korean and Japanese skaters. <3
6) I still absolutely think "Carmen" should be banned, and am pretty close on "Swan Lake". However, Kaetlyn Osmond skated the heck out of her program with virtually every maneuver, every arm movement precisely on the music. She deserved her medal; she earned it.
So, yeah. All the feels for Medvedeva. She's still Sailor Moon to me.
I think I think that if it’s supposed to be primarily art, the Olympics are probably the wrong venue for it. Figure skating is the only discipline there (certainly in winter) where artistic merit seems to be considered, afaict. The snowboard etc seem to award points primarily based on technical difficulty, for instance.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense figure skating is the equivalent of the Summer Games’ gymnastics in that sense, I suppose.
That's fair. It's also seemingly true that the Olympics is the one time that the judges consistently seem to go with technical prowess over artistic pretty consistently, at least in women's skating. Come to think of it, there have been controversies in all the skating disciplines (men's, pairs, dance).
ReplyDeleteThey stopped doing actual figures a while ago, and the skills that addressed are sort of rolled into evaluating skater's edges, I guess. That left the short program as the other purely/primarily technical aspect.
They could just scrap the artistry altogether and say you've got two minutes, whoever does the most and hardest jumps and spins in that time wins. No artistry, pure athletics. I'm guessing they would not go quite that far, though.
Either way, putting skates on and then trying to either dance or push a not-ball into a goal with a stick seems like a bit of a waste when you could be trying to do laps fast, be that short or long track. ;)
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