Time on the roundup - twelve forty five
Dejah:
They just showed Kiira Korpi during the ice cut, but I was uploading. Nothig I could do. Poor kid did not skate well.
From the ISU forums:
Rosie
Joined: 03 Nov 2005
Posts: 159
Location: UK
Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2006 7:46 pm
First two groups :
Great skates from Olympic new girls Korpi, Leung (technical score of 51.83) and Yan Lui - Efremenko also good.
Programmes littered with errors from the Olympic veterans Liashenko, Sokolova and Sebestyen. Sokolova held up by PCS.
From skatingforums.com:
#11 Today, 03:02 PM
Laetitia_Hubert
Registered User Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Toronto, Canada
Posts: 103
...
There seems to be a lot of pressure on these ladies and many of them are so overly focussed on getting their components done that they have this panic look on their faces on the ice because they're so nervous.
#20 Today, 03:27 PM
jcspkbfan
Registered User Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 1,124
Quote:
Originally Posted by charmainia
Miki Ando fell on her quad attempt. Is she planning some triple-triple combination?
Not only did Miki fall on her quad attempt, she also missed several of her triples. I feel sorry for her; the CBC commentators said the Japanese media have followed her nonstop throughout the Olympics and Miki broke down in tears after a reporter asked her about her late father....
After thinking a bit and reading the comments above, something struck me about this whole thing.
Note that as I previously mentioned, I have actually met Kiira Korpi briefly. In fact, the meeting was so brief that I had forgotten that I have technically met her twice. The second time was at Los Angeles International Airport, where I held this inaccurately reconstructed conversation with her:
OE: So are you on the [airline name deleted] flight?
KK: Yes.
OE: Taquito.
Truth to tell, I've never interacted with her extensively, but she certainly seems like a nice enough girl, and those who know her better have confirmed this.
As I previously noted, Korpi made the Finnish Olympic team due to an excellent showing in the European championships in Lyon in January 2006. That vaulted her into a very select company. How select? Well, think about other sports:
About 0.5 %, or one in 200 of high school senior boys playing interscholastic baseball will eventually be drafted by an MLB team
About 5.6 %, or less than three in 50 of high school senior boys interscholastic baseball players will go on to play men's baseball at a NCAA member institution.
About 10.5 %, or less than eleven in 100 of NCAA senior male baseball players will get drafted by a Major League Baseball (MLB) team.
And these are higher percentages than in other sports. So you have all of these people playing baseball, and only a few hundred of them are at the U.S./Canada major league level at any one time.
Now look at all of the ladies' figure skaters in the world - not just in the U.S. or Canada, but in the entire world. How many of them made the Olympics? Only 29.
So the next time you hear someone talking about how so few people play at the major league baseball level (MLB), or the professional football level (NFL), or the men's basketball level (NBA), it's proper to acknowledge that these people ARE at a very high level, but their leagues are not quite as selective as Olympic ladies' figure skating.
And yes, I know that I'm comparing an individual sport to team sports, but there are certainly more than 29 PGA golfers, and more than 29 pro tennis players.
Perhaps one could argue that the 29 ladies' figure skaters at the Olympics aren't necessarily the best 29 - Michelle Kwan fans could certainly make that argument, and there are probably other cases in which a skater didn't make the Olympics because her country only had a limited number of slots - but you can still argue that these 29 skaters are among the best of the best.
Now the Steve Dilbecks of the world may think that the ladies' figure skater who falls may be internally tormented for the rest of her life. But I suspect that these people, even with their obvious drive to succeed, will derive some satisfaction from just making it to the biggest figure skating stage on this planet, and possibly this entire galaxy. (Although I hear that the ten footed figure skaters in other galaxies are truly outstanding.)
Back on our own planet, there is a commentary on the marketing of Olympic athletes entitled If Sasha Cohen falters tonight, do the terrorists win? (Note: the author does not think that Bush is the greatest man on earth.)
...Joey Cheek and Shaun White are hardly what Madison Avenue had in mind before this Olympics. Back then, it was all bad boy Bode Miller, whose penchant for tippling gave him an every-guy appeal. It was Apolo Anton Ohno, he of the fabulous name, whose soul patch gave him a certain Maynard G. Krebs je ne sais quoi. And it was Michelle Kwan, who fed into the American fetishization of Asian females. But now, as these and other Great American Hopes crashed and burnt, we are left with two dorky-looking guys and a Jewish princess to carry the mantle of American pride.
The minute Sasha Cohen emerged with an 0.03 lead over Irina Slutskaya in the short program, she turned into Debi Thomas circa 1988. It is Cohen's good fortune this year that her nemesis is the cute but hardly glamorous Slutskaya rather than the vampish Iron Curtain Maiden Katarina Witt....But Cohen has never been strong in the freeskate, and has often suffered from loss of concentration in the second half of the program. Yet she has never had as much at stake as she does tonight.
The sports press didn't want it to be this way. After Kwan withdrew, they turned their attention to the fresh-faced Emily Hughes, leaving Cohen to focus on the job she has to do tonight. Perhaps they did her a favor, buying her a few days of calm practice time [OE NOTE: What practice?] before deciding that the future of American prestige rests on her small shoulders.
Cohen can be a difficult skater to like. Lacking Kwan's press-friendly demeanor and Hughes' "oh gosh" innocence, she is there to skate, not to talk. But with all the expectations resting with her tonight, the responsibility given her by the press to somehow single-handedly resurrect the United States from the bankrupt wreck it has become under the stewardship of the Bush Administration -- while dressed in spangles and resting on a 1/8" skate blade, I hope she can pull it off -- for her sake, not for ours.
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