Skater Kimmie Meissner doesn’t fall but doesn’t rate highly

The good news is that Kimmie Meissner stayed on her feet, which she hadn’t done in three straight competitive programs. For a young woman who had fallen seven times in her previous 11 minutes of skating, that is a significant step forward.

The bad news is the judges still didn’t find much to like about the 2006 world champion, leaving her ninth after Wednesday’s short program at the World Figure Skating Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The good news is Meissner is less than four points from third place, and swings of 10 points in the free skate are not uncommon.

The bad news is she will skate in the next-to-last group today, and that is the first time since 1994 that no U.S. woman has made the final group at worlds.

While the picture I got from Eurosport audio commentary was not detailed enough to distinguish what the judges disliked about Meissner, the picture the low scores created – especially her technical scores, which were 10th – is that of a skater who no longer gets the benefit of the doubt in this subjective sport. One of the latest darlings, Korea’s Kim-Yu Na, fell on a jump in an otherwise fine performance, and her technical scores still were two points higher than Meissner’s.

A former world champion who made no major mistakes rarely is penalized the way Meissner was Wednesday. People watching on overseas Internet connections – or the live foreign TV coverage – left comments on a skating message board that suggested the scores were perplexing. Others said she was solid but unspectacular.

All season long, it has seemed judges have been determined to find flaws in Meissner’s technique. Using replay, they have hit her hard for wrong edge takeoffs and under-rotated jumps.

Wednesday, they called her for a wrong edge takeoff on a triple flip, which is surprising, given that wrong edge takeoffs usually occur on the triple lutz, turning that jump into a triple flip. Her footwork sequence and combination spin both were called only level 2.

Maybe she got too much credit in the past and is being judged accurately now. The mandate from on high that judges should pay extra attention to such details this year seems to have affected Meissner more than many other skaters.

“We knew I could do a clean program like that. Right now, I don’t care where I am as far as the placement goes, because nothing can top the feeling I have,” Meissner said Wednesday.

Such a reaction may sound like a rationalization, but it is not uncommon for skaters. At some point in a career, every skater has an epiphany about not allowing satisfaction to be determined only by judges – an attitude that was even more important in the compulsory figures era, when results were hierarchical, and upstarts never were fairly rewarded.

Placement is, of course, important, and Meissner may do well enough in the free skate to move up in the standings. But once a skater falls from the judges’ grace, the slope back up is slippery, especially when it is made of ice.

Philip Hersh covers Olympic sports for The Times and the Chicago Tribune.