In Paris, women skaters -- and their sport -- continue to lose footing
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When she came off the ice after Friday’s short program at the Bompard Trophy Grand Prix event in Paris, Caroline Zhang said, ‘I stayed vertical.’
That apparently is all anyone can hope for in women’s figure skating these days.
Zhang didn’t skate very well.
Neither did any of the other nine women.
No surprise there: The sport is simply a combination of ice follies and, when the skaters do stay upright, a relentlessly boring repetition of sloppy execution of the same contortions required by the new judging system.
Flawless (or even relatively clean) is impossible now that the judges are trying to find things wrong and basing their judgment on use of replays too dependent on camera angles to give an exact picture. Even South Korea’s Kim Yu-Na, who is marvelous to watch, was found guilty of ticky-tack errors (as well as bigger mistakes) in her two Grand Prix wins.
I would like to tell you more about how they judged Friday in Paris, but the International Skating Union, mired in the dark ages technologically, chooses not to put the element-by-element results online until the entire event ends. (These results are available at the rink after each phase.) So even those of us masochistic enough to keep watching this stuff are deprived of information to make the experience more interesting.
This is what I saw Friday, thanks to icenetwork.com:
Reigning world champion Mao Asada of Japan, making her Grand Prix season debut, popped the second jump of her combination and wound up with just 58.12 points, one of the lowest scores of her career.
Joannie Rochette of Canada, who looked like the real deal with two strong performances at Skate Canada, fell on the first jump of her combination and still won the short program at 59.54.
Zhang, of the U.S., popped her double axel and was third at 51.76 –- a lower score than she had at Skate Canada, when she fell.
Bebe Liang of the U.S. fell and still wound up fourth with the embarrassingly low score of 49.60.
Emily Hughes of the U.S. made her season debut, fell, and wound up eighth with an even more embarrassingly low score, 44.32, 16 points below her personal best.
The men’s short program was better, mainly because 17-year-old Canadian Patrick Chan gave an impressive performance and 19-year-old Japanese Takahiko Kozuka gave evidence that his victory at Skate America was not a fluke.
Chan’s short program score, 81.39, was a well-deserved career best. Now he has to show that he can put together back-to-back strong showings.
The U.S. men?
Not in contention, with Ryan Bradley fifth (69.35) and Brandon Mroz sixth (65.44).
Were it not for Jeremy Abbott’s solid skating to win Cup of China, the U.S. men would be close to writing off the entire Grand Prix season, even if Johnny Weir has yet to skate his second event.
Time to go out on a limb, which is quite a risky thing at a time when vertical constitutes victory and so many top skaters are injured: I can easily see no singles medals for the United States at the 2010 Olympics. That has not happened since World War II.
Updated 8:15 p.m.
-- Philip Hersh
