For God knows what convoluted and clown-ass reasons, Skate Canada has determined that the public must not ever ever EVER believe not EVER that any of its figure skating partnerships are romantic. Lately they've resorted to tactics that are the marketing equivalent of a parent hiding nutrients in a vegetable-averse kid's omelet or lasagne.
SC goes to quite a bit of facebook trouble also, to emphasize that within partnerships, sex ain't happening.
But this is fine for one of their figure skater's facebooks. (I read this last summer, so it had remained visible on Jessica Dube's fb for over 3 years.)
No un-vetted photo of Tessa/Scott or Jessica/Bryce ever makes it onto anyone's fb, but this thing sits right there.
It was in the "boxes" section of her fb. This screen capture doesn't have her name, but it was sitting in her fb with her name all over it and comments from her friends below it.
Yes, she's French Canadian but she did the quiz in English and slapped in asterisks and said "as a joke!" so she was fairly well having it both ways here. She knows.
I think back then Jessica was in what she terms a "gangsta-girly" fashion phase with the head wrap bandana and she also sported puffy gold earrings at times, and so the favorite word to say may have been part of the package.
Yet she found it prudent to asterisk some key letters.* The rest of her possible favorite words are spelled out.
I took the quiz so I could see the answers. I scored about where her friends scored - except for Bryce, who crushed the field and commented that he thinks Jessica may have lied on her quiz.
During the Patrick Chan pseudo-brouhaha about China, where it later emerged it's entirely the fault of selfish, unpatriotic corporate Canada that Skate Canada has shit for sponsors, it turned out Patrick Chan didn't realize there were human rights violations in China. Then people jumped in to say you barely have a history requirement in Canadian high schools so it's not his fault. And then it's mentioned the USA is almost as bad.
Well shit, then how did I find out about it? Oh that's right - when I was in school they taught me to read.
And come to find out - since I was aware that China had been accused of human rights violations - this makes me a political scientist. According to an attorney/backer who spoke up for Chan.**
Maybe it's making more sense why Debbi Wilkes speaks to the public as if they learned the alphabet song only yesterday.
But it's okay! Who cares if our figure skaters haven't got no education (even those who've applied to the University of Colorado). We not only don't care if everybody knows our skaters are ignorant - we'll defend it. He's a figure skater. Give him a break - Patrick didn't even know China was its own country til last week.***
Say this stuff loud and proud and Skate Canada has no problem. In fact, what could have been an - eh, there-goes-Patrick-again situation turned into crisis management (at last - Barb MacDonald had a crisis! You know that got added to her bullet-pointed credentials even before she sent her customary a.m. email to ice-network.com.) with Thompson talking and Barb talking and reporters who live in the SC tank prompted to get the SC spin out there.
A 24-hour news cycle event turned into a week (it's figure skating, so 24-hour is a little generous - how about 25 minutes). They took a skater's whine and blew it up to a posturing, grand-standing clusterfuck with at least two SC officials getting their names in print. What SC does best. Your government funding at work.
In the category of other things SC and the "skating community" thinks is just fine to put out there, I recently went looking for a Dube Davison article I remembered reading, where somebody working with them felt it important to tell us explicitly that they used to be "lovers". Not a "couple". "Lovers." Try as I might, I couldn't un-read it.
So I took some pepto-bismol and googled the article:
Ew
I don't understand - if "everyone knows it" then why does this person also add that "you have to say it." If we already know it, no, you don't. But basically what the fuck kind of article is this?
Skate Canada gets an almost pornographic enjoyment out of detailing the extreme closeness of "platonic" (or former lovers) figure skaters in their partnerships. First of all - since when is the sexual status of its figure skaters any business of a skating Fed let alone a component of its marketing? But Skate Canada wades right in with truly creepy enthusiasm, relishing every detail. We're told what's in the shared Weaver & Poje family breakfast tacos. We're informed about intimate marriage/sports counseling for platonic partners. Every five seconds Skate Canada sticks a thermometer up the rectum of some skating partnership and reports back with the blow-by-blow (not literally blow-by-blow, cause they're platonic, but you get what I'm going for here). And then they drop the chaser - they're PLATONIC.****
It keeps re-impressing me as a little off.
_________________________
*I know there's no excuse for that word and I also know why there's no excuse. That makes me a social anthropologist.
**Why do skaters get to pull the skater-ignorant card. What about the rest of us? "He's a figure skater - not a political scientist." Do vets, students, cops, office managers, personal trainers, nurses, etc. get to go there? "I don't know what that wet shit falling from the sky is called - I'm a UPS driver, not a meteorologist!"
***He'd assumed it was a region of the country of Asia.
****I think all of Skate Canada's skaters in skating partnerships were required to be microchipped if they were on the Vancouver Olympic track. This microchip is programmed to de-platonic them the second one or the other declares the intention to retire after an upcoming competition.
SC goes to quite a bit of facebook trouble also, to emphasize that within partnerships, sex ain't happening.
But this is fine for one of their figure skater's facebooks. (I read this last summer, so it had remained visible on Jessica Dube's fb for over 3 years.)
No un-vetted photo of Tessa/Scott or Jessica/Bryce ever makes it onto anyone's fb, but this thing sits right there.
It was in the "boxes" section of her fb. This screen capture doesn't have her name, but it was sitting in her fb with her name all over it and comments from her friends below it.
Yes, she's French Canadian but she did the quiz in English and slapped in asterisks and said "as a joke!" so she was fairly well having it both ways here. She knows.
I think back then Jessica was in what she terms a "gangsta-girly" fashion phase with the head wrap bandana and she also sported puffy gold earrings at times, and so the favorite word to say may have been part of the package.
I took the quiz so I could see the answers. I scored about where her friends scored - except for Bryce, who crushed the field and commented that he thinks Jessica may have lied on her quiz.
During the Patrick Chan pseudo-brouhaha about China, where it later emerged it's entirely the fault of selfish, unpatriotic corporate Canada that Skate Canada has shit for sponsors, it turned out Patrick Chan didn't realize there were human rights violations in China. Then people jumped in to say you barely have a history requirement in Canadian high schools so it's not his fault. And then it's mentioned the USA is almost as bad.
Well shit, then how did I find out about it? Oh that's right - when I was in school they taught me to read.
And come to find out - since I was aware that China had been accused of human rights violations - this makes me a political scientist. According to an attorney/backer who spoke up for Chan.**
Maybe it's making more sense why Debbi Wilkes speaks to the public as if they learned the alphabet song only yesterday.
But it's okay! Who cares if our figure skaters haven't got no education (even those who've applied to the University of Colorado). We not only don't care if everybody knows our skaters are ignorant - we'll defend it. He's a figure skater. Give him a break - Patrick didn't even know China was its own country til last week.***
Say this stuff loud and proud and Skate Canada has no problem. In fact, what could have been an - eh, there-goes-Patrick-again situation turned into crisis management (at last - Barb MacDonald had a crisis! You know that got added to her bullet-pointed credentials even before she sent her customary a.m. email to ice-network.com.) with Thompson talking and Barb talking and reporters who live in the SC tank prompted to get the SC spin out there.
A 24-hour news cycle event turned into a week (it's figure skating, so 24-hour is a little generous - how about 25 minutes). They took a skater's whine and blew it up to a posturing, grand-standing clusterfuck with at least two SC officials getting their names in print. What SC does best. Your government funding at work.
In the category of other things SC and the "skating community" thinks is just fine to put out there, I recently went looking for a Dube Davison article I remembered reading, where somebody working with them felt it important to tell us explicitly that they used to be "lovers". Not a "couple". "Lovers." Try as I might, I couldn't un-read it.
So I took some pepto-bismol and googled the article:
Ew
I don't understand - if "everyone knows it" then why does this person also add that "you have to say it." If we already know it, no, you don't. But basically what the fuck kind of article is this?
Skate Canada gets an almost pornographic enjoyment out of detailing the extreme closeness of "platonic" (or former lovers) figure skaters in their partnerships. First of all - since when is the sexual status of its figure skaters any business of a skating Fed let alone a component of its marketing? But Skate Canada wades right in with truly creepy enthusiasm, relishing every detail. We're told what's in the shared Weaver & Poje family breakfast tacos. We're informed about intimate marriage/sports counseling for platonic partners. Every five seconds Skate Canada sticks a thermometer up the rectum of some skating partnership and reports back with the blow-by-blow (not literally blow-by-blow, cause they're platonic, but you get what I'm going for here). And then they drop the chaser - they're PLATONIC.****
It keeps re-impressing me as a little off.
_________________________
*I know there's no excuse for that word and I also know why there's no excuse. That makes me a social anthropologist.
**Why do skaters get to pull the skater-ignorant card. What about the rest of us? "He's a figure skater - not a political scientist." Do vets, students, cops, office managers, personal trainers, nurses, etc. get to go there? "I don't know what that wet shit falling from the sky is called - I'm a UPS driver, not a meteorologist!"
***He'd assumed it was a region of the country of Asia.
****I think all of Skate Canada's skaters in skating partnerships were required to be microchipped if they were on the Vancouver Olympic track. This microchip is programmed to de-platonic them the second one or the other declares the intention to retire after an upcoming competition.
Unbelievable that Jessica would ever consider using this word, let alone posting on a public wall that it's a favorite "joke" word. It also makes everyone associated with her look bad, that no one obviously had anything to say about this, or made sure that it was taken off her wall immediately!
ReplyDeleteScott wants to be associated with this person? Really?
Skate Canada and the figure skating culture at the elite level is corrupt and toxic, no two ways about it.
ReplyDeleteI believe they're at the stage of too big to fail - i.e., too fucked up to fail. Nothing can be acknowledged or fixed because everything is enmeshed - it's like an institutional glioma. The only time things may change is after Sochi when most of this crowd, one hopes, will move on and the new personnel is in place. The old crowd will start marketing their "expertise" in the private sector and the new crowd will claim they are really not familiar with some of the details of the marketing policies practiced by the old crowd, so they really aren't in a position to address it.
It's incompetence that protects them right now - it's too big to fix, so they won't fix it. They don't want to hurt themselves or look bad.
At this level there's no such thing as house cleaning. Who is going to do it? Who can order it? Who wants the bad publicity - the acknowledgment that anything at all is wrong? We know it's everybody else's fault - the public thinks figure skating is sissy, corporations aren't patriotic, etc. They've got a Director of Business Development whose title is apparently fluid because she is actually not doing any business development - she's a "personality" and that's it.
What's insufferable, really, is the aggressive ineptitude and ignorance coupled with the presumption that they can preach to the public. Debbi's patronizing, mother-knows-best, here's some homework, here's the lesson you should take bullshit. The women is unqualified for her job but she manages to get her face all over the GPF mewling to high level skaters and talking bullshit at them. Skatebuzz is her private promotional platform and that's about it.
I'm pretty confident Scott DOESN'T want to be associated with Jessica but he is, four years running and he's gonna stay like that til at least after Sochi. Whatever hopes he may have had that it would end sooner very likely bit the dust more than a year ago.
I'm pretty sure at this point Scott would prefer to be "out" than continue with the charade..In terms of using the n word, well that speaks volumes on behalf of Ms. Dube - let alone SC...
ReplyDeleteRemember that odd pre-Vancouver feature where Tessa "Didn't exactly say no" about them ending up like Sale & Pelletier, talked about how she likes to walk in Paris holding hands with Scott, likes it so much Scott said he has to tell her to back off a little bit sometimes (about her walking enthusiasm) - and he mentioned he'd been pitching the idea of them being a couple to her for the duration of their partnership and this was his first "maybe" from her?
ReplyDeleteVery cute, but not an accident. They were still playing both sides of the street, but if you know how these things are set up, this WAS setting something up. No question.
It was especially striking to use Salle and Pelleter as the parallel - a "mature" married couple with a small child - and Scott and Tessa at the time this was filmed were only 19 and 20.
But, their reality is they'd had had the big time, grown-up plans of a much more mature couple set for a specific timeline - the Olympic season and directly afterwards.
How would a reporter know this though, without cooperation from the subjects - without instigation from the subjects? It's not otherwise a logical topic for a duo when when one is still a teen-ager. Dating or romance, sure. Marriage and babies, not so much something a reporter would be nudging a couple that age about, not with most couples.
Scott and Tessa are not most couples.
This piece was groundwork for a potential coming out party.
Then nothing.
I KNOW the rift over shins IS bullshit - they were in constant contact and saw each other all the time - they were and had been a couple and it only made them tighter, if that's even possible. They made that rift scenario up after having spent the previous season talking about how much closer it made them - which everyone could see for themselves anyway - and they were already as close as it gets.
ReplyDeleteBut - VM have a habit of sticking half-truths into big lies, so I wonder where the half-truth is in the rift storyline. Yes, claiming they were estranged when they were actually making a lifetime commitment with all the planning around that is a way to take the focus off what they were really up to as a couple in 2009-2010. I mean if they were estranged, nothing like that could have been going on - this is how they and SC think - it's the type of liars they are. Primitive.
Still, some of the things Scott said are intriguing, especially if you start wondering if there was a conflict, but not over shins or surgery. He claims he was frustrated because he kept getting a date for her to return and the date would change. Well, that's ridiculous. Tessa was back far too early and they both knew it. She could barely skate when she came back. She was operated on in October, appeared with Scott at Skate America in November to discuss her operation, and by early Dec. was back in Canton. Scott's not a dumb ass - he was with her, and he knew she got back into training fast. She could not possibly have returned a single second sooner and he knows it. There was no getting excited about an even earlier date - there was no possible earlier date.
I'm wondering if Tessa's shins threw a potential "reveal" plan into disarray. I wonder if she'd been agreeing, or planning, or considering that they could come clean at such and such a date, and Scott would get excited (not about shins, as he later pretended, but about this) - and then she'd chicken out or pull back - again. Repeat.
That could frustrate a guy tired of shamming it up with Jessica for sure.
The last time Scott used to drop "Not yet anyway" was after the Olympics. And I think he anticipated that maybe they'd soon have to come out - and Tessa did too. Maybe Meryl and Charlie thought so too and made plans to support them - remember they originally went out of their way to be included in the London HOF celebration - and then didn't show.
Maybe because as it turned out Tessa wasn't showing either, so the morale boost/buffer they'd intended to provide wasn't needed.
That period of time after the Olympics - about 9-10 months afterwards - seems to have been the only hope Scott had for a reveal happening prior to Sochi. But it appears that circumstances simply favor Tessa. Every time Tessa sees that it's feasible to continue hiding, that they can, in fact, get away with it, that's what they do.
And random tweets from Ryan Semple notwithstanding, the bottom line is I'm sure Scott would rather suck it up and be humiliated in this Jessica scenario than watch Tessa sham it up in a similar way with some guy. For whatever reason, SC - and Team Virtue Moir - think it has to be done up big.