Jessica Dube Loves Scott Moir

While doing twitter catch-up, I began hoping wondering if Scott and Tessa could be taking a shot at re-setting the narrative. Maybe they were toying with the idea of launching a menage a trois along the lines of Anais Nin/Henry Miller/June Miller. Tessa and Kaitlyn sort of fit the parts. Maybe the Kaitlyn Lawes/Scott Moir origin story would take a turn:

From wikipedia:

At the end of 1931, [Anais] Nin, finds herself dissatisfied with being a timid, faithful wife to her banker husband, Nin and her husband contemplate the possibility of opening their relationship. However when Anais meets June Miller, she is magnetically drawn to her and perceives June to be the most beautiful and charismatic woman she has ever met. Nin pursues an extremely intense, ambiguous, sexually charged friendship with her. When June leaves, Nin becomes involved with Henry, and begins an uninhibited sexual and emotional affair with him, which prompts an intellectual and sensual awakening. A friendship is formed between the two that was maintained throughout both artist's lives.

Henry, June and Anais

It’s right under our nose.

Come on guys, do something. Apropos of something much more serious, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart recently talked about "the nuanced language of lack of effort." Scott and Tessa's social media presence isn't all that nuanced, but the lack of effort part is nailed. I don't know if it's @jonescurl ladies specifically, or curling in general, but the curling angle has dull optics.



Apologies to anyone digesting a meal, and I'll be posting about something else completely in a minute, but because of other issues I've been following, and other subjects I'm reading about, I was recently thinking again about the gay panic, as well as other point-and-laugh elements, of Scott and Tessa’s fauxality show, such as when Scott’s small penis-having buddies* told Scott they’d be happy to get into figure skating if “We can use your partner.” I initially clocked this as gross because Tessa is Scott’s wife, and you shouldn’t be heh heh-ing with your buddies about what a hot piece of ass your wife is, particularly when she’s also your children’s other parent. But when I think of it again, the disgusting part was where if you want to get with a grown assed woman, you don't ask her. Barter with Scott.

I know they were pretending she wasn’t his wife. They were pretending it was Scott and his buddies showing all kinds of appropriate respect to his platonic skating partner. But they weren't pretending about the demographic this was all pitched towards. Nobody ever has to ask if it's low status females. Just look at anything they do, and don't let the contempt hit you in the eye. If it were dogs, or aliens, or a planet of Na'vi, they'd raise the bar. (No offense to dogs, I love them.)

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Here's something that I've been following. (Hint, professional sports are a cesspool.)

[FIFA is an] organization avowedly devoted to the best interests of soccer [which] instead sacrifices human lives and the game itself on the altar of greed for one reason: patronage politics.

The government of international sports is confoundingly opaque, conducted largely in the shadow world of hotel suites and private jets led by men in dandruff-flecked suits.

The above is from Sports Illustrated’s coverage (June 16, 2015) of the FIFA corruption investigation. Sports Illustrated's broad use of "international sports" is intentional.

FIFA is a big story. It's massive amounts of money and the most popular sport in the world, and has gotten itself into an international criminal investigation. Major soccer events, not just the World Cup, are awarded to countries that commit human rights violations in the process of staging the event (e.g., conscripting the equivalent of slave labor to construct venues destined to end up as white elephants), among other issues. The “ripple effect” of FIFA’s corruption is horrific.

Thankfully, figure skating doesn’t have that kind of money, but after Sochi, we know it's just as dirty.

Yes, soccer's issues are a lot more serious because they can be catastrophic for human beings who aren't even involved in the sport. But I think systemic corruption in other international sports, and the lack of meaningful public effort and energy focused on it is worth caring about in its own right.** But sports journalists are publicists and entertainers. It's only because the FIFA scandal rises to international, non-internally adjudicated corruption that real-er journalists got interested. When things hit tribunals, it's okay to independently investigate all of a sudden.

In one way, those concerned with soccer's problems have an advantage over those concerned about figure skating. Soccer is a simple game to understand. Everyone from grade school youth soccer organizations to World Cup finalists use the same rulebook: The Laws of the Game.

Figure skating is a “sport” where the Olympic gold medal can be stolen in front of millions of viewers, and none of the media present admits to being knowledgeable enough to point this out with informed conviction based upon a confident understanding of skating skills and the rules. Including journalists who’ve written multiple books about figure skating culture. They're a little upset, but kind of lose the thread when they try to address it (see Steve Milton's feeble cris de coeur.). This is because "Figure skating journalists” love the culture, but don't care about actual skating (like many fans, they don't distinguish between performance values and skating values). They are actively hostile to thinking fans of the sport.

It's comforting to read more about other sports where shadiness takes place directly in front of journalists, many of whom call it out for what it is, to little effect. Maybe if journalists really called out figure skating from an informed perspective, figure skating would just keep on truckin, and there's no need to be frustrated that figure skating sports writers are just a bunch of groupies who don't know what they're talking about. Maybe it wouldn't make a difference.

For example, Bob Baffert is the trainer of American Pharoah, the three year old colt who just won U.S. horse racing’s Triple Crown after a 37 year draught. Last fall, another Bob Baffert three-year old, Bayern, “won” the Breeders Cup Classic ($5 million purse) after Bayern swerved directly left out of the gate and body slammed his primary competition, including the betting favorite, Shared Belief.

Bayern's jockey is in stripes.

Nothing against the horses themselves. All non-human participants in this melee are only three years old.

Santa Anita Racetrack’s three racing stewards put up an inquiry, but decided to let the results stand. They said because the incident happened at the start, it "didn’t affect the outcome of the race", nor where the individual horses were “reasonably expected to place.” Shared Belief, the favorite, ended up fourth, and Moreno, the early speed expected to run with Bayern and gas him before the finish, never got to run at all.** * Bayern came out of the gate, immediately slammed sideways instead of running straight, and took out his primary competition, Shared Belief and Moreno, who had post positions immediately to his inside, and Bayern kept on steamrolling sideways til he was at the rail, three or four paths over. He did a major lateral move instead of a forward angle.

It’s okay though. Santa Anita’s racing officials knew, prior to a race, where the horses would finish. They must all be very, very rich. It also kind of makes people feel silly about the big deal made over the post draw for the Kentucky Derby every year. Who knew it didn't matter? I expect Baffert will contain himself now every time one of his horses is bothered in the early going – he usually can’t shut up about losing all chance before the race even begins.

Stewards in New York and Kentucky said the horse should have been disqualified. Broadcast journalists live calling the event said the horse should have been disqualified.

And here’s where racing fans have it over figure skating: the Santa Anita stewards, who lunch, dine, text, phone, and share the box all the time of the wealthiest trainer-in-residence, Baffert, found a CBCH Rule to hide behind when justifying their decision, the “reasonably expected to place” rule that was widely mocked. So, bad luck for that one race, BUT, it appears that Santa Anita is going to do something about the rule. It often works that way. Put up a big front and bluster through the immediate debacle, then hustle to fix it behind the scenes to avoid another embarrassment and, going forward, to less obviously piss off the betting public that underwrites the entire enterprise.

Figure skating is immune to embarrassment, because nothing embarrasses figure skating, not in the competitive realm, and not in the world of exhibition and show skating, more than the fact that its demographic are women who are kind of of middling age, with a somewhat younger crowd of the fangurl persuasion folded in. The money both groups spend on this sport must smell like someone's embarrassing aunt. If only figure skating had, as its demographic, a legion of beer-bellied, comb-over guys with maybe thirty teeth to share among a group of five, reliably wagering the grocery money, like thoroughbred racing has. Figure skating could hold its head up and maybe gain the self-respect to set its house in order.

Here’s something familiar – the jockey most impacted by Bayern’s body slam – Mike Smith, aboard Shared Belief, fulminated after the race to the first journalist to stick a mike under his nose. He thereafter went quiet. Smith rides a lot of Baffert’s big money horses, so what can he do? As Baffert and the connections sat at the press conference, Baffert leaned over, apparently indifferent to the live mikes, and instructed Bayern’s jockey, Martin Garcia, to say the ground broke under him. This became part of the story, but it was strictly color. There’s no accountability.

P.S. I actually like Bob Baffert well enough, and love American Pharoah, but in this case, his horse should have come down.

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*If they didn’t want us to know, they wouldn’t have been ridin ve-hicles in the muddy outdoors shootin firearms all over the W network, and Scott would have used a porta potty instead of proving to us he has a dick by peeing against a fence.

**Who knew the ways basketball sometimes got shady, such as officials obtaining autographed shoes from the big stars of the game, throwing them up on ebay and pulling in a few thousand,. You can see that even championship calibre players enjoy a little pregame insurance in the officiating department.

*** Not to mention that I looked it up, and poor Bayern finished dead last in his two big stakes outings this year.