Marketing your way to gold

Apart from the Sale & Pelletier incident in 2002, which was more like a railroad job, has a figure skater or skating team successfully marketed their way to an Olympic gold medal against superior competition before, or are D/W breaking new ground?

They're so relatable!

We saw Meryl Davis sailing away with her Kelloggs Cereal on her Sunday sail, as you do. They're busy acquiring as many marquee names - like Derek "makin some shapes!" Hough as they can think of to help brand their upcoming Olympic programs. At the rate they're going their costumes will have to resemble NASCAR race uniforms.

This may as well be a "Four Your Consideration" campaign for Best Picture. Sochi will just be the venue for the announcement. The votes will have been cast already.

Their partisans are trying to create an issue out of what happened at the 4CC's 2013 with Virtue and Moir, and there's agenda all over that. That agenda is they want Virtue and Moir's scores to be lowballed through Sochi, to compensate for inflated scores at 4CCs.

They want us to believe Virtue and Moir were overscored at the 2013 4CCs, get out the memo that Virtue Moir are overscored, period. It's audacious, I'll say that. Silver medal and still overscored!

Nobody is talking about Davis and White's skating. It's all how Davis and White make people feel. And how unfairly they're treated. Once in awhile, they lose to a better team that outskates them every time they take the ice. Not that often, but from time to time. OMG - the humanity!

Some of their partisans are quite belligerant about how irrelevant they find the actual skating. And yet they think gold in Sochi in a freaking skating discipline is D/W's by right.

How much have we heard - if anything - about Meryl and Charlie's actual skating? Not "expression" - their SKATING?

How much have we heard about the stars who are helping them shape their programs?

How much have we heard about their Kelloggs sponsorship? How much have we heard about their work ethic and all around wonderfulness? The actual competition is a mere formality. #sochigold is inevitable, if this sport is to be considered legit. If North America is not to shame itself in Russia. If North American fans don't have their perception of the sport soured by the blatant and unfair score inflation for Virtue Moir. #sochigold. What's skating compared to matters of such urgency?

Over here, we have Virtue and Moir, who have tied their own hands. They can't counter market without tying themselves in knots. "Look - a bridal magazine shoot where we pose like a bride and groom even though we're only platonic and by the way look at me and Cassandra in Aruba!"

Thanks guys. That helps.

Virtue and Moir are completely checkmated, marketing wise, by Davis and White. Davis and White may be nothing like the cheery Disney-fied versions of themselves they instagram and tweet, sunny one dimensional personalities with only hash tags and exclamation points in their heads. But I doubt very much they've got a baby and a marriage with each other on the down low, which means they've got a whole lot more scope for this marketing shit than Virtue and Moir, who simply have not put themselves in a position to put themselves out there. Davis and White have got the field to themselves.

Even if Charlie were, say, secretly hitched to Tanith, that's not such a scandal. It might be a little bit shady to have his wife comment on the Sochi ice dance event, but that's not a big leap from having his girlfriend comment on the Sochi ice dance event, so big whoop. There's really nothing that could come out that requires them to tie their hands now. They are free to work it and work it til we're barfing up cornflakes. (And btw, I'm not suggesting Charlie is secretly wed to Tanith. Just that it wouldn't really matter.)

Virtue and Moir officially (and of course, hypocritically) claim to shun social media, but social media is where Davis and White are hustling themselves into a gold medal before they've even unveiled their programs. Every single thing they do on twitter and facebook is making the case that they DESERVE gold as people.

One would think that Virtue and Moir partisans would enter the arena with the strongest weapon available to them - Virtue and Moir's skating.

That would require their Federation in their corner, and their Fed has abandoned them now that the Skate Canada officials have determined Virtue and Moir have either declined to serve or no longer serve the personal agendas of these officials. They're not going to get the word out they way they do consistently with Patrick Chan.

Scott comes from a huge skating family, yet as connected as they are in figure skating in Canada they don't seem able or motivated or I don't know what to use their connections to make the case for Scott and Tessa based on sport.

Maybe it just goes against the grain to treat the public as capable of understanding this as a sport. But that's the only counterargument available to them, because it sure looks as if DW have gotten the message that this medal is not going to be awarded for anything that happens on the ice. Here's how they're railroading this thing before the competition even happens - if Virtue and Moir blink at the wrong time in the same competition where Charlie and Meryl are two-footing, leaping, hopping, skipping, clutching, dragging, knee sliding and otherwise junkyarding their way through their program - then everybody will scream that Virtue and Moir were overscored because of an ill-placed eye-lash flutter from Tessa. They'll scream it before the season starts, they'll scream it at every competition Virtue and Moir skate before they even meet Meryl and Charlie, and at the end the scores they got vis a vis Gilles & Poirier at the last two Canadians will look like inflation while D/W's scores - it's only fair - will make Yuna Kim's scores look like Rachel Flatt's.