Jessica Dube Loves Scott Moir

I think many figure skating fans have already read Jacquelyn Thayer’s most terrific new interview on her popular Two for the Ice web site, which features this quote from Alexandra Paul of the Canadian team Paul/Islam:

“After Skate Canada, [Krylova] decided that we needed more of a bold costume,” says Paul. “The gray was too subtle and too light and she wanted us to stand out more and look more dramatic. As soon as we got these costumes made, we stepped on the ice for just a practice in them, and it was just amazing. Everybody was saying how much different it made the program look, just from a costume change and looking bolder on the ice. So you can thank Anjelika for that one."

I loved the new costumes. Particularly Alex’s beautiful dress. But it continues to disturb, how much the conversation about ice dance revolves around everything but the actual skating and dancing. "Impact" is a word I'm learning to hate in connection to ice dance, because in practice it means "impression", not content. "Effective" is in the same category. Yes, ice dance, as in all figure skating, has a performance component, but a reading of the rules and guidelines reveals that the performance component is actually a technical category, just as "presentation" used to be a technical category under 6.0. A lot of fans don’t bother understanding that, because the broadcast commentators prefer to perpetuate the erroneous idea that it’s “opinion” “taste” and “trend”. It doesn't mean acting, chemistry (connection, as revealed in skating and dancing, is different than "chemistry"), program theme, music, style, or personality. It is all grounded in execution, techniqiue and skill. I don't know if judges are dumb, explicitly schooled in all of this bullshit and none of them ask how come the rules aren't getting all of the emphasis, or if it all goes to the corruption that's been driving the sport, most particularly this past quad.

There are a ton of great quotes from Paul/Islam in this article, including pretty rare specifics about the Olympic environment, training schedule and pressured, constricted practice time, but I do want to mention this:

“You know, when you see a team for example going around hand-in-hand, just stroking, stroking, stroking, that’s something that we want to stay away from as an ice dance team.”

Well, they'll never win Olympic gold in that case, but good for them.

It’s a shame that the “fashion” for ice dance is not to actually skate or dance on ice, and IMO it may have played a role in their ridiculous 18th place finish in Sochi. I think if ice dance is going to be about fashion, trends, impact, effectiveness, and style, the rulebook needs to reflect this. Right now we have a rulebook saying one thing and everybody else – the judges, the commentators, the journalists, the skaters – telling us the rulebook is irrelevant to the outcome. The rulebook is about skating skills, yet we all know you can have the best skating skills, and execute the most and the best in a given competition, and it will be blithely treated as a sidebar to the competition with no explanation as to why an event that is about skating skills considers them an also-ran in the outcome.

Elsewhere in skating, here's Tessa, Scott and SC team members at ACGM. I guess they're still part of Team Canada, or else they've forgotten it's post Olympics 2014, not post-Olympics 2010. Tessa is certainly dressing like it:

And this article from Faces Magazine, where Scott and Tessa allude to judging politics, and getting the short end of the stick, but then default to saying all the skaters are technically sound, so the outcome comes down to style and personal preference, so what can you do. We all know this is exactly how it's laid out in CoP.  As usual, Tessa and Scott take a topic, walk in a big circle around it visiting the sights, and wind up back at zero.

And this:

.”

David Dore is the vice president of the ISU. He's the highest ranking ISU official from a figure skating background. The President, Cinquanta, is a former speed skater.

Dore presided over an Olympic quad during which Davis White received scores they didn't earn, according to CoP's own rules, standards and criteria, and during which Virtue and Moir were stripped of points and continuously had showcase elements gutted under one pretext or another, the last time after they arrived in Sochi and learned that they risked losing points on their step sequence if they left in their spectacular showcase straightline lift. Yes, because it's VM that have timing issues, not DW.

How did this happen? For four years Dore, the vice president, had no idea what was going on in the ice dance scoring? He had no idea that Virtue and Moir were being low-balled and held to a double standard? He did his job in earnest, and it was others, lower down in the ISU hierarchy, who elevated DW and lowballed/trip-wired/whispering-campaigned Virtue and Moir, and it never ever came to his attention?

There you go. #great person. He's WONDERFUl for skating.

That's the "sport".