I don't like you, Madison Hubbell

Happy Halloween

I don't know these people, but it's a bunch of
biathletes dressed up as figure skaters for Halloween.

Now that ice dancing has been cleared of many high level competitors, Hubbell & Donohoe have easily qualified for the Grand Prix final, where they will be defeated by Papadakis & Cizeron, who have yet to make their Grand Prix debut.

I still hold a grudge against Madison Hubbell from last year, where she employed her outspoken personality to perpetuate the kind of narrative bullshit that we can't get enough of in ice dance. To refresh:

Tessa and Scott are kind of that — for me, at least, they’re the quintessential Old Hollywood team. Like, they just…no matter what music you give them or what choreography, they find their place inside of it. I think that they knew their strengths and they knew their weaknesses and seeing them train, they don’t compare themselves, so it lets them be 100% committed to whatever it is they choose to do. And that’s where you see, for me… You know, they get the tens and they get all the +3s. And we see them compete, you know — they’ve had a lot of little bobbles, little mistakes this season in their performances. They don’t always skate perfect, but they make you believe that it’s perfect because they’re so committed to each other, to their performance, and they just get lost in their own little world.

Oh fuck you again, Hubbell.

The sour grapes in figure skating are enough to choke on. Dear God the resentment when somebody or a couple of somebodies are extraordinary AND consistently win. Hell, the resentment persists even when the best skaters with the best skate of the competition are blatantly prevented from winning. Can we please not get some gold hardware and serious respect for the amazing stuff thrown down by the lesser skaters and teams over here instead? Let's have some fairness!

I went looking for Hubbell's quote before starting this post and found it on a webpage -JudgingPrivilege wordpress - I hadn't read before. It reads like something a regular participant or two on this blog may have created. Here's Hubbell re Gabby and Guillaume:

For Gabriella and Guillaume, I think that they’ve always had, even when they were younger and less successful, they had a power, a glide and, you know, sometimes in practice… We actually trained for a little while with them in Detroit when they came, visited Pasquale [Camerlengo] in our first season together [2011-12], and they were a team that were a little bit of a mess, made a lot of mistakes, but those moments that they were really skating together, you could tell they had just this special chemistry, a glide…

Like, for me they are the kind of skating that I want to see in ice dance. It’s power but it’s also elegant. Their lines are just gorgeous and they’ve put a lot of work in the last four years of being here in Montreal on the precision and what it takes to not lose points and not make mistakes, and that’s really the only thing they needed to become the powerhouse that they are, because naturally they have just such beautiful lines. They’re artists in the way that they represent music and feeling and so I think that’s their quality.


I was going to call up some images of P&C's magnificent lines* but how often can you do that? It doesn't matter.

The Judging Privilege blog calls her out.

Excerpts:

When the quotes were condensed and tweeted by Figure Skaters Online, they got to the heart of the matter: Hubbell holds up Papadakis and Cizeron as a sort of Platonic ideal of ice dance, while Virtue and Moir make mistakes, but let you forget about them.

It is also a curious juxtaposition to create — Papadakis and Cizeron as a team who have ceased to make mistakes, Virtue and Moir as a team who do — when the French have logged disruptive falls at two of this season’s events.

Hubbell also stressed on the same call that they are keenly aware that none of the three top U.S. teams have any real edge over the other, nor can they overlook the threats of many other international teams ranked on par.

But something has made them feel similar caution is not in order where Virtue and Moir are concerned.

Judging Privilege surmises this something was Hubbell & Donohue's cozy relationship with notably non-partisan US Judge Sharon Rogers and her frequent scoring of Virtue and Moir as on par with Hubbell & Donohoe.

So in these quotes from last season, Maddie is not being candid. She's politicking.

She will be much happier always coming in second to Papadakis & Cizeron than third behind Virtue & Moir and Papadakis & Cizeron. She can't possibly kid herself that they have a shot no matter how the skating goes down. They're already better than Papadakis & Cizeron and yet must pretend Papadakis & Cizeron's abilities are something to which they can only aspire.

Here's Hubbell & Donohue's free dance at Skate Canada. I don't think it represents their best. I thought there were a lot of little bobbles, as it were, too much sliding and scampering, and many small slips and moments out of sync. And they seemed somewhat gassed in the back half of the program.



I think Hubbell's attitude also resides in the Montreal situation. I suspect and continue to suspect that while H&D and P&C were actually coached by and part of the supposedly close-knit crew at Gadbois, Virtue and Moir were pretending for public consumption only - something with which Virtue and Moir are thoroughly experienced.  I suspect Virtue and Moir had their own coaching, own training ice somewhere else, their own choreography, and behaved as if they needed resources far beyond what was available at Gadbois - and indeed they did need resources far beyond what was available at Gadbois and they got them. As skaters they are far beyond Gadbois and everybody there.

I suspect that what Virtue & Moir did was considered elitism, which I've come to understand is a big no no in elite sports like ice dance. As is truly elite level performance. Be truly elite, you will piss people off.


*sarcasm.