Jessica Dube Loves Scott Moir

One of the worst parts about following ice dance lately is having to actually watch it.

Is it that Gabriella can't be fussed about the
free leg on the exit or she just forgot?

The fact that Papadakis & Cizeron are serenely untroubled by program mistakes doesn't mean the judges should be, but talk about screaming into a void.

Their characteristic "can't be fussed about this unison stuff" also happened in the free.

Remember this crisis?

It is clear that figure skating looked at the emergence of Virtue and Moir in the early-mid-0s as a looming issue. Two very young ice dancers, spectacularly talented, versatile, musical, wonderfully charming and good looking, passionate, and, most of all, unambivalent about each other, skating and competition. They were built to last. If things had been allowed to proceed without interference, they would be the winners of four Olympic gold medals - Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang and, coming up in 2022, Beijing. Nobody came along in that time who could challenge them, and even ten years ago skating knew the odds of a team with the goods to challenge them coming along the pipeline were slim. There is still no team to challenge them.

This could not stand.

So the sport did two things – pretended another team had accomplished stuff on the ice that had not been accomplished (key points, steps executed correctly, stable, synchronized elements, speed, unison, edges, skating) and scored accordingly, while dumbing down the requirements to eliminate any advantage Virtue and Moir gained from their ability to achieve extraordinary skating feats on the ice. A third component was propaganda, easily accomplished in an enterprise where even the journalists who cover it know little about what they're covering and continue to be incapable of distinguishing performance (i.e., apparent energy, "flair", charm, theatrics, emoting, personality) from content.

We got gold medalists in Sochi who held hands at arms’ length throughout their program interspersed with piggy back rides and dragging, and we currently have dominant world champions who skate two footed, flat bladed and frequently out of sync but look so floaty when they do it. This pacifies the mediocre skaters whose whining begins to sound as if having a lot of talent and being really good at something is an unfair advantage, unfairly awarded. Shouldn’t working super hard to overcome or packaging yourself around a handful of inherent deficiencies get more points?

This article:

How do you make tango so fluid

Has two of my favorite quotes. One is a question from the 'journalist'. "Usually tango can be quite stiff and formal. Yours is completely fluid. How do you make passion so fluid."

How did you make the tango the exact opposite of its requisite sharp, staccato characteristics so it is performed like every other program you've ever skated?

And from Papadakis: "Four years ago, we didn't start with an Olympic medal hope. Then we realized it was possible."

What was their first clue? Even they are saying they knew they weren't skating to an Olympic level but suddenly were getting scored as if they were.

If you took a snapshot mid-twizzle rotation of any pair of ice dancers more often than not there will be moments out of sync, and then they catch up by the exit, but these two. What did this sort of execution win in Pyeongchang? World record? Explosive GOEs?

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I’ve get a wry enjoyment out of Gilles and Poirier, still doing their thing all these years after Poirier controversially jettisoned Vanessa Crone, still essentially occupying the same spot, still cheesy. If Poirier had known he'd be treading water in 2019 with the same goal just about the same distance away he might have jumped off a building.