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?

***

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.

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.

GOE changes.

If a judge or team of judges is going to give a mediocre (or even poorly executed or barely executed) move a +3, there will be no problem awarding the same move by the same skater(s) a +5. As everyone has already remarked. It's cosmetic b.s. that won't affect the rankings.

Alina Zagitova.

I enjoyed this. I think only Russia can produce figure skaters who win the Olympics but come back with the drive of a runner up. She's not skating as if she won, she's skating as if she pep talked herself all summer and this time, damn it, she can do it. She's got more power and speed. War horse music and then some in both programs, but Carmen is fantastic figure skating music, and the music is supposed to support the skater, not vice versa. Phantom of the Opera I'm meh about but in a women's short with lots of cuts, it's fine.

Ok.

I've read all the comments over the past couple of years that report what is really going on here (above, and by here, I mean Zachary Donohue and Madison Hubbell), but I have no first hand information. If the comments are correct, then I just can't.

I saw this when it was first published, obviously, but who took the picture 
or was Meryl's right hand holding a selfie stick?

IMO (and obviously this is not a unique position) just about everything has devolved into the lowest common denominator of self-promotion.

Fedor. Red carpet appearance. His lovely bride
to be is out of frame to his right. No point in showing
her because it's the same facial expression she has worn
99.7% of the time she has been in front of a camera lens.
She is one of the mysteries of my time.

I think this year Hubbell & Donohoe will win most of the silver medals in competitions shared with Papadakis and Cizeron and the rest of it will be P&C's uninterrupted march toward 2022 gold. Of all the ice dancers in ice dance history, this is the one the ice dance decided should be as unchallenged as Grishok Platov in their day, while ice dancers with actual talent, Virtue and Moir, were treated as disruptive and a problem. It's because of this we have the Shibs and W&P sitting things out. There is no point. The Shibs have already won all the silvers.

It's never going to happen. There will always be something to promote. They're going to be on the public stage the rest of their lives, and at that point what with all the doubling down and raising the ante, they'll consider the price of coming clean too overwhelming and, as with most people who double down on something wrong or are on the losing end of a sunk cost fallacy, they'll become more convinced the initial lie was right. Maybe if we have WW III they'll decide it's ok but I'd bet that they wouldn't want to distract from world events.

About lies, I've been watching a bunch of youtube on how to spot a liar (it's a super popular topic these days along with analyzing narcissism). The body language info that was most interesting made the point that stress is much easier to spot than deception, and if you see signs of stress when someone is speaking, that can be a tell. Well, actually, you will see signs of controlling stress. Self-touching, exhalation, lip biting, rubbing one's arms or legs. And blocking - arm crossing, eyes averting. Virtue and Moir, when really lying, between the fixed eye contact and faint smiles (Tessa), and the strenuous self-pacifying we see from Scott, were almost a parody of lying tells. I used to wonder if they were trolling on that basis alone ("We're pretending to be terrible liars.")

Dr. Phil comes along, however, and is not a huge fan of body language tells. He believes there is one major thing that will tip you off - someone telling you shit you never asked. Too much detail. Going on and on. Explaining why and how what you say is true.

On that basis:

Tessa and Scott. The W Network
Case closed.*

*I read a 1930s movie star's autobiography. Towards the very end, she goes on for paragraphs explaining to us why she and her long time leading man and close friend never slept together. They loved each other dearly, she explained. From time to time he'd have a crush on her or she'd have a crush on him and the other one would keep it in check. Why is it so hard for people to understand that the closest, most intimate, most beloved friends who sync together effortlessly can have the tenderest feelings of love but not do the deed? This was a duo where nobody (in the show biz media or show biz history, or among fans) has ever insinuated they DID sleep together, but she throws this in. It raised a whole bunch of flags to me but I didn't know why. Now after hearing Dr. Phil, I know what it is.

When Tessa Virtue was fat

Tessa Virtue has been fat twice in her competitive career.  The first time in Sochi:

She was called fat by numerous bystanders in figure skating, coaches of competitors, etc., all of whom are going to burn in hell for it. I wonder what ALL of them got out of parroting the party line. Their teams didn't get dumped? Their teams got a boost? What?

After Sochi, she wasn't fat anymore. Then as soon as Virtue and Moir returned to figure skating, she was immediately fat again when VM began competing against Papadakis & Cizeron.

Fat. Not really fat for a PERSON, but
for a skater, come on.

You want to look like this:

The ideal skater and dancer bodies.
As ever, words cannot describe.

Maria Tallchief. Once married
to George Balanchine, which
is odd because he was the main
guy who influenced the ballerina
wraith, launching a generation
of eating disorders, drug abuse and
nicotine diets. His era of influence
waning, body-type wise.

Darci Kistler in her prime. If she had
only been a wraith, perhaps she'd have
been more successful.

Ashley Bouder, principal dancer with
the New York City Ballet. She's fun.
Look her up.

Julie Kent. Principal dancer with
the American Ballet theatre 1993-2015.

***
When I started this blog somewhere around early 2011 (I'll look at the archives later) fake news (a/k/a "propaganda") wasn't widely perceived to have been mainstreamed. Virtue and Moir's lies about their relationship was a seemingly home brewed enterprise that seemed equal parts "protect the privacy of the kids" and "give the hometown friends and family (and the spotlight hungry at Skate Canada, and the complicit media) something to make them feel involved and important." It was marked by an unnecessary malice and poor sportsmanship, tackiness and contempt that stood in unpleasant relief vis a vis the Moir & Co. incessant bragging about core Canadian values. It didn't have the most professional sheen. Many people outside any sort of fandom could see pretty easily what was going on. For those that knew what was going on for other reasons, it was like a two way mirror where you could see and hear people talking shit about you behind your back. "Oh, they can't hear us! We can mock them!"

When Virtue and Moir did their reality show, the blog noted that, apart from Virtue and Moir being ice dancers, "Tessa and Scott" stood alone in the universe of reality shows as complete fabrication. Not even the premise was true. I said the premise of other reality shows, from the Kardashian output to the various Bachelor iterations, were essentially real even if the format and plot developments were warped. I.e., - the Bachelor(ette) is an unmarried individual in a cast of other unmarried individuals. The Kardashians ARE a blended family. Etc.

I don't think that's the case anymore. Lots of things have joined the W Network's "Tessa and Scott" as a complete fake masquerading as a realish life narrative.

****

1. There was a lot of pushback when Forbes named Kyle Jenner a "self-made billionaire."  This for a young woman fronting what is essentially a glorified license agreement. The pushback featured a word that's become nearly radioactive (not to me, but to some) - i.e., "privilege." I know just seeing it and some people stop reading.

Don't be delicate. Be vast and brilliant.

That's officially (for now) Tessa Virtue's favorite quote. It's innocuous as a mantra for an elite athlete (although some day I'd like her to explain how one becomes "vast", or is able to choose brilliance), but as words to live by, it's insipid and exclusionary.

I'm not fond of the "follow your passion" truism - it's not real. It avoids dealing with or even acknowledging the many inherited privileges that make that pursuit possible for very few at a young age, while, due to systemic realities, it's out of reach for most people due to the mundane need to, you know, survive.

And let me say that's quite a favorite quote from someone as chickenshit - and procrastinating - as Tessa (and Scott) when it comes to something that would require real, non-instagramable maturity, courage, conviction, and honesty - outside the bubble of her sport where they exist as exceptional. It would require humility. They prefer the marketable kind of courage and passion.

Most people can't follow their passion (there was lots of pushback on the Kyle cover but this from "ManRepeller.com" was my favorite. It makes no bones.)

2. Read the below on tumblr from a woman claiming to work in pr - it's something we already know, but it nutshells things so well:

Do you want to know who the pioneers of “Fake News” are? The PR firms and the PR teams. We CREATED “Fake News” to sell you the truth we want to depict. “Fake News” is both a PR generated concept and a result of dangerous PR games.

This tumblr vent went on to say that the goal of ALL pr - her agency's goal, every agency's goal, is to make people feel bad. I think Virtue and Moir succeeded with that one (remember "Hi, I'm up and at 'em early on instagram on Scott's birthday solely to make the point that you CAN'T MAKE ME wish him happy birthday on this platform."). She CAN feel him up on a nationally televised reality show though, as part of their 2014 Olympic prep - isn't that sort of thing the primary reason one hires expensive ice dance choreographic talent?

They have boundaries only when they're not getting paid to to violate them. If someone offered them big bucks to come clean, they'd lose their scruples, I promise.

Virtue and Moir were little amateur trailblazers in the fake news arena, but there was a tidal wave right behind them and they jumped aboard.

Both Scott and Tessa do a lot of "empowerment" signaling (I ripped that off from virtue signaling, and how I hate the word "empowerment) while sustaining a ten year history of gaslighting their fans, who are mostly women. It's exploitation at its most basic, and built upon the inherent inequality. Nobody can argue that Tessa and Scott didn't manipulate and lie above and beyond, a hundred times over than what was arguably necessary to "protect" whatever they claimed they were protecting.

They were aware of what was being said by fans, and fed it back, even when it contradicted earlier narratives. They didn't have the common respect to account for discrepancies - it was always out with the old that we previously insisted you to believe, in with the opposite. Fans were like a bug you poke under a magnifying glass.

They were often uber-controlling, overheated and intense about it, trying to crawl into fans' heads, which I've never understood. They always made fans wrong, even about the skating (fans loved Carmen, Virtue and Moir claimed they didn't),.

I never understood why they needed to humiliate fans so completely. It's still humiliation even if the victims are unaware. What was behind the overkill? Maybe their competitive spirit, which shows itself even in an unequal contest. Or maybe it's greed.

Their fans are mostly women of a demographic that is probably least valued in north American culture, and therefore least respected.

From time to time, Virtue and Moir will issue a straightforward and sincere statement, as they did when Denis Ten's murder was reported. They did the same when they supported the right of women in sport to be free of predators. But IMO, it's not possible to really have it both ways like that. Their sincerity is poisoned. You have integrity, or you don't.

*And of course, what about those who don't have a passion to follow? Is that ok?

The butthurt on Cizeron Papadakis
still makes me ragey. How totally unfair
to have skating and dance in ice dance.
Shouldn't the sport
had thrown even more points at their errors
while dinging VM for imaginary mistakes? The
stress they went through all season knowing
it wasn't going to be 100% a gift! Only 98.7 or so.

Back before their first Olympics, I wanted Virtue and Moir to have the same resume as G&G  - they were in a similar universe of their own. When they weren't allowed to take home the gold in 2014, I equivocated with myself that G&G didn't compete in the 1992 Olympics, but rather the one after. Then VM won 2018, justice had snuck in through the back door, and I began seeing their resume as on par with G&G. I'm only talking resume, purely out of context.

There is actually an area where Virtue and Moir's resume stands above G&G's, and above not just skating teams, but all figure skaters who ever competed in more than one Olympics. Have any other Olympic figure skaters been perfect in every Olympics in which they competed? G&G's LP at Lillehammer had a number of small glitches (while their nearest competitors had made their own roughness a feature, not a bug, and G&G's technical purity was their feature, so of course, many fans considered the result unfair). The media is not really allowed to acknowledge that Virtue and Moir were perfect in Sochi, but they were. That is extraordinary. I don't think there are any other figure skaters as absolutely purpose-built for that level of competition. Scott sang through all of it. (It's not noted as much that Tessa sang with him in the Pyeongchang fd, but she did.)

It's heartbreaking in a way that the most extraordinary ice dancers in history competed at a time when being good at skating was actively discouraged by the sport, where it was considered problematic, where everything on earth was done to artificially level the playing field to the point of humiliation.

I appreciated this from them:

VM address abuse-free coach_student environment

Virtue and Moir attempting one of
Papadakis & Cizeron's L4 competitive lifts.

Virtue and Moir in the Globe and Mail

Concluding paragraph.

They’ll have other projects to announce soon, they said, and new collaborations to begin. The next act for Canada’s Tessa and Scott may look a lot different from what we’ve seen so far.

These bitches. No it won't. Even if they decide to lift the veil on their more compelling unseen collaborations, new is not the word for any of them.

I'm discussing this article out of order because I did like this part near the end:

Moir and Virtue are a little less eager to do their own choreography. They skated one of their pieces at Pyeongchang – a flowing, elegiac tribute to Gord Downie, set to The Tragically Hip’s Long Time Running. But “we tend to steal from ourselves,” Moir said; and when working alone, they miss the perspective of what Virtue calls “the outside eye.”

Good. Long Time Running was, to me, as meh as most of their show dances, and the Gord Downie backstory was no help.

The article's author, Robert Everett-Green, observes that ice dance inhibits dancing, because you can't "stop and dance."

No worries. Ice dance rules and criteria have worked hard to get us to where teams are mostly stopping and "dancing". Our current world champions, Papadakis & Cizeron, seem to feel that the skating part of what they do is a pretty unfair expectation of Olympic athletes as extraordinary as themselves. That's for show boaty, cheap ass vulgarian panderers like Virtue and Moir (right, Madison Hubbell?).

Ice dance rules and regulations have developed to where teams are incentived to ignore as much as possible the fact that the medium is ice. Ice dance has eaten its own tail at this point.

Tessa says:

The impetus for our movement as a pair should be quite similar to that of the ballroom world. But we have just that forward-backward plane of motion with our blades. It’s very tough to transfer ballroom technique onto the ice, to give the illusion of the proper hip motion and position, with the speed and glide of the blade.

I don't know why Tessa bothers. Except that Virtue Moir have to execute proper technique to have a prayer, and other teams do not. Well, the Shibs have to do it too.* If it's not done perfectly, we hear from analysts - who have just cribbed the info from something they've overheard - that the reason the Shibs and/or Virtue and Moir didn't win was flawed execution of a technical detail. Other teams can ignore the whole translate dance into that forward/backward plane of motion bit, and break world records. Other teams win via creating "a special feeling." Virtue and Moir had to perform per archaic technical standards that don't apply to ice dance anymore, that have been stripped from the game.

When Virtue and Moir were not awarded the gold medal they won at the Sochi Olympics in 2014, we heard that they were artists, but Davis White were the technicians. When, via a magical, perfect storm that thwarted political intent, they crushed the field in 2018 Pyeongchang and were allowed to eek out a win, the narrative positioned Papadakis Cizeron as perhaps not the strongest technicians, but divinely gifted artists. Denied acknowledgment of both technical and "artistic" high cards over the course of 8 years, Virtue and Moir are currently positioned as cunning performers who win by hiding careless execution behind a cold, bold, and somehow unfair confidence. They're scary. And kind of cheating. They're practically Russian.

I don't think Virtue and Moir care, though. They have the gold, they won gold, even though it's the only gold medal win I can think of that is both deserved, and sticks in the craw. It's pretty much living in my craw.

You have to figure out how to incorporate the lateral movement and still keep the flow and integrity of the skating,” she said. “We try to give the effect of ballroom, but we often have to get there through very different means.

Well, they have to. Others, no.

Article:

In dance terms, their Moulin Rouge routine had a ballroom base, a lot of balletic movement in the arms and bits that looked more contemporary. It’s the last category – the one least favoured by the conservative standards of their sport – that they most want to expand in their non-competitive ice dancing.

"Bits that looked more contemporary" is one of my favorite ice dance terms.

Those are descriptive generalizations. But, as we all know, ice dance is now whatever you want it to be, as is only proper in an elite Olympic sport. Conservative, it ain't. If the right deals are in place, you can slop it up out there however you want.

P.S. - are we still describing Papadakis & Cizeron as humble flower childy skaters too sensitive for the competitive world who somehow win because they summon magic, but it's all about the feeling for them, or can we jump on ahead to where they actually are - we deserve it all, and any contrary result is inherently unfair?


*Which makes them both better off than a number of other teams who are never going to get on the podium no matter what they do.