2/24/2006: Podium report, or "Dick Button's Lament"
I said that Shizuka Arakawa might sneak up and shut out both Sasha Cohen & Irina Slutskaya, and she did just that. In doing so, she won Japan's first medal in these Olympics, and its first skating gold medal ever. She's going to be such a superstar when she gets back home. I'm so pleased for her.
But overall Thursday night's skate finals failed to impress. Not because Sasha Cohen or Irina Slutskaya didn't win - I was rooting for them both along with Arakawa and a half dozen others - but because the whole night just fell flat after the triumphs of the short program. It showcased the pressure these kids are under and the fact that we expect impossible feats from them over and over again, and it also showed us the flaws of the new judging system in that virtually every program was the same, with the same moves and the same style (or lack of). Most of the skaters in every discipline are merely doing tricks now to earn judging points, and filling the spaces between with very little that's enjoyable to watch. Dick Button has complained about this stuff for two weeks now, and he's 100% right.
Aside from staying on her skates while most of the others bounced, Arakawa's routine included this unique backbend move, which may or may not have helped put her on top. The only other thing that was different by any of them was one of those very, very fast blur-spins by one of the girls. We used to see those all the time. Now it just seems to be about trends: everyone does the same moves, the same spins, the same spirals, even after they've completed whatever elements they're all required to do. That gives us non-experts an easy way to compare one to another, but something's missing.
Arakawa & Cohen were really the only ones who showed grace and elegance along with their powerhouse jumps and intricate spins, and that's too bad. All that seemingly effortless beauty is one of the reasons women's figure skating is the premier event of the Winter Olympics. It's clear to me that most of the skating coaches and trainers are overlooking something that used to be an integral part of a world class skater's curriculum: ballet training.
Nobody expected both Sasha and Irina would bounce, but that's how it goes. As amazingly talented as both are, it just seems like something's wrong when these are the silver and bronze performances:
If skating's only going to be about technical tricks and powerful jumps from now on, let's just ditch the music and sparkly costumes. Turn it into a purely athletic event and stop pretending it's something else. Or split it up into different disciplines like other sports do: have a jumping competition, a spinning competition, an artistic competition 
(keep the music & some sparkle for that, but hope it doesn't go where ice dancing's gone), and then maybe an all-around. Maybe the officials - and we viewers - are just asking too much of these kids by expecting that each of them can do everything, and we really have no right to be disappointed when they can't fulfull every aspect of this demanding sport. The talents it requires are just too many and too diverse, especially when every breath they take makes world headlines.. after all, they're just kids.
I wish the best to all of them, especially Irina Slutskaya & her mother; and Tugba Karademir, Turkey's first-ever Olympic skater, whose parents couldn't even afford to go to Torino to watch their girl skate in the Olympics after giving up everything to get her there.
