Claude Monet: The Seine at Port Villez, Snow Effect, 1885
Good evening, Kibitzers!
I know I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been seeing figure skating videos on YouTube lately. The Winter Olympics haven’t started yet, of course, but there are a bunch of fall/winter competitions whose results are posted now. I don’t remember what made me click on the first video, but since I watched that, it’s obvious to YouTube that I must need to see many more.
And it’s not wrong. I don’t watch many athletic events, not being especially interested in most sports, but the express purpose of figure skating is to be interesting and beautiful to watch, and it does succeed at that.
The names of the people competing in Olympic figure skating for the United States have been released, and it was pretty quick work to scroll through YT’s suggestions and find them all competing in an event within the last month or two. So, let’s have a look at them.
By way of an introduction, here’s a Today segment from a couple of weeks ago when the teams were announced. I paste it here because it gives a quick faces-and-names overview of the six “singles” skaters — in my opinion, it devolves into dopey “how does it feel” Q & A pretty quickly and there is nothing much at the end you’ll miss if you quit when you get bored. [4:58]
The Wikipedia page for Winter Olympics 2022 Figure Skating advises that this year, the International Skating Union has had the goodness to rename the “Ladies’ Singles” events to “Women’s Singles”. Excuse enough to start there!
Also, I’m starting with Mariah Bell, that ancient crone, all of 25, as we heard above, and having the nerve to think she can still skate! I swear, do people hear themselves? (Be aware that these clips are not quite as long as the video time I’m giving — there’s a minute or two at the end when they wait to hear a score.) [6:18]
Karen Chen, the only one of the three women with previous Olympics experience. [6:56]
Alysa Liu. Please note that we are fielding Olympic competitors who are younger than this blog. [7:48]
Men’s Singles: I’ll start with Nathan Chen. I was going to say that the general opinion seems to be that he walks on water, but then I realized they all do; it’s just frozen at the time. He’s certainly carrying some big expectations; I imagine he’s grown into them. If you have an extra 2:30, this link is to Nathan skating his Lion King program when he was seven (7) years old. OMG, the little hat with the ears! Anyway, this video: no hat with ears. Still quite impressive. [6:16]
Vincent Zhou. I believe this is my favorite costume of all those in this diary. I love the muted color and the judicious use of sparkles. This is not at all meant to trivialize his considerable skill as a skater; I’m just shallow. [6:50]
Jason Brown. I didn’t find a TV clip of him from this year, but this is a decent video shot by a spectator in the stands. Sadly, it lacks blathering commentators, but it’s just the one — they’ll be back. [3:51]
Just for some perspective, before we move on, on how the level of the sport has evolved, here’s some video from the 1948 Winter Olympics. It’s sort of a newsreel-ish format, but it does show some actual competition. That Olympics was at St. Moritz, and the footage serves to remind us that the skating was outdoors on a frozen pond and probably seriously cold. Dick Button, then 18 and representing New Jersey, was the men’s gold medalist, while Barbara-Ann Scott won the women’s gold for Canada. (Yes. Yes, he won it for New Jersey.) [6:27]
As an additional point of comparison, this bit of film is from the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France. Figure skating starts about 35 seconds in, with then-11-year-old Sonja Henie. More detail on the YouTube page about the people shown and the film itself. You can see that figure skating had already taken some big strides by 1948. [2:55]
So then: there are two categories for two people skating: “pairs” and “ice dancing”. The US team has two sets of pairs and three sets of ice dancers.
Pairs: Alexa Knierim / Brandon Frazier. This is the program they did in Grenoble in November, but all the videos of that event can’t be embedded — this is a “sendoff” exhibition they skated in California, so no scores or commentators. [2:54]
Ashley Cain-Gribble / Timothy LeDuc. [7:54]
Ice Dancing: Madison Chock / Evan Bates. [8:53]
Kaitlin Hawayek / Jean-Luc Baker. [6:14]
Madison Hubbell / Zachary Donohue. [8:05]
I have a few more skaters, but these next two videos are the two parts of a half-hour piece from the Olympics official YouTube channel about ice-dancing teams, not just from the US, gathering in Montreal over this past summer at the Ice Academy of Montreal, a specialized coaching/training facility for ice dancing, to start preparing for the Olympics in earnest. [14:45]
If you like process the way I do, I think you’ll find the two episodes interesting. The facility is run by a clutch of retired ice dancers with an extremely hefty list of awards and honors. Not all the coaching is in English, but the closed-captions work. [13:32]
Okay, more skaters. First, Caroline Green and Michael Parsons got edged out of the Olympics ice dancing team this year, but they presented this unusual program based on the style of Martha Graham, which they apparently choreographed mostly themselves, and I thought it was worth seeing. [8:08]
Apparently you have to be 15 by the previous July 1 to compete in the Winter Olympics and other “senior” events, so 14-year-old Isabeau Levito (like Dick Button, representing New Jersey) wasn’t eligible this time. She’s awfully good already, so if she keeps on in that direction, maybe next time. [5:29]
Now, all I have left is the US’s competition. Cha Jun-hwan will compete in the men’s singles for South Korea. What an excellent program this is! [6:15]
Anastasia Mishina and Aleksandr Galliamov will skate for Russia in the pairs event. The insouciance with which he flings her into the air above his head, where she spins in flight, is just one of the remarkable things about this. [6:11]
Two more Russians! Anna Shcherbakova, 17, is the current World Champion in women’s singles. Pretty much everyone’s been waiting to see her skate in the Olympics. I don’t understand the scoring system, but you don’t need point counts to tell you she’s a very gifted skater. [5:49]
And then, here comes 15-year-old Kamila Valieva who, unlike my homegirl up there, is old enough for the Olympics this year. A different video of her, which I posted in a KTK a few weeks ago, was what drew my attention to skating to begin with. Apparently she’s now the favorite for the women’s Olympic gold this year, supplanting Shcherbakova, and one can see why. So — I wish they could all win, but instead, we’ll just have to see what happens. [6:46]
⛸️ ❄️ 🏅
🦠 JFC, This Again 💉
SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine: Illustration by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank; doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-027. See link for description of what’s depicted.
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🦠 Epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding is a very informative Twitter follow concerning Covid, although not generally a comforting one.
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