All Right on the Night
When Shizuka Arakawa stepped onto the ice tonight, my first reaction was, "What a great costume!" Toinight, it was more than the outfit that was great for the Japanese skater.
For Arakawa, it was possibly the performance of her life, and unlike the other top skaters, she hit every one of her moves. When she finished her routine, I said, without any prompting from the NBC commentators, "That's probably your gold medal there, baring a perfect night from Irina Slutskaya," because Sasha Cohen had made mistakes on her routine already. Slutskaya presumably knew when she came on the ice that she needed to skate a flawless performance in this, her last chance at Olympic gold. (At 28, she's considered an old lady when it comes to figure skating. Looking at her, I would have never guessed her to be that old. She looks like a teenager, or maybe a 20-year-old, to me. Maybe I am getting old.) She didn't get the performance she wanted. In fact, she made enough mistakes to end up slipping to third, so Cohen backed in to a silver metal, and Arakawa took gold.
The new scoring system is supposed to reward the best skater on the night, the one with the best performance, not just someone with a big reputation. From my non-technical point of view, it appears to have succeeded.
For Arakawa, it was possibly the performance of her life, and unlike the other top skaters, she hit every one of her moves. When she finished her routine, I said, without any prompting from the NBC commentators, "That's probably your gold medal there, baring a perfect night from Irina Slutskaya," because Sasha Cohen had made mistakes on her routine already. Slutskaya presumably knew when she came on the ice that she needed to skate a flawless performance in this, her last chance at Olympic gold. (At 28, she's considered an old lady when it comes to figure skating. Looking at her, I would have never guessed her to be that old. She looks like a teenager, or maybe a 20-year-old, to me. Maybe I am getting old.) She didn't get the performance she wanted. In fact, she made enough mistakes to end up slipping to third, so Cohen backed in to a silver metal, and Arakawa took gold.
The new scoring system is supposed to reward the best skater on the night, the one with the best performance, not just someone with a big reputation. From my non-technical point of view, it appears to have succeeded.