Helene

Plushenko was about to speak, but Mishin, his coach, told him not to. That is why he turned down the chance to do the interview with NBC. According to some of the play-by-play I've been reading, Weir was about to do the flip, but there was a rut on the ice, and he circled around the rink before attempting the jump again. But earlier in the program, it looked like he had forgotten his choreography. Weir had a hard season. In his intereviews, Q&A's, and journals, he described how he knew Tarasova was returning to Russia to work for the Russian Figure Skating Federation, and that his summers in Connecticut were over. Tarasova choreographed a free skate to Liebestraum, but it was difficult for him to tell her that he just didn't feel the music. She then choreographed a program to music by Mrvica, some of which Slutskaya used for last year's free skate. USFS monitors told him the levels weren't high enough. He felt like he was betraying Tarasova by changing the program around, after all of the work they did on it. Then, after US Nationals, he said he watched the tape, and he was bored watching it. That's when he reverted to Otonal with changes.

I've seen him live a number of times, and I don't know if I've seen him more intense when he dug into his toenails to pull out his qualification and short program skates in Moscow last year. His dullest performance I thought was at DC Worlds, but he blew off the roof at 2003 Europeans with what I think was his best ever long program, St. Petersburg 300, which he followed with his Nijinski tribute in 2004. To me, Yagudin and Plushenko are like Sobikov and Smirnov or Tebaldi and Callas. Completely different animals, with a small subset who like and appreciate both for what they are, and in the case of Plushenko/Smirnov/Callas, in spite of or because of their excesses. Mathematically, that would be true if Lambiel, Joubert, Takahashi, and Sandhu landed all of their jumps -- which has happened once in the last two years, for Lambiel in his quali round at Moscow -- but what he needed to do today was to do the number of jumping passes he is allowed, which means one three-jump combo, two two-jump combos, and five solo quads, triples or 2Axels. He did seven jumping passes, leaving out one, and only completed eight jumps, instead of the 11 he's allowed. He said if he felt good today, he'd do the quad, but if he felt like "Nick Nolte's mugshot," he wouldn't. The bus schedule changed from once every ten minutes to once every half hour, and he was late in getting to the arena. It sounds like he felt more like Nick Nolte's mugshot, and he substituted a 2Axel in place of the quad.

The first live competition I attended was the European Championships in Malmo in 2003. The stadium is beautiful, not like the hockey barns we have in the US. That was when I first saw Berntsson. His skills are so much more impressive live than on TV. There are a few sources for viewing skating online, if you have broadband internet access. One is CCTV5, which can be viewed through the pplive site. It's in Chinese, but there's a link in English. It requires Windows Media v.9 or higher. Through this shareware, you can choose CCTV5 from the channel listing. They broadcast nearly all of the skaters for the Grand Prix events in the fall, the European Championships, Four Continents, and a lot of the Olympics, although for the Olympics, there's more competition for air time. I've had mixed results over wireless. According to the pplive people, the more online, the better the reception, because of peer-to-peer sharing. Another is an online service that is available only in Europe; I didn't get farther than being told I wasn't in the right territory: http://www.yle.fi/urheilu/mediasali/torino...inostream2.html There have been broadcasts from Brazil, with rather funny and non-expert commentary (Plushenko has been landing 4Axel combinations according to the commentators), and on Russian TV. Eurosport has been having live audio coverage. Please do -- we're watching them over the Internet, in spite of the US and even Canadian networks who focus only on the top competitors and those from the broadcast country. Berntsson has so many female fans on the figure skating boards, he could host his own harem I loved Pylkina/Hogner when I saw their free skate at Trophee Eric Bompard last fall. They have superb skating skills and the quietness of their blades was second only to Totmianina/Marinin. According to their ISU bios, they train under Pylkina's mother and in Moscow part-time. I'll be rooting for all of them, hopefully at the 2007 European Championships, if I can get to Warsaw next January.

Your Swedish young man, Kristoffer Berntsson is a wonderful skater, and made top 10 at Europeans last year. Like the Finns, Swedish skaters have wonderful, soft blades and edges. Sweden is part of a developmental program, along with Denmark, Great Britain, and a few other smaller federations, and the results are showing: Berntsson continues to improve, and Adrian Schultheiss has promise (although he beat out my sentimental favorite, Filip Stiller, who has been behind Berntsson forever, when finally, Sweden had a second spot at the European Championships). Lina Johansson is lovely, but she was, unfortunately, injured this year and not skating her best. The young pairs team of Pylkina/Hogner is wonderful with great basics, but one of them was injured before Europeans, and, as a result, they couldn't compete there to meet the qualifying criteria for the Swedish Olympic Committee. Berntsson has a big following among North American and European fans on the figure skating boards. He's one of the most admired OES (Obscure European Skaters, a term created on Figure Skating Universe), particularly for his creative programs. He should be earning 7's at least in his choreography and interpretation according to the written guidelines. It also doesn't hurt that he's very cute in a sport where just about everyone is good looking.

You beat me to it, Leigh.

That's an interesting thought. In several Balanchine ballets, there is imagery directly from religious paintings, and is one step removed. Examples are the finger-to-finger gesture between Terpsichore and Apollo before the pas de deux that echoes G-d giving life to Adam in the Sistine Chapel and the crossed-wristed, angular high-fifth that frames the face of the lead woman in Mozartiana, which Farrell recognized as the Madonna in a painting in the church she attended regularly. Then there is other biblical imagery in his Don Quixote, notably where Farrell's character dries the feet of Don Quixote with her hair.

I don't think it would self-injurious for either party to make it clear that they continue to meet, without commenting on the talks themselves.

Plushenko had a 2-point differential in the component scores over Weir. While technically the difference between 8.25 and 7.75 and 8.5 and 8.00 is the same, there seems to be a barrier between going over to the next point. Weir didn't average over 8 on any of the five components, and Plushenko did on four of five; the majority of judges haven't put Weir at that next level. The PCS are factored as "1" in the short program, and for Men, as "2" in the free skate. If the differential holds in the free skate, it will be magnified. A fall on a quad or triple jump (or combo or sequence) loses -4. To squander a 10-point lead in the free skate, Plushenko would have to fall three times or to go off program and do an illegal quad or combination or leave out a combo altogether. (An illegal combo is how he lost to Emmanuel Sandhu in the Grand Prix Final three years ago.) He has landed a 4Toe/3Toe/2Loop combination consistently for at least three years, and often has a second quad in his program. Plushenko skates first in the last group of the free skate, so he cannot decide whether to do the solo quad after having seen his competitors skate. However, his program has the highest base difficulty of any man in the competition, and he's been landing 4/3/3's in practice. Even when his landings are not the prettiest, the height and air position in his jumps usually compensate. And last year in Moscow, with a double hernia and without a quad in the qualification round, he was within one point of Lambiel's quad-filled, best performance in international competition. Weir has attempted one quad in competition ever (a fall), and even if he lands what he's done in practice (4Toe/3Toe/3Toe), that make up a little less than three points of his deficit, if Plushenko lands a 4/3/2. Weir is going back to his Otonal program from last year, which didn't even include all of the potential jumping passes that men are allowed. If he hasn't upgraded that program, and Lambiel and Joubert include their quads and skate relatively cleanly, silver is in jeopardy, because Lambiel and Joubert are within a few points of him.

I was thinking about this through four performances of Nine Sinatra Songs. Oh how my best fourth-grade friend and I used to make fun of her parents' "Strangers in the Night" 45**. And there I was the last two weeks, wishing the music would never end and trying to decide which Sinatra to buy and download. So why is the music on this show so inane and derivative from the 80's, when the great originals have all been reissued to CD and whose royalties have probably expired? When the judges complain that the routines are like disco, what do they expect when the dancers are dancing to disco? (**For those born in the CD age, vinyl played at 45 rpm's [probably not even an option on most of today's turntables].)