Women’s Figure-Skating Finals 2022

Before I quote from any terrible articles below, I’ll give my take on the women’s figure-skating finals (long program).

Trusova was an absolute physical powerhouse, nailing jump after jump after jump, but not exactly linking it all together with very much style. Sarah Van Berken neé Meier, moderating for SRF in Switzerland, said that she would have been in the top 10 for men with those jumps. It was an exciting program, but my viewing partner said it was “ugly”, compared to Sakamoto, who is a very pretty skater, if not as physically bombastic.

Shcherbakova was a lovely skater and was also very powerful and technically amazing. She absolutely deserved the gold medal. Trusova should probably have gotten third, except that she got an unreasonably high presentation score—it was only about four points under Sakamoto, which is hard to understand.

The Japanese in general were very pretty skaters, with Yuzuru Hanyu putting in a gorgeous, languorous routine that looked like he didn’t even know anyone was there. He never two-footed, he never rested, every move was part of a poem he expressed with himself and his skates. Amazing. Trusova did not look like that. Neither did Nathan Chen: his routine was great, but very different and not nearly as pretty, although it was artistic.

Back to the ladies. Valieva fell four times. She did the same routine absolutely flawlessly in the team competition. She had already handily won the Russian and European Championships in 2022 (setting world records for points) and won the junior world championships in 2020. She has been accused of taking an illegal substance. The team medal she won with Russia hangs in the balance. If she’d won this competition, there would have been no medal ceremony because it, too, would have been tainted. We are not supposed to know about this because she is 15 and she is supposed to be protected. But she is also from a very shitty country called Russia, so tongues wag and rules are not followed in the urgency to accuse Russia of not following rules (both in the U.S. and in Switzerland).

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that she threw the final so that her two countrywomen could take the medals. In all likelihood, without the accusation, Russia would have swept the women’s medals. Instead, they got out of the way and had her fall her way into fourth place, which she did admirably well. It was relatively easy convincing a world who’d spent a week calling her a criminal and monster that the nerves had gotten to a 15-year-old. I don’t think that that’s what happened, though. I think Russia or the IOC or all of them told her to fall on her sword instead. She was probably even remunerated handsomely for it. Those weren’t tears of loss: she was learning how bad it feels to choose the best possible option of several bad ones. At 15, she has learned the lesson of the world. She’s young; she’ll get another chance.

The NYT is a dumpster fire

I couldn’t even really begin reading articles like Why the Beijing Olympics Are So Hard to Watch by Lindsay Crouse (NY Times) or After a Disturbing Night, Concern Rises for Teenage Skaters by Juliet Macur (NY Times) because they’re so incredibly opinionated—even though they’re not in the opinion section of the newspaper. That absolutely doesn’t seem to matter in any way anymore. I’m not sure if it ever did, but I feel like it must have, decades ago.

This is how Crouse starts her “article” about the Olympics.

“Imagine a dystopian Olympics. Maybe it would have athletes skiing on fake snow down parched slopes. Robots mixing cocktails, making dumplings and disinfecting the air. Events staffed by workers not in sportswear but hazmat suits. Instead of a stadium you are eager to sit in, a bubble you cannot leave.

“They’re being staged in a country whose persecution of the Uyghurs has been called a genocide by the Biden administration, and yet China had a smiling Uyghur athlete light the Olympic torch as Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin looked on, two autocrats seated together in the V.I.P. box.”

Imagine a country that invades whomever the fuck it feels like whenever the fuck it feels like it constantly heaving broadsides against other countries, all the while never once being call on its bullshit or, heaven forfend, even being considered to be banned from hosting or participating in the Olympics because of its monstrous crimes. People won’t shut about the slap in the face that is letting China host the Olympics, but no-one ever says anything about the U.S. It doesn’t even occur to anyone that they might be applying their principles somewhat unevenly.

Or, after a week of relentlessly dumping on Russian skaters, the Times now sends out Macur to write,

“Finding a way to protect teenagers inside an authoritarian sports system like Russia’s will be challenging. No doubt girls and women fear speaking out because of possible reprisal against them or their families. Setting up an independent group to provide oversight there is not as easy as it sounds.

“This is Russia we’re talking about, the country caught switching out urine samples in a doping scheme at the 2014 Sochi Games so its athletes could win.”

Obviously, America’s only concern is for the children. Sure it is. Quit your bullshit, you utter hypocrites and monsters. It’s fascinating to watch a country talk about other countries’ abusive systems when they just had one of the greatest child-abuse scandals in history in their own women’s/girl’s gymnastics program. In that case, it was sexual abuse, completely unrelated to the training program. You can argue that a training program shouldn’t abusive, but you could pretend to some humility when your own house is shattered glass.

It’s unsurprising that this kind of bullshit fills the pages of the New York Times. Their agenda has been clear for a while now: provoke war with Russia, by any means possible. I would imagine it’s a good trade-off to retain whatever advertising funding that they have remaining. After having predicted an invasion on the 16th of February—smack-dab in the middle of the Olympics—the front page on the same day looked like this:

NYT Front page on 19.02.2022

No humility, no remorse, no surrender. They have their marching orders from the military-industrial complex.