Opining on the Winter Olympics Women's Event (part 1): Surrealism at work

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How very poetic that the women’s short program started off with a Christmas song and ended with a song called “Now We Are Free.” The doping scandal that has hovered over these Winter Olympics was perhaps at its most overbearing yet yesterday during the women’s short program, where Kamila Valieva, the skater at the center of all of this, got to continue her Olympics despite a positive doping test taken during Christmas Day of last year.

It made an already surreal pandemic Olympics even more surreal.

When Valieva took the ice, the observers in the arena were split - loud cheers from teammates and supporters, and complete silence from those who disagreed with the decision to continue to compete. After she competed, the ROC team decided to pull her out of the press conference, as they knew she would be bombarded by questions. Now we carry the surreal into the free skate.

History made

We knew that there were a number of skaters who were ready to join the list of rare triple axel achievements in the women’s event. The short programs started with Anastasiia Shabotova and Mana Kawabe, both of whom have landed the axel in international competition before, but neither of whom could get it done in the short.

But in the second-to-last group, it was Wakaba Higuchi’s stunning triple axel that helped her join the list, becoming the fifth woman after Midori Ito (1992), Mao Asada (2010, 2014), Mirai Nagasu (2018), and Valieva in the Team Event to land that jump in Olympic competition. Her score reflected some harsh calls from the technical panel and she currently sits in fifth, but she will always have that triple axel.

Questionable component marking

It’s been a developing theme over the past few seasons, but it was surely on full display yesterday in the short program. Program components were created to be able to distinguish different aspects of a skater’s non-technical prowess - they were meant to be able to qualitatively and quantitatively distinguish those who may be great skaters but mediocre performers, or mediocre skaters but great performers. Yet as the IJS has progressed, the component marks have undergone more of a convergence.

How are judging panels not able to distinguish labored stroking from effortless glide in skating skills? Or impeccable attention to music timing from skating through big key music moments in interpretation?

You might as well go back to one “artistic” mark if you’re going to do that. And it’s not even in the right range for some skaters.

Uneven skating

Whether it was the Olympic pressure or the distractions of the week or some combination of both, the women’s short in general was not skated particularly well. Kaori Sakamoto had the skate of the evening, Anna Shcherbakova brought the best that we’ve seen from her this season, and Alysa Liu, Yelim Kim, Anastasiia Gubanova, and Eliska Brezinova found lots of magic in their performances.

But it was an overall uneven competition, with just 10 points separating 6th from 20th. Expect lots of movement in the free skate - it might give men’s skating a run for their money.