Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Olympics: Men's Figure Skating - Short Program

Ohmygoddess!  I do not care what else happens in Vancouver tonight - I saw perfection in the form of - get ready for this - a NINETEEN year old French figure skater I'd never heard of prior to tonight.  But I think we shall be seeing and hearing a lot about this kid in the not too distant future:  Florent Amodio.

He's the current male French figure-skating champion, outskating Brian Joubert to win the title!  Wow!

What an amazing program.  I can only tell you what I saw - and I saw - perfection, and passion - and anger - and pain.  A young man not afraid of showing emotion, but not at all frou-frou.  Technically sound and as far as I'm concerned, pitch-perfect when it came to interpreting and skating to his musical selection.  I can't tell you what that was - I can only tell you that his performance brought tears to my eyes. 

He scored a personal best - above 75 points - under the new-fangled scoring system which is almost never explained to the audience.

I don't care what that asshole Pleshenko does tonight - this kid has him beat skate-wise and definitely class-wise in this figure skating fan's eyes.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I couldn't agree more!
Every element - whether physical, mental or artistic - was so thoroughly and beautifully delivered.
I understand he'll need to bump up the complexity of his jumps to go for gold; but, I am confused how he could have scored lower than Plushenko on spins, footwork, choreography, and? "GOE" (Please tell me what that is! If it's the equivalent of "je ne sais quois" then he should have scored higher there, too!
Strength, purpose, precision and beauty. That's what I saw from Amodio, and I cannot wait to see more!

Jan said...

Geez! I watched Plushenko's performance and thought it did not hold a candle overall to Amodio's performance. Yeah, he has tall jumps - well he's a tall skater relative to most of the other dudes. But I agree with Dick Button's analysis afterwards - he didn't say it in quite this way but what he meant was that Plushenko's performance lacked that "it" factor. And lots of flailing arms but not much interesting edge-wise. He's riding on his prior reputation and the judges are allowing him to do it. Hope they wise up soon! They seem to be open to other skaters. The Japanese champion Takahashi scored above 90 points too and is breathing down Plushenko's neck - in a performance that I personally found much more compelling than Plushenko's, far more musicality and emotion, but not as brilliantly performed as Amodio.

The judges obviously are giving the more experienced champions the higher spots - thought the new judging system was supposed to eliminate that. Yeah, right!

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