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Opining on NHK Trophy (2 of 2)
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Jeremy Abbott (USA) had a fantastic short
but faltered in the free skate. Is he over-
analyzing his skating and letting it get in
the way?
Photo: AP/Koji Sasahara
The American skaters are thinking too much.
Figure skating isn’t a thinking person’s sport, per se. So much of it has to do with repetition and muscle memory that any sort of second-guessing takes you completely out of the zone. And a lot of the skaters seem to be very analytical – we see that in the interviews, from Evan Lysacek to Jeremy Abbott to Ashley Wagner to Mirai Nagasu. While Lysacek seems to have dealt with his thinking much better during the past couple of seasons, Abbott and Nagasu, and to some extent, Wagner, seem to have a way of psyching themselves out during competition.
And it’s not to say that being self-critical is not a good thing, but if you are unable to get out of your head when you are out there during the few minutes that you are going through your program, it can be self-destructive. Coaches like to tell their pupils to just go out and skate, and it’s no joke – but in a sense, sometimes there is nothing more difficult than to stop thinking and just do it.
Injury timeout? Really?
Maybe someone should’ve told Yukari Nakano last month about this injury timeout policy. Nakano, who, like Yuko Kavaguti, dislocated her shoulder right there on the ice after a fall, chose to weave her shoulder pop-in into her choreography instead of going to the judges like Kavaguti did.
It was certainly a gutsy and admirable recovery, reminiscent of Dan Zhang in Torino when she fell on her throw quad salchow and looked like she had decimated her right leg, only to come back and skate well enough to win the silver with her partner Hao Zhang. But it makes you wonder if these injury interruptions are really appropriate. For one, what’s to keep skaters from feigning injury in the middle of their programs and getting a three-minute breather? And two, if a fall is really so serious that a skater is unable to continue skating, is it really a good idea to let them skate again?
One also wonders if there were sympathy Program Components Scores (PCS) that were handed out by the judges. Kavaguti and Smirnov’s average PCS in that free skate was 7.72, a good quarter to half a point higher than what they scored in the short and at either program at Rostelecom Cup. It’s a tough call, and I guess some will point to Tonya Harding at the 1994 Olympics and say that if she was able to get a restart due to her equipment malfunction, then why can’t skaters get a restart due to an injury (bodily malfunction?)?
Looking ahead to Skate America
There was news this weekend that Sasha Cohen has gone back to John Nicks as her primary coach after doing her season’s prep work with Rafael Arutunian. It still seems a bit iffy as to whether or not she will be competing this week, but everyone’s fingers are crossed that she will be able to make it to Lake Placid.
Previous: Opining on NHK Trophy: Part 1
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