World Figure Skating Championships

I spent the last six days at the World Figure Skating Championships, which showed up here in Boston. It doesn’t happen every day. It was a ton of fun.

I knew almost nothing about figure skating when we bought the tickets last year. I tried to study, although that was inevitably less successful than I’d hoped. Here are some observations.

• I spent a good deal of effort trying to learn to recognize the jumps: toe loop, loop, flip, Salchow, Lutz, and Axel. This was a mistake. First, distinguishing jumps is hard because they happen fast. The speed is more evident in the arena than it is on video, where the camera focuses more tightly on the skater. But, in terms of the sport, distinguishing jumps doesn’t matter much. You do need to recognize the easiest jump (toe loop) and the hardest (Axel). The others are roughly interchangeable: a triple Salchow is worth 4.3 points, a triple Lutz is worth 5.9, and there were 148.39 points in Alyssa Liu’s long program.
• There is some very fine skating in the early groups, which never get shown on television. I also thoroughly enjoyed attending practice sessions, and would have gone to more of them if I had the endurance. The Boston Garden’s seats are OK for an arena, but competition was more than eight hours a day, and one must sleep occasionally.
• Jeremy Jacobs owns Boston Garden. He’s not popular with sports journalists, or with me. There was a lot of cheese-paring visible at the World’s: for example, doors opened only 30 minutes before events, which is not sufficient time to admit 17,000 people with lines running around the block. $13.00 hot dogs — bad $13 hot dogs — are absurd. They pretend that each concession stand is a separate business with artisanal this and that, but they’re all the same and they all have the same (absurd) prices. $8 root beer? The afternoon and evening sessions are so close together that no one can get dinner other than those $13 hot dogs. The Garden did open a pair of water bubblers if you knew where to look, but hid them in order to sell $6 Coke-branded water.
• Most breaks were wasted with silliness and ads for skin care products en Français. This could, in my view, be better used by providing pointers to future events, to local skating organizations, and more history. Tenley Albright and Kristi Yamaguchi are right there, and might have interesting things to say.
• Fans agree: kiss and cry is intrusive but it's part of the thing, but the “leader’s chair” is just sadism. That said, one gets the impression that the skaters like each other well enough. That may be acting — a necessary legacy of Harding/Kerrigan — but if it’s acting, they do it well.
• Lots of cheers for the Ukrainian skaters, and also for skaters from Israel.
• I was lucky to find (via Reddit) an excellent Discord of welcoming Figure Skating enthusiasts started for figure skating podcast The Roundup.
• Jackie Wong @rockerskating, provides an amazing service. He attends the warmup programs and the competition and tweets, almost in real time, what jumps people are attempting and what happened. In practice groups, he sometimes records the jumps by the four or five skaters noodling on the ice and waiting their turn. It’s cryptic but not hard to learn, and it really helps to get a feel for what you’re seeing.
• Figure skating fans uniformly use the skaters’ first names or initials: it’s always Alyssa and Ilia, never Liu and Malinin. This can be even more cryptic than learning that 3L(u,step) means that the skater didn’t get around on the triple Lutz and had to use the free foot to prevent a fall. “I’m sitting next to Minerva” is not a sentence I expected to see.
• Figure skating fans are quite involved in long-term narratives and dramas surrounding their favorite skaters, and their favorites are not necessarily the people who spend a lot of time on the podium. Jason Brown, for example: he skated a clean free skate with no hope of winning, but people were absolutely delighted. See also Wakaba Higuchi. Also Deniss Vasiljevs (Latvia).
• Ilia Malinin, on the other hand, is obviously a generational talent. In a sport in which the winner is frequently determined by a margin of a fraction of a point, he won the Men’s competition by 31 points, and this margin surprised no one.
• Figure Skating needs a really good blogger.
• Skaters often come out into the arena, either to watch or to loosen up outside the confines of the locker room. This doesn’t happen in other sports: you never see Tanner Houck in the bleachers.
• At the concluding exhibition, a pairs team (I think Metelkina and Berulava from Georgia) did a wonderful gender-reversed program. Pairs rules are frankly sexist and really ought to be revised, but in this climate it takes some courage to say so. And it takes some athleticism for a small woman to throw a 6'1 man for a loop.
• One of the welcoming fans from the Discord group mentioned that the sport owes a debt to 3-time champion Kaori Sakomoto (silver medalist this time) for taking the focus off child abuse and the 2022 Olympic meltdown. In a real sense, the sport is still trying to find a solution to the scandal of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, where corruption in judging upended the sport. The new format is better, but I wonder whether there is a proper sport waiting to be facilitated by better structure.