Yuna Kim

Aww, everybody is so cute. I remember this pic. Mira's also in the there.

Speaking of ynkf- it's been a while since I visited the site, but I got a virus there yesterday. That is one of the reason I have avoided it for an entire month. I know a lot of people here go there, can anyone suggest a way to combat it? I have Microsoft Essentials and Malewarebytes, but for some reason it doesn't catch the rogue antivirus program until after the fact. I did send send a msg there a while back about the problem.

camion said:

Aww, everybody is so cute. I remember this pic. Mira's also in the there.

Speaking of ynkf- it's been a while since I visited the site, but I got a virus there yesterday. That is one of the reason I have avoided it for an entire month. I know a lot of people here go there, can anyone suggest a way to combat it? I have Microsoft Essentials and Malewarebytes, but for some reason it doesn't catch the rogue antivirus program until after the fact. I did send send a msg there a while back about the problem.

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I think they already fixed it..

I thought so too. But it literally took my computer two hours getting rid of the fake trojans and adware from the Windows Restore virus I got from there. I had to boot my computer in safe mode w/networking, uncheck my proxy server, etc.- a hassle I'd like to avoid because ynkf is my favorite Yu-Na page.

Check out this article: http://www.feverskating.com/fevers/53374044

Yuna wants to build an ice rink in Korea in her own name, one that can serve both as an exclusive training rink for figure skaters and as a competition venue for figure skating. It is revealed that her participation in the new show "Kiss & Cry" is part of a long-term strategy to maintain the visibility and public interest in figure skating in Korea. She also apparently has various "projects" in the pipeline to raise money for the ice rink.

If she's serious about this, I can't see her retiring from competition any time soon. She raises most of her money from commercials and sponsors by competing. She also maintains public interest and support for Korean figure skating by competing. :think:

ETA: Some interesting excerpts from the article...

Kim’s dream is to build an ice rink that is large enough to host competitions, not just a small practice rink.
The staff hinted that participating in the show is one of the first steps of Kim’s project.
She knows that keeping the public interested in figure skating is important and takes priority over raising money for the construction.

“It’s known that an ice rink costs about 3 billion won to build.
Her long term plan is to prepare funding for building the rink through various profitable projects.
After that she wants to build an ice rink in her name and help nurture the next generation of Korean figure skaters,” said the staff.

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Krislite said:

If she's serious about this, I can't see her retiring from competition any time soon. She raises most of her money from commercials and sponsors by competing. She also maintains public interest and support for Korean figure skating by competing. :think:

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I agree. Not just a wishful thinking (some people seem to wish she retired, though) but a realistic scenario. She is true to what she says. She has never said she generally enjoys competing but it seems that she is trying her best to do. Though she has not confirmed anything, she will possibly skip GP and will go to 4CC and Worlds next season.

I think this possible decision to continue is mainly because of the confidence in her physical condition as well as the role she willingly takes on as a pioneer figure skater in Korea. Yes, she is still prone to injury and had doubts about how much she could raise her condition preparing for Worlds. However, she worked hard and according to her, it was successful. She looks very fit and has a bit more muscles than before.

I don't think she participated in Worlds just to win but I think her definite goal was to win and as far as we saw her practice/warm up vids, it was not an impossible dream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A5FMSpnm0A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oPX91ewyTg (Look at her 2A-3T!)

Well, only if the first 3-3 in SP was successful...
I am not saying Miki Ando did not deserve win and I am not complaining. Anyway, some bad luck as well as other elements resulted in Yuna's defeat, I think.

According to my observation, Koreans begin to show more sympathy and support for what she is doing. Many people witnessed how hard and sincerely she trained in Korea and how consistent her techniques were. And she will do what she can do for big causes like charity, construction of ice rink and the olympic bid! They will understand even if she does not do every competitions.

Yuna will sing a Pyeongchang Olympic song together with a singer, Lena Park(Junghyun Park) and I am excited.
Lena Park, 35, is also known for her amazing voice and the resemblance in looks to Yuna.(except she is very tiny and short.)
http://koreangossipgirl.com/yuna-ki...sing-together-for-pyeongchang-winter-olympic/

If you want to hear Lena Park sing, try this. She sometimes hits super high notes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8crYjX7eam0

Some pics from Kiss & Cry.
http://sportsphoto.news.naver.com/themePhoto.nhn?themeid=23598&id=390161

sunny0760 said:

[...]
I think this possible decision to continue is mainly because of the confidence in her physical condition as well as the role she willingly takes on as a pioneer figure skater in Korea. Yes, she is still prone to injury and had doubts about how much she could raise her condition preparing for Worlds. However, she worked hard and according to her, it was successful. She looks very fit and has a bit more muscles than before.

I don't think she participated in Worlds just to win but I think her definite goal was to win and as far as we saw her practice/warm up vids, it was not an impossible dream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A5FMSpnm0A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oPX91ewyTg (Look at her 2A-3T!)

Well, only if the first 3-3 in SP was successful...
I am not saying Miki Ando did not deserve win and I am not complaining. Anyway, some bad luck as well as other elements resulted in Yuna's defeat, I think.

According to my observation, Koreans begin to show more sympathy and support for what she is doing. Many people witnessed how hard and sincerely she trained in Korea and how consistent her techniques were. And she will do what she can do for big causes like charity, construction of ice rink and the olympic bid! They will understand even if she does not do every competitions.

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I agree she looked very solid in practice, and had several clean run-throughs in Moscow. But as they say practice is just practice. It's very different from competition. I think the whole year off from competition, plus the fact that her first competition was Worlds, had disrupted her ability to handle nerves. A 4CC "test-run" would have gone a long way towards preparing her for Worlds.

~_~

Can we please stop hindsight blaming Yuna's decision to skip most of the season? It's not as if Yuna does significantly better at Worlds even when she skates a full season. In 3 of her 4 previous outings, despite skating a full season and coming in as the favorite, she made costly mistakes in the SP or LP to keep herself from winning. Remember her disastrous SP in 2010? This was after a season of seeming invincibility and nonstop wins. There is absolutely no guarantee that had Yuna skated a full season, she would've done any better at Worlds (she might have done worse, if anything).

There are very specific things that can be blamed on lack of preparation if a skater underperforms at Worlds after skipping the season, but none of these apply to Yuna. Let's go through them:

A) Program fails to maximize COP score. This can happen to skaters who never tested their programs under the rigors of actual competition under the COP. When blade hits ice, it actually turns out some jumps miss out on the distribution bonus, or a spin only gets a level 1, or some other snafu. This didn't happen to Yuna. All her levels were maximized, and all her jumps meant for the halftime bonus got that bonus.

B) The skater has lost his/her technical edge that earlier competitions would have reinvigorated. This didn't happen to Yuna either. She landed all the jumps/jump combos she did last season at one point or another in the SP or FS, and when they were on they were as huge and controlled as they ever were. And of course, she was even better with the jumps in practice. Now some may be tempted to blame Yuna's jump flubs on her skipping the season, but again, she has flubbed jumps and combos at past Worlds despite landing them beautifully the rest of the season.

Yuna came into the competition in top competition shape. She skated two programs beautifully, though she made some mistakes, it was no worse than most of her performances at Worlds. She won silver with a perfectly respectable score, she just got beaten by a skater who skated better that day. There's no shame in that. Yuna says she has no regrets and I say she is right.

^OK, SB, we'll stop.

We'll have more opportunities to test your theory that Worlds is just her bad luck competition. I doubt she can finance her own ice rink on the scale of the Staples Center or Moscow's Megasport Arena without a few more Worlds appearances.

It's a bit odd that Yu-Na's plan to build a rink was revealed by a production manager of SBS, which makes me wonder if SBS is considering collaborating with her on the project. The budget estimate cited in the article, 3 billion Korean won (about 3 million US dollars), sounds like for hard construction cost only for a simple practice rink. When the steep land prices in Korea and the maintenance costs are added, the total budget would be much higher, even if she could get some subsidy from a local government for a parcel of land.

If she's serious about the rink, maybe it's because she has concluded by now that it would not happen unless she takes initiative, after all the politicians and local government bodies, for whom she made many appearances for their PR and other promotional events, failed to deliver on their promises to build a rink dedicated to figure skating. When the talks for a rink were stalled (and eventually scrapped) last year at the City of Seoul and the City of Gunpo (where she spent her child and school years) on budget and financial viability issues, IIRC she pleaded that a lavish facility was not needed, that a simple practice rink would do.

According to the SBS person cited in the article, she now wants a rink with some spectator seating, not just a basic practice rink. If those words are true, my guess is by that she would mean a rink with seating capacity large enough for local competitions, not something with thousands of seats which would require serious figures in construction and operation costs. I don't know how concrete her plan is or how serious she's about it, but I do find it to be consistent with her previous remarks, in that she expressed her concerns that, while young Korean skaters had made big advances in their technical levels, but in general they lagged in skating skills for which a warm and less crowded rink dedicated for figure skaters' use would be needed, and that the Korean skaters needed to perform more often in front of audiences for development of their expression and performance skills, as she spoke from her own experience of having competed before empty seats in her early years.

Serious Business said:

Now some may be tempted to blame Yuna's jump flubs on her skipping the season, but again, she has flubbed jumps and combos at past Worlds despite landing them beautifully the rest of the season.

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But this is the first time Yuna missed a 3-3 at big competitions(5 Worlds + Olympics).
11 successes/12 tries(SP&LP) in 6 competitions.
Maybe the effect of the first jumping try(3-3 at SP) in 13 months? (Skating at the last order that Yuna wanted to avoid..) :think:

Sorry for my poor English.

Serious Business said:

~_~
Can we please stop hindsight blaming Yuna's decision to skip most of the season? It's not as if Yuna does significantly better at Worlds even when she skates a full season.

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I'm going to disagree with you a bit on this. Participating in preparatory competitions can certainly help reduce nerves, and I think that was the culprit behind Yuna's hiccups at 2011 Worlds. (Yuna's hiccups at 2010 Worlds was due to lack of motivation and emotional exhaustion after the Olympics IMO). Her consistent domination of women's competitions in 2008 and 2009 was much more indicative of what she could do when motivated and invested full-time in a competitive schedule.

EricRohmer said:

But this is the first time Yuna missed a 3-3 at big competitions(5 Worlds + Olympics).
11 successes/12 tries(SP&LP) in 6 competitions.
Maybe the effect of the first jumping try(3-3 at SP) in 13 months? (Skating at the last order that Yuna wanted to avoid..) :think:

Sorry for my poor English.

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I didn't know she was so consistent with her 3/3 at Worlds! Good for Yuna! But still, she has made silly mistakes on jumps before at Worlds at jumps she's consistent on - she splatted on her 3lutz in the SP in 2008, and botched her 3sal at 2009 Worlds, both jumps she's otherwise great at - so it's not unprecedented. She is clearly still capable of landing the 3/3, which she did in the FS as well as many times in practice. It's just bad luck that could've happened even if she skated the rest of the season.

jatale said:

I'm going to disagree with you a bit on this. Participating in preparatory competitions can certainly help reduce nerves, and I think that was the culprit behind Yuna's hiccups at 2011 Worlds. (Yuna's hiccups at 2010 Worlds was due to lack of motivation and emotional exhaustion after the Olympics IMO). Her consistent domination of women's competitions in 2008 and 2009 was much more indicative of what she could do when motivated and invested full-time in a competitive schedule.

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But she didn't dominate in 2008. She came in third at Worlds, despite competing a full schedule the rest of the season (and winning them all, too).

I would question Yuna's commitment if she showed up at this Worlds missing jumps, spin levels or projected with less than her usual intensity. But that wasn't the case at all. She just made small mistakes that are similar to ones she made in her previous outings at Worlds, and really they were smaller mistakes than all her previous Worlds except 2009, when she won. I find it hard to blame her schedule or question her commitment to winning. She skated two beautiful programs full of challenging elements, and beat everybody except the rightful winner.

Serious Business said:

I didn't know she was so consistent with her 3/3 at Worlds! Good for Yuna! But still, she has made silly mistakes on jumps before at Worlds at jumps she's consistent on - she splatted on her 3lutz in the SP in 2008, and botched her 3sal at 2009 Worlds, both jumps she's otherwise great at - so it's not unprecedented. She is clearly still capable of landing the 3/3, which she did in the FS as well as many times in practice. It's just bad luck that could've happened even if she skated the rest of the season.



But she didn't dominate in 2008. She came in third at Worlds, despite competing a full schedule the rest of the season (and winning them all, too).

I would question Yuna's commitment if she showed up at this Worlds missing jumps, spin levels or projected with less than her usual intensity. But that wasn't the case at all. She just made small mistakes that are similar to ones she made in her previous outings at Worlds, and really they were smaller mistakes than all her previous Worlds except 2009, when she won. I find it hard to blame her schedule or question her commitment to winning. She skated two beautiful programs full of challenging elements, and beat everybody except the rightful winner.

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What was most unusual about this Worlds was not Yuna's LP, but her SP. Her free skate at Worlds was actually one of her best ones in the last three seasons! Her only big mistake in the free was popping the 3Flip. Now if you compare her 2011 Worlds LP to her other LP's when she competed a full season, she has done much worse even in the Olympic season when she seemed unbeatable. In the 2009 Skate America, she practically had the worse free skate of her career. In the 2009 GPF free skate, she doubled her triple toe in what was supposed to be her 3Lz+3T, then two footed her 2A+3T. And of course in her 2010 Worlds free skate, she fell on a 3S and popped a 2A.

In the 2008-2009 season she made similar mistakes in the free skate at several competitions. Luckily for her, she's almost always had a very strong short program and almost never missed her opening 3/3 combo. That combo was both her cushion and her primary advantage over the other skaters. Missing that combo in the SP cost her the World title. She could have overcome that with a clean free skate, but that's much tougher for Yuna than a clean short program.

So while I agree with you that a full season likely wouldn't have made any difference, perhaps it would have been better for her sake to have her SP layout put the 2A first, followed by the 3/3. Many skaters in the 6.0 era used to do that, "warming-up" for their program by first doing a double Axel. A "warm-up" is particularly needed when you haven't competed in a long, long time.

Didn't Yu Na skip the 2008 4CC due to injury as well?

Additionally, is it really fair to compare two/three seasons ago with Yu Na of today?

I don't think it's the year off that did it. It's the year off + massive coaching change + commitment to a huge number of projects that did it, imo.

ImaginaryPogue said:

... I don't think it's the year off that did it. It's the year off + massive coaching change + commitment to a huge number of projects that did it, imo.

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I don't think the coaching change or her commitment to other projects had any significant influence in her preparation for Worlds. Out of fairness, I don't think she did bad, to begin with. She almost won, and it's not like we've never seen her skate worse before, even with the Yu-Na of the past including her Olympic season.

It was evident during the run-throughs and warm-ups that she was competition ready. She had retained her jumps and all, and it seemed to me she was even better conditioned than ever. Yu-Na herself said after the competition that it was not as difficult as she'd thought to get her condition back to the Olympic level, and that she felt she's getting physically stronger after each season.

About the coaching change, how much room can a coach have for improvement when he inherits someone like Yu-Na? It'd be like you were asked to become Woods' new swing coach after he regularly obliterated the scoring records and blew away the field by ten strokes. Given the post-Olympic letdown and the turmoil around the coaching change, I think Oppegard did an excellent job in keeping her focused and motivated enough to get her back to that competitive level.

About her commitments to other activities, since her ice shows in LA early October last year, she had no official or commercial activities, other than making a speech at AIPS Congress in late March. She gave up making the trip for Sport Accord in London and concentrated on Worlds. She had six months for preparation, which I think would've been enough. As usual she had a tremendous amount of risk-taking embedded in her programs, e.g., difficult transitions, the FSSpin immediately following the second 3Lz without any steps, the 2A only 2-3 seconds apart from the 3S at the symbals toward the end of her LP, etc. Of course, she had some bobbles with the jumps, but it can happen to anybody anytime, and I think overall she executed the difficult routines superbly, which indicated she had been ready. When she said she had no regrets as she did everything she could and was satisfied with the result, I believed it.

Did her skipping the whole season and coming directly to Worlds have any impact on her performance? I would say probably, considering that the botched 3-3 in the SP was her first ever in the event, counting back to her two Junior Worlds appearances. True, it's uncertain she'd have done better, had she had a preparatory event. But it seems commonsense that no amount of run-throughs or image training could substitute a real thing in getting rid of certain jitters and fine-tuning the programs. Yu-Na herself in a way acknowledged this, by hinting that she would consider going to one event before Worlds, if she continue competing next season.

Completely random, but did anyone notice that she didn't do her trademark Yuna (bent-leg layover camel) Spin in her 'Homage to Korea' program? :think:

If that's the spin Josee Chouinard used to do..I think everyone should leave it out.

colleen o'neill said:

If that's the spin Josee Chouinard used to do..I think everyone should leave it out.

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Biellmann didn't invent the Biellmann spin either.


Yuna had to leave out her signature spin from her LP, again because of the sudden and nonsensical rule change right after the Olympics. The new rule does not allow skaters to change edges more than once during a given spin take, and if she was to include her "Yuna spin" in a spin then she would not be able to receive a level 4. Just another example of tolls the new rule is taking on Yuna's skating. Yuna also had to opt out of her 2A-3T, a combo she so consistently performs and always receives high GOEs, because of the new 'no three 2A' rule. I mean, if ISU aimed to up the skaters' technical aspects of their programs through the rule changes as they claim, shouldn't they limit the number of double jumps instead of 2A? The rule change made Yuna opt out of more difficult and impressive 2A-3T and instead choose less technically demanding 3S-2L. Just a stupid rule change with a stupid reasoning and they expect us to buy that at face value.

aftertherain said:

Completely random, but did anyone notice that she didn't do her trademark Yuna (bent-leg layover camel) Spin in her 'Homage to Korea' program? :think:

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It's unlikely we're going to see her do the spin in her competition programs, unless they undo the rule change parma mentioned above.