- Joined
- Mar 7, 2005
I like your take on this. Tara won in '98 but I preferred Michelle then and I always will.
I think Hamilton got it exactly right and as you stated it is not about who is best when they are on but about who skated the best that evening.
What about those of us who genuinely were not blown away by S&P's performance? Likewise, I was not that impressed with Tara at the time, I thought she had a lot of energy and excitement and skated well, but she lacked polish and maturity and just looked completely juniorish to me as an amateur competitor. While I like her in retrospect, that "it" quality that so many saw in that performance just never was that apparent to me.
There were still three judges who thought Kwan deserved the nod despite Tara's performance.
The problem with Hamilton's statement is not only that it completely ignores and oversimplifies the many thousands of variables that go into judging, but that it also assumes that there is a genuine unanimity in what the judges see and consider to be the best performance.
As for Clean vs Unclean, in pairs, the cleaner simpler performance almost never won over the more tentative and jam packed.
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