http://nymag.com/fashion/10/fall/67510/index3.html
According to Weir, his sixth-place finish had less to do with his skating than with his relationship to glitter. “I felt going into the Olympics that I had very little support from my own country, from the U.S. Figure Skating federation,” he says one summer afternoon. “I went out there and I did everything I could possibly do, and I knew going into it that a medal wasn’t in my sights. It was political. In figure skating, there’s this thing, there’s a way that you can say, ‘Okay, if you help this skater, our skater, and promote him and push him to the top of the podium and help him get there, we will help yours.’ There’s a lot of that that goes on, and America likes to try and stay away from that issue, but everyone does it. I skated great, Evan skated great, we probably both should have been on the podium somewhere, but you know, the team official came to me and said, ‘We didn’t know you were going to skate like that.’ ”
........ “It’s very hard,” he says, “but you know, someone literally came to my coach while I was crying behind a curtain and said, ‘We wish we had known Johnny was going to skate that well, because we were pushing the two other Americans.’ And that takes balls to say that.”
According to Weir, his sixth-place finish had less to do with his skating than with his relationship to glitter. “I felt going into the Olympics that I had very little support from my own country, from the U.S. Figure Skating federation,” he says one summer afternoon. “I went out there and I did everything I could possibly do, and I knew going into it that a medal wasn’t in my sights. It was political. In figure skating, there’s this thing, there’s a way that you can say, ‘Okay, if you help this skater, our skater, and promote him and push him to the top of the podium and help him get there, we will help yours.’ There’s a lot of that that goes on, and America likes to try and stay away from that issue, but everyone does it. I skated great, Evan skated great, we probably both should have been on the podium somewhere, but you know, the team official came to me and said, ‘We didn’t know you were going to skate like that.’ ”
........ “It’s very hard,” he says, “but you know, someone literally came to my coach while I was crying behind a curtain and said, ‘We wish we had known Johnny was going to skate that well, because we were pushing the two other Americans.’ And that takes balls to say that.”