Yea, he is so young. I wonder those hard falls will eventually take its toll on his health, the same concern as Tracy and Kurt often express about Oda's bending knees. I'm curious: Are skaters trained to fall in a certain way so that the possibility of injury can be minimized?
I came back from Quebec yesterday. Boy it was so exciting. I had a luck to ran into Dai again and again till he started to greet me. What a luck!
I became so euphoric that I lost my mind to see programs with cool head.
Dai was just so sensual on the ice that he made some women fainted during his FS!!
Nadine, you are right. He is Elvis on the ice, Nick Slater said so too. Unbelievable charisma and sexuality that even affected the male audience in the arena.
No wonder there are so many Japanese fans following him all over the world. He is just that attractive.
I am not happy with Chan winning free with so many mistakes, but I am still in the afterglow of this fantastic experience, so it does not matter to me right now.
I will see his blues again and again tonight till I go to sleep.
Good night guys.
What so many people seem to forget is that Patrick is only 20 y.o. too and hasn't reached his prime either. He's going to be truly amazing when he does.
You must have made quite an effort to read such a thing into skatinginbc's expression of concern.
Not at all. I'm saying it's too soon to tell, and they may end up improving more as performers than as technicians and jumpers. It's worth noting that both Patrick and Javi have been competing senior from a relatively young age; Javi made his debut at Euros and Worlds before he'd even turned 16, though he mixed in junior events during his first few seasons. This is similar to the older skaters whom I mentioned in my previous post, and not that common among current skaters. So while both are young, they are probably more around the midpoint of their career (actually, assuming Chan at least will retire post-Sochi, he's in the second half of his career by now). I don't know what sort of toll all this might take on a skater's body.
Sorry that it came across that way. I'm not a skater, so I honestly don't know if there is a "correct" way of falling or not. I roller-skated once and fell butt-first. It hurt like hell and I hardly could stand up and walk after that. Chan is training difficult jumps (e.g., 4S); his difficult footwork and transitions sometimes cause falls as shown in his competitions. Given the difficulty level of his programs, I imagine he must have suffered a lot of falls during his daily training, more so than other skaters. One thing stood out about his falls in competition is that he recovered really fast as if they didn't bother him at all. Yet I remember Yuzuru fell once and missed a great part of his footwork. Again, is there any "secret" way or safe way for falling? Or did Chan simply swallow his pain and resume skating? If the answer is the latter, I'm concerned. I'm afraid those hard falls would eventually take a toll on his health. Personally, I would not trade health with Tara Lipinski's gold medal and I believe a sport should be designed in such as to minimize health risk. For instance, poor jump techniques lead to injury and so they are discouraged with edge deduction and so on. Similarly, a fall might cause injury and so the deduction for it should be great enough to discourage skaters from taking risk more than what their body can handle.
That's interesting because within the last few days I saw one of the men save a jump in a way that made me fear for his knee. I've watched so much skating recently that I couldn't tell you who it was. Skaters may know how to fall, but if they can save their jumps, probably most of them would, risky or not.
)Skaters are getting old too, even our favorites.
