The Canadian Ladies

What can one say about Jennifer Robinson? She has been at it almost as long Martina Navatilova! A great tour de force. her LP, in fact all of her skates at Dortmund were ver special. A special praise for her for keeping the 2 places for Canadian Ladies in international competitions for all these years.

The torch is now passed to Joannie Rochette. If you have tapes of all her skates QR,Sp and LP, you will see the makings of a world champions, I still do not understand why she continued doing triple jumps after triple jumps without combos. I believe she was in a zone with a beautiful performancel and she got caught uop in the moement.

Other than Cynthia Phaneuf, who is soooo promising, I really do not know any other Lady skater in Canada, but I believe the two will be formidable in the Moscow Worlds! Do you?

Joe

Right now, for me at least, Cynthia is a in terms of her possible successes(baring a major injury of course) in the sport. Unfortunantly, have not yet seen her skate, so I cannot make any personal judgements. However, I have heard people praise her artistry and musicality.

IMO it would be interesting to see how she develops in comparison to Kimmie Messigner, Miki Ando and Katy Taylor who (IIRC) all placed higher than her at junior worlds recently. It should also be interesting to see how they do on an entire season as seniors.


But while she certainly sounds like she could be promising, she could also fall into the 'hot-cold' trap.

Joe, Joannie had 2 jump sequences (flip-turn-turn-toe, toe-turn-sal) in her long program. So that's not exactly comboless . She also said in the post comptition interview that she'll be working on a 3/3 so she can move up and compete with the top girls, which I was very glad to hear. Also, landing all her planned lutzes at Worlds was an enormous personal triumph for Joannie, and that let her enter the small group of ladies skaters who have a true lutz as well as a true flip! She was very close to making the top 6, and IMO she should have been at least ahead of Sluteskaya in the SP, and ahead of both Sebastyen and Koster in the FP at Worlds! Go Jo for top 5 in the very near future!!!!

Thanks for clearing all that jumping for me which Joannie did in her LP. She did have a much better skate than Irina, but Irina has such a presence that, I believe the judges have to make her look better than she was. This is not a bash of Irina. It's just that she was not at her best. Joannie was!

I'm not overwhelmed with Kostner and I believe Sebastyen whom I do like is at that age of not developing extra air turns. It looks good for Joannie to be in the top 5 next season if those 3x3s develop.

Joe

LOTS of skaters should have been ahead of Kostner in the FS. I still can't get over those four 5.7s, four 5.8s and a 5.9 in technical merit for a program with 4 clean triples and two disastrous and incredibly clumsy falls.

I guess since she trains in Germany, she rode in on the home country coattails.

I would have placed Kostner 10th in the FS, after Susanna Poykio and before Irina Slutskaya.

That would have left the final standings as:
1 Shizuka ARAKAWA
2 Sasha COHEN
3 Michelle KWAN
4 Miki ANDO
5 Julia SEBESTYEN
6 Fumie SUGURI
7 Joannie ROCHETTE
8 Carolina KOSTNER
9 Elena SOKOLOVA
10 Irina SLUTSKAYA
11 Susanna POYKIO
12 Elena LIASHENKO

Kostner in 5th ahead of Sebestyen and Suguri is simply unacceptable.

Joesitz:

Thanks for such a nice positive post! I too give Jennifer praise for her contributions to our Ladies field over the years.

Joannie does look promissing and what I like is her attitude. She said to our announcer "she has to go home and work on the triple-triples as she observed all the top ladies doing them at the worlds." It's great to see new talent on the horizon. Cynthia has great potential as well.

Thanks again.