- Joined
- Jun 21, 2003
I don't think a truly iconic program can be called "overrated". I don't care whether any poster thinks Torvill and Dean's Bolero is the worst choreography ever on skates and a total snoozefest. It had a profound effect on ice dancing. (don't know why? Did you watch ice dancing in the 70s and early 80s?... Thus, iconic. :yes:
I tried to look up the meaning of "iconic," but came away little the wiser as it applies to this thread. Is it "having a profound and lasting effect"? In that case John Curry's Don Quiote is not iconic, because no one has tried to skate like that since.
Maybe it ought to be more like, "this performance personifies what figure skating is all about." Or "this is the ideal to which all figure skating performances ought to aspire."
...to me 1 move that was always overrated was Michelle Kwan's spiral - a lot of the times she didn't have what I would consider great extension and it always included a super cheesy open mouthed smile.
A spiral is an edge move. Extension and smiling are just icing on the cake. Like this:
Michelle was not naturally flexible. She learned to get satisfactory extension by rolling her hip sideways, rather than by bringing her leg straight up. Sasha Cohen, who was a flexible skater, was able to get spectacular extension, but at the cost of bending lower at the waist and skating more on the flat.
Nicole Bobek deserves a lot of credit for Michelle's spiral. A very young Michelle saw Bobek skating and told her coach, "I want to learn how to do that!"
As for the cheesy smile, poster KwanisaLegend nailed it (below). This is Michelle teasing the audience; "You know you want it, right? This is what you came for, right? This is what you paid your money to see, right? OK, OK, wait for it, wait for it. Here it comes...here it comes...here it is! "
It was where she put the spiral in her program, she knew exactly where in the music to put her spiral The audience always responded loudly because they loved it and looked forward to it. She smiled because she knew they loved it. The spiral was not easy. She held it with amazing control, her free leg never shook or wavered, she held an edge the whole time and moved from an inside edge to an outside edge.
Sasha Cohen also had a strong spiral, but never held it for too long, she opted for spiral variations.
Spirals are not appreciated anymore which is just sad. To me, spirals are figure skating, they exemplify the beauty of a blade on the ice, the flow and gracefulness of figure skating.
But, to each his/her own.
Yeah, by the time Sasha came into her own, 6.0 skating was gone and we moved to points. Sasha was, of, course, capable of doing an "iconic" spiral, but it was the changes of position that garnered the points. Since then the ISU has continually degraded the moves that made figure skating figure skating.
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