Gosh russianfan, you've had a year since joining this Forum to call it stupid and didn't. Seems like the only time it became an issue for you was after the results from last night. Was it stupid when you watched Yulia in 2014 win her one and only OGM, ...I wonder. As it's been a year on this Forum, I don't recall you ever bemoaning her medal or that of Plushy and others. Were these as well tainted or somehow unearned...
Here's the thing russianfan, try calling Team events 'stupid' to legends like Mark Spitz, Mary Lou Retton, Usain Bolt, or Michael Phelps, and see how they react to your dismissal of their Olympic medals and moments. But hey, if it helps your narrative in the next few days, ...'stupid' it is!
I for one totally agree with
russianfan's opinion about the team event, and you will not be able to accuse me of a similar fan-based agenda or whatever.
(...and btw not that it should mean anything, but in case it does mean anything to you, I'm Canadian and pretty much all of the top Canadian skaters happen to be among my big favourites in the sport right now, who I love seeing succeed; I have no agenda to de-value the seemingly likely result of this competition). Now, good for all of the skaters for going out and achieving whatever they achieve with their skates in whatever competitive context is laid out for them -- they are certainly doing more than I am doing, and I absolutely give them a huge congratulations for anything at all that they go out and do on Olympic ice under any circumstance -- that does not mean the event is compelling at all, though, and it doesn't take away from the skaters' competitive achievements to state this opinion about the event.
And I don't read that the poster is calling all team events (in other sports as you name) "stupid", just this particular one in this particular sport, as evidenced by the rest of the post with its specificity to this event, and especially the comments about this amounting to a competition of 3 medals for the 4 top
skating federations. Unless you are reading too much into the ommision of the word "the" (they clearly meant: "the whole idea of
the (/ this) team event" instead of "the whole idea of team event(s)" in general; nowhere does the rest of the post suggest that the poster is even talking about team events in any other instance than this one). As an aside, I don't know if the poster is a Russian speaker (with excellent totally natural English fwiw), but it is very common for Russian speakers to accidentally omit the word "the" in English, because they don't use it much (or even at all?) in Russian. But maybe I'm the one making too many presumptions at this point (I'm an ESL teacher though, so this kind of thing jumps out at me - sorry if being too pedantic at this point, or if I'm even off the mark as I'm aware I may well be.)
And I agree: I find the event somewhat "stupid" (or at least "silly"). To go off onto my own tangent: The difference in most other individual sports that have these occasional team events, particularly "relay-type" ones in which any of the stars you mentioned were involved in, is that in most of those the team members
unite and participate together in one common/shared performance (such as in a relay race) as a team against the rival teams. "Team" has more of a proper meaning there. Something like gymnastics, granted, is not really about this, and so it's much more similar to this skating thing, but even there what you have is multiple athletes from the team all going together through the same rounds, all being judged the same way against the same group all along the line, so it's showing off depth and consistency of the team in a more meaningful way than what this skating competition allows for with its convoluted way of picking and choosing who is to perform and be included (and excluded). This "team" skating competition is missing many of the key fundamentals displayed in these other types of team events -- I'd have to write a very long post if I was going to list all the problems I have with it, but this post is long enough already and many of the problems are already noted in bits and pieces by others elsewhere.
Another thing: I'm surely many people -- and especially those who really don't care for it -- barely even think about this once-every-four-years team event much at all, until it is upon us (sure they might be aware of it, inevitably as a fan of the sport, but do not necessarily invest much energy speculating over it), so I'm not sure how choosing not to bother to comment about it over the past year demonstrates anything? I certainly haven't felt the need to do so during the last year, even though I knew it was coming and despite my decidedly strongly negative opinion, because I simply prefer not to spend time thinking about it (much less writing about it as I'm taking the time to do now), and rather prefer discussing things I enjoy investing thought in. It's just now when the event is here and thrust into the spotlight for these few days, while we eagerly wait for the rest of the competition, that it becomes a more prominent discussion topic and a current bit of news to give opinions on. I will most gladly forget about it again soon enough, and go back to considering it not important enough of a thing to really mention, in my enjoyment of figure skating. I can only presume I'm not alone in this.
Your post comes off as way over-defensive. Sorry I felt compelled to jump in, and sorry if I am being too presumptious anywhere.
but she was pretty much left alone. And of course in SLC they let her go behind the closed doors to be by herself without a moment of nastiness. Such things would never happen today. The media have long crossed the line, its unfortunate :disagree:
Hopefully it'll give her good luck!
