I think my point is going to be simpler... I was writing a long post and decided to reframe
The discussion shouldn't be about who is better and who may place ahead or not. Some will do well and place ahead because they are better, and some of the better men may do badly, as it always happens in men competitions. Stephen is above average in TES and is now right in the middle of the pack in PCS. If he does skate the same way he did at the Olympics, it should be enough for top ten, because statistically, that's how it goes. It doesn't really matter if Cha or Brown or anyone have much better skating skills. If they do not jump well, they won't win either.
At this point, what matters is not even our perception of other skaters but the scoring the judges are willing to give Stephen. His PCS scores have improved every performance he did at the Olympics. Judges are giving him credit for consistency and warming up to his very well built programs. He is not expressive. OK. That's a fair comment. Only a handful of skaters are
and one of them will probably not make the LP.
Let's not be too critical here. Stephen needs to skate well. That's the only thing he can control. Others ? May fall may land quads and quints
Judges, may like or dislike him.
But the point is simple : with what he brings to the ice, at this precise moment is top ten worthy.
Sure, it may not happen for a whole lot of reasons. We have seen stars not making the LP in the past. But why not just acknowledge that Canada has a real chance of top ten finish this year, which hasn't been the case since Messing retired. We can cry in a couple weeks if this doesn't happen but on paper, it should happen.
I mean, we have to consider the simple fact that this season has been all over the place and what is the most important is what Stephen has shown, consistency.
Having freelanced part-time as a manuscript editor during my years as a librarian, I can tell you that newspaper copy editors are no more. The publishing world is shrinking in number and types of employees. Supposedly the author's spellchecking etc does that work, but it doesn't. For something book-length, the author is supposed to hire and pay the few remaining freelancers (who will see the errors the author doesn't because the author sees the words that are supposed to be there, not what's actually on the screen). But writers don't want to share the money, and for a daily blog there isn't time for hiring out. AI hasn't got there yet, as evidenced by the number of hilarious mistakes in the captions for videos and films where the program has misheard what the speaker actually said. There's a new freelance occupation called data annotation that is supposed to be teaching AI how to edit, but the field is so far all new and experimental. In the meanwhile, literate readers just have to roll their eyes a lot.
