I think that the reason for our sensitivity is that figure skating is such an individual sport that is so very different from other sports.
We got the K&C where we see the skaters suffering with their coaches, we see them greeting their parents / friends / teachers / cleaning ladies / cartoon movie characters - we often see them crying or extremely happy and all that time the attention is just on the one skater / pair. Then we got the whole costume, make-up, charisma, personality - and all of those things also have an impact on the performance, it is evaluated to a certain extend.
Another thing is that we have just these very few competitions each season (compare that to a football player who plays ideally once a week in the National League, then every few weeks in the Champions League / UEFA Cup, every few weeks in the National Cup and of course in the international matches for his National Team that are always going on - and always 90 minutes or more). Skaters have just so few chances to redeem themselves and a harsh opinion like Hersh's always seems so final. A football player can just suck it up and score a hat-trick in the next game next week. But one bad competition and the skater sometimes has no chance to redeem themselves for 6 or 7 months - and everybody only talks about this last bad competition.
A sport that is similar is probably Tennis or Golf. Only a few big meetings (very few care about the Tennis apart from the 4 Grand Slams). You hear / read people talking about Federer's tears, his great new outfits for Wimbledon, Rafa's newest strange colour... But there is still a difference, because Tennis is somehow objective, the one guy won the last tie-break and therefore the tournament.
Figure skating just isn't objective, it's judged from the start. Not only the judges judge the skater, the audience does too, the federations, the coaches, all the little living room judges (like us). That's why it's so emotional. And that's why it often gets vicious here, because we all have our personal opinions, that rarely have a lot to do with how great the Triple Axel is but rather with our personal impressions of the skaters.
And the worst thing that can happen to us living room judges is that some guy gets his personal opinion published in a major newspaper. A guy who some of us think of as not really qualified. And that makes the tiny living room judge really mad, because here on the boards we can at least slaughter each other, bicker as much as we want and build some additional houses on our ignore list for more inhabitants. But this guy just publishes his stuff in a major newspaper, we can't slaughter him, we can't make the statements go away, non-skating fans will read it and consider it useful information and then might not like our precious favourites. Every skating fan has to live with the fact that the judges determine the outcome of the competition, the fate of the favourites, of the tiny lovely girls and cute boys. But I think that lots of us don't want to live with the fact that some journalist determines the image of these skaters in some national publications.
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