- Joined
- Mar 26, 2014
Sarah was 4th going into the FS. The system at that time was based on ordinals, and a 4th place skater statistically didn't have much hope of winning. Sarah skated before the top three, knowing she probably couldn't win, so she was more relaxed than she normally would have been. She just skated for the enjoyment of it, rather than concentrating on the technical details as she usually did. She couldn't have known that all three of the top skaters would have a performance glitch: Michelle fell, Irina was slow, Sasha didn't skate clean. So Sarah wound up with 5 first-place ordinals to Irina's 4 and took the gold.
Irina, BTW, was furious. She liked and respected Michelle and wouldn't have felt bad losing to her, but she regarded Sarah as an upstart who had "stolen my gold medal".
Didn't she? Unlike falls and "not clean" "slow" is quite subjective.