I expect he will.
Olympic failure/coming up short did wonders for careers like Asada's and Kwan's, and Chen.
Totally agree re Gogolev- he was fantastic and, to surprise to myself, his skate really touched my heart.
The schedule was horrible. In no other competition do the men do a SP, wait 2 days, and then do a FS.
Replays are available on Peacock if you have it.
Whatever is going on I don’t think it’s like the twisties. The twisties keep one from knowing where they are they are in the air. He wouldn’t have landed any jumps if he had the twisties. Simone wanted to defend her OGM. She didn’t want to withdraw, but she literally could have died if she continued.Sorry posters, this is a duplicate post from the replay lounge! Delete if needed.
Here is my take on Ilia's skating issues and hopefully does not come across as a conspiracy theory!
This started in the team events, when he skated well enough but not up to the over-hyped Ilia standard. Something was up.... Then Rafael Arutunian was called and received an "emergency clearance" to come to Milan and help coach Ilia, in addition to the fact that Ilia was not practicing at the Olympic practice venue, but at another location in Italy (I also remember reading that the ladies were practicing off-site, so this may be insignificant). I think that maybe Ilia "lost" his jump/quad abilities, similar to the Simone Biles "twisties" issue that caused her to drop out of the 2020 Olympics. Hence, Raf showing up and the off-site practices kept this development under wraps. When Ilia came off the ice in the short program, i could hear Raf saying something like "Yes?? The technique worked." I really think Ilia just temporarily "lost" his ability to do jumps beyond a double, much less being able to jump quads. His popping jumps and falling on the ice were so VERY UNCHARACTERISTIC of him, that something else other than Olympic nerves was going on. Anyways, just my layman's opinion of what may have happened.
What you need to do is look for "re-live".
Of the 3 you mentioned who are "unfortunately . . .retired", respectfully, I believe you are remembering at least 2 of them as they finally turned out. I remember seriously disliking everything about Hanyu's skating up to and including his 1st Olympics performances. He was nothing but a jumping bean back in the beginning. I thought the sport had gone to heck and would never recover! To a lesser, and shorter span extent, Nathan was the same. They both became incredible skaters and more than deserve the fans' adulation, but not in the earlier years. I admit I always had a soft spot for Shoma, so I'm not sure I remember his earlier years objectively, but I'll leave him out of what I said about the others. I do still often think the emphasis on the jumps is misplaced, but I'm not as pessimistic as I once was.
This has nothing to do with Jeremy Abbott. It's more of a Nathan at his first Olympics finish.
Evan Lysacek was skating with a high fever and severe flu symptoms during his SP in `06. He had to have IV fluids and stuff to recover for the LP. So, definitely not the same thing.
Plus, if I'm remembering the order of things correctly, he landed the 1st quad and probably felt all was well, so decided to go for the 4 Axel even though thinking he didn't need it. I think he was tight from the get go, maybe because it looked like he could walk to the gold, and when he singled the axel it so thoroughly shocked him that he couldn't recover.
I didn't like that comment from Ilia either, but come on, it was said right after the shocking disaster. He's a kid. Did you keep watching after that? When Ilia and his coaches were free to leave the Kiss and Cry, Ilia went directly over to Shaidorov and congratulated him, It wasn't just a perfunctory hand shake and walk off either, he stood and talked with him for some time. That's more sportsmanship than some older NFL players show to each other!
I always felt that way too! I think I was crying most of the way through Paul's free skate, it was so wonderful! And to be honest, I never cared for Petrenko's style; I understand he was very talented, but his skating always seemed stiff to me.
Did you read the rest of what I wrote, about his interaction with Shaidorov? And if you must call what I said his "excuse", then I lean more to the moment in which it was said, which I also referenced.
It's not supposed to be. Not in the sense of just doing grunt work to win.
Nah. His body lines aren't good enough yet and he doesn't have the ability to fully embody the music yet. His second 4Sal was also not fully complete, but they didn't call it. The PCS judging here actually showed minor improvement over what the judges have been doing normally. Like for example, Kagiyama scored "only" 85, when his similarly flawed LP at Worlds last year scored 87. They need to keep going in this direction, because there's a hell of a difference between what people did today, and have been doing in general the past 8 years, and what a '10' on PCS is supposed to be.
