Wow, I go to bed and miss all the drrraaaaammmmaaaa.... and I am feeling chatty so skip if you don't want to read me before I've had my coffee.
We're doing this just so the type of skater you enjoy won't get trounced as badly on the scoreboard?
No,
they are doing it because they are trying to slow, stop or even {gasp} reverse the decline in interest in the competitive sport worldwide: they
tried the heap-rewards-on-the-mega-jumpers thing with Chen and Malinin - and it didn't work and their two biggest male drawcards are now competing
with them for Japanese attention - and with the TT girls where it seemed to work and then imploded into tainted ugliness.
with one less jumping pass, Malinin may be able to show what he has other than fabulous jumping. It remains to be seen... but in your ideal world, Malinin would manage to do more with choreography with the added time and shut down the naysayers. I am waiting for it
What is amusing to me is that Malinin has over and over said how much he admires Yuzuru, and yet neither he nor any of his fans seem to have the foggiest what it is that has
made Yuzu both the highest-achieving (in IJS at the very least) and most popular skater on the planet. And I'm not knocking the jumps, because Yuzu and Shoma were both pioneers in the jump revolution - they both have first quads/jumps in their resume.
An athlete delivers an iconic performance that garnered widespread mainstream attention...
Iconic? Oh please. The only iconic bits are in ten-second tiktok clips which is probably enough for a lot of folk. ISU don't
have to show the whole thing because the jumps - which appear to be all his fans or what media is looking care about - are still there. And there was more 'widespread media attention' to
minor events in nearly all sports that have been
listening to their damn audience.
The general media have no idea why a 4A is any more 'speshull' than the other quads, the general audience can't even tell them from triples, I suspect it's things like cantilevers, hydroblades and backflips that they like to see just as much.
How do you measure the number of new eyes brought to the sport ?
Let's check IG followers. Malinin and his 4A have 175k. Jason Brown and his 3A have 287k. Even Kimmy Repond and her 2A have 211k.
So where are those eyes ?
To be fair, Jason and Kimmy (and Nathan Chen, Tessa Virtue, all the current and retired big instagram accounts) have been going on sm a lot longer than Malinin - Yuzu started his after them all, never posts because he seems to keep forgetting it exists, and still has 232K. Go figure
). And Jason does have a more appealing online personality. Plus people do impulse subscribe and then forget/lose interest, in the person or the platform, but never
unsubscribe, so numbers can be dodgy. Social media is in the end less important than bums on seats.
The YouTube of Malinin's free skate had MILLIONS of views in a very short time... like in days... and then, of course, NBC pulled the video.
Starr Andrews has 57M views. I repeat, social media is in the end less important than...
You want to beat the best? Then get better.
Well, Malinin et al can also get better. No one is stopping him from honing his skating skills.
Anyway, simple fact is, TPTB in their wisdom let the jump-crazy thing make a pig's breakfast of scoring and lost a hell of a lot of interest worldwide as a result, and this when it was already a worry. I doubt this will entirely turn it round, but hey, they need to try something.
The entire sport is not supposed to be running entirely for the benefit and glory of Ilia Malinin and the TT girls (if and when they come back) because Ilia Malinin and the TT girls are replaceable, just as Chen and Chan and Javi and Shoma and Yuna and Yuzu ought to have been.
But if it loses the bulk of skaters and audience, it will die.
Now... where's that coffee?
Very helpful for me too since I wouldn't have known if it was his twin.
