GPF Coverage

[gsk8]

Anna Kondakova is on site in Sochi covering the Junior and Senior Grand Prix Final for Golden Skate.

Enjoy the articles!​

 

[Mathman]

Great coverage by Anna K.!

Interesting take on Mao Asada's short program music and concept.

Despite her technical proficiency and excellent skating skills, the Olympic silver medalist’s program appeared to be almost superficial for a skater of her caliber. The student of Nobuo Sato was relaxed and carefree throughout, and was obviously enjoying her performance.

However, the program did not require her to demonstrate her ability to interact with her music on a more profound level to the extent to which some of her most memorable routines have in the past.

Fair enough, but I thought Mao's interpretation was delightful. As Mao says, she wanted to capture the feeling that she has coming to practice every day with a smile on her face.

 

[dorispulaski]

Thanks for the great & timely articles!

 

[CoyoteChris]

I agree with MM. I love that short program....she really comes alive....
On another matter, I wonder if we can ask Anna about the attendance. It looked to me that more seats in the lower bowl were filled during the dance final than the ladies final???? In fact, it looked as if the lower bowl had pleanty of seats available in the first ten rows.

 

[Anna]

The story about attendance is very weird. Everyone said (both on and off the record) that there were no tickets left in the ticket office, which might as well be true, but it did not transform into good attendance.

From what I've gathered, most of the tickets were distributed among local people, but in an absolutely random fashion. Like people from one company getting tickets to first day of the competition, while the people who work at another company got those for the second day. The place is a military camp with several checkpoints to go through (think airport security level, which is kind of understandable, but still), so there was a lot of hassle just to get to the venue. You could not walk to it, you could not drive to it and the only way to get to Iceberg for a spectator was to get on a dedicated shuttle bus in downtown. Apparently, plenty of people thought that it is too inconvenient to begin with (they had a fixed route and with the town in a total gridlock, getting to the pick up point might not have been that easy) and then, from what I have heard, it was really poorly handled to day 1, so the word on the street must have been 'stay away from it'.

Which resulted in absolutely absurd situation: there were people who attended on Day 1, actually loved what they saw and were willing to pay to come back, but there was no way to buy tickets

I have not seen official figures on attendance, though.