Skating forums are hazardous to your health. You can suffer whiplash just watching the buzz on Gracie rise and fall.People are getting ahead of themselves. She needs to skate a good LP today to show that she's among the elite. Just a few weeks ago people were burying this girl. Things can change even in just a few short hours. She now needs to show she can finish the job.
I hope she'll have a strong LP today - it was nice seeing some changes to her SP, it definitely seemed less "busy" with the small changes in choreo, and she seemed much more relaxed than I think we had seen her skate a SP all of last season. I still saw lots of room for improvement too.
Only thing i wonder about is her jumps don't seem as big. Not sure if she's intentionally slowing herself down a bit to calm herself and so doesn't have as much power going into her jumps. But if she is doing that it's working.
I didn't see the scared look in her face that we've seen in the past when she took the ice yesterday. Now the test is if she misses a jump in her LP how she reacts. Usually it just starts to snowball from there and she struggles.
If you want to be considered a great champion, one of the questions you have to answer is: can you win when you're expected to?Yeah my whole feeling on this at this point is good for her, wonderful short. However, she's usually done fine when the pressure is off. Going into this competition almost everyone of any knowledge level out there expected her to be third at best, behind Akiko and Julia. She'd also been flying under the radar for a few weeks. To me, the real question is what she can do now that she's in the lead.
Yeah my whole feeling on this at this point is good for her, wonderful short. However, she's usually done fine when the pressure is off. Going into this competition almost everyone of any knowledge level out there expected her to be third at best, behind Akiko and Julia. She'd also been flying under the radar for a few weeks. To me, the real question is what she can do now that she's in the lead.
drivingmissdaisy said:I think what we're seeing is that the judges aren't going to give the top 3 and insurmountable edge in PCS, which to me is a great thing. I'd hate to see Carolina fall twice or Mao do three triples and beat clean programs from Gracie or Ashley.
I'm pretty sure if Mao/Caro skated so badly, Gracie wouldn't need to be overscored in PCS to beat them. And while it's good and nice knowing the jugdes would actually score after performance and not name, I don't think Gracies SP marks are any sign of it (because of the inflated PCS, that is).
Additionally, I take it the 3-triples comment shows you're talking about LPs too, and Gracie didn't even skate hers yet. She did really well in the SP, but just assuming she'll repeat that in the LP is premature.
TontoK said:I'll have to go back and look, but my recollection is that her PCS for this short program were in the 7's and low 8's. They didn't seem wildly inappropriate to the performance.
It's not as though she were scoring in the 9's. I'm not sure your comments regarding inflation are on point here.
And even if it's 'just' high 7's, that can still be too high (it's fine for SS, but CH and IN? No). Her In mark isn't even 0.5 off of Akikos. Sorry, for all the quality Gracie has in the TES department, she (and her choreography) leave a lot to be desired in other aspects.
And again for the 'just high 7's'-part: we're talking about the ladies here. How often do they break 9's anyway? It happens with men, dance and pairs, true, but far more seldomly for the ladies. PCS of 30+ are actually pretty high.
She will have to beat Julia Lipnitskaia and Akiki Suzuki first! I'm not expecting much of Gracie if she makes the Olympic team. She doesn't skate well under pressure. She comes undone and makes many mistakes, like she did in her subpar long program at Skate Canada.