Well, I meant to bring it here myself anyways, so here goes:
Out with an epic bang, winning a 7th consecutive gold medal - unprecedented and unsurpassable in modern figure skating - to become a living legend. And with a wave of the hand he is gone...
I guess I can say I was born a figure skating fan. I can't remember not watching it. I inherited the love for the sport from my parents, and then took it further, spending weeks poring over VHS tapes in order to learn about jumps, spins and lifts, rewatching my favorite programs so many times that I can still recall them in detail decades later. I realized pretty early on that as impressive and exhilarating I found the jumps, I was really captivated by the inspired performances - the beauty and harmony of movement, the expression of music through choreography, the authenticity of emotion - and found my favorite skaters among those who were able to seamlessly add the highest quality athletic side without ever letting it overpower the performance, and who kept growing and evolving constantly, able to surprise me from one year to the next.
I spent a good 20 years being an avid fan of the sport itself before Javi came along. I remember seeing him live for the first time, at his second Europeans back in 2008, raw and rough around the edges, landing jumps like a cat many others would have gone down from, with mediocre programs, but somehow charming. I was a fan by the time he showed up with his Pirates of the Caribbean program and the drunken Jack Sparrow step sequence a couple of years later, rooting for this Spanish boy burning up the ice with his charisma, still unrefined, but landing triple axels and quad toes and salchows like no one's business, not abandoning the character or performance style for a second. And then my mind was blown when he moved to Brian Orser and learned sophistication, lightness, fluidity, body posture. I can't remember any time when he didn't show up from one season to the next with more quality to his skating and more nuance to his performance, musicality oozing out of every cell in his body. He was my all time favorite by a long long way by the time Black Betty came along.
He has done rock, jazz, opera comedy, Sinatra, Chaplin, Presley, each with a distinct flavor. I could get goosebumps sitting in the 25th row of an arena because he invited the entire audience into the world he created so easily that I was sometimes taken aback by a jump he did out of absolutely nowhere, almost forgetting I was watching a competition with the highest stakes. As he was maturing with age and experience, he gradually crossed the boundaries of sport to evolve his skating into performance art. No one in figure skating will ever come close to the electrifying, breathtaking perfection of his flamenco, which got the audience buzzing and yelling with excitement before he even moved from his opening pose. His last competitive programs brought out the lyrical beauty from his skating with such softness, harmony, power and emotional authenticity that made my throat constrict the same way when I watch really good actors on stage. He took his Man of La Mancha on a climactic journey from dashing and glamorous to tenderly romantic to genuinely heroic, a man’s story condensed into just four minutes, when most others struggle to connect with their music at all.
And in the meantime, the precision, quality and speed of his skating has improved to such a level that his simplest edge exercises to warm up for a practice session were wonderful to behold. His quads out of his world with their power, length and height. His Ina Bauer into triple loop utter perfection. As he was doing his program runthroughs in Minsk, other skaters in his practice group stopped and just stood by the boards to watch. He has so much talent he was able to win despite being away from competition for almost a year and showing up with less than three weeks of training.
The truth is, Javi has become figure skating itself for me over the years.
The greatest of all time.
The heart and soul, as it says on that blue banner of ours.
And now that he is gone, I simply can't believe that the figure skating world can just keep moving.
It has stopped for me, as if those 20 years before Javi never existed.
:sad21:
tureis... I thought I was past the point of getting sniffly and teary, but apparently not. I saw (again) the series of pics by Joosep Martinsson this morning and it is difficult to get work done (again)...
As far as I can remember Javi has only ever used black ones.
️
