Yes!! We must remember that Yuna was born in an impoverished, developing country where babies were shipped off by the millions to be adopted abroad!! In Korea after WWII, they were too poor to even eat white rice!! They had to eat unprocessed brown rice!! She learned to skate on frozen ponds because the nation was too poor for skating rinks back then! Then for much of her career, she had to skate in a shopping mall because that was where the only FS rink in Korea was. When Yuna started achieving success, she had to deal with 3/4 of the skating world uniting against her: the sneakily scheming Japanese, the brute-force politicking Russians, and the Americans, still powerful even in the death throes of their skating history. She even had to endure a grassroots campaign against her run entirely on YouTube! It was only by the great Canadian Brian Orser offering her protection that she was able to withstand the onslaught. Hers is truly a rags to riches story, the story of a modern-day Crusader vanquishing the infidels. Yuna singlehandedly caused the Miracle on the Han River, where South Korea went from a tiny oppressed backwater nation to the 11th biggest economy in the world. She personally founded Samsung and LG, and she was responsible for the vast improvement of Hyundai and Kia in the last 10 years. Compare this to Kwan, whose family could always afford any kind of rice, who did not push her nation's economy up in the rankings, and who didn't have to learn to skate on frozen ponds.Hi guys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think one of the greatest reasons as to why Yuna gets so much fame and support is her underdog story. For those of you who really know Yuna and her skating career, you understand that there ups and downs, but more downs than ups. Her skating career takes you all the way back when Korea was just a developing country, and she is the first to come out of her country to become the best in the world when no other figure skaters before her have done so from Korea. If you really watch her skating and learn about her life, you would understand that there are a lot of political games played and the sport itself does not back her up. First, it was the rival story of Japan v.s. Korea which allowed the audience to be interested, and root for their countries. When things were clear that Yuna is the ultimate champion, people got to understand the beauty of Yuna when she skates on the ice. Don't forget she holds the world title. That's something to say about her.
It amuses me how even the biggest Yuna fans in this thread are falling over themselves trying to be politically correct because pangtongfan invoked the name of Michelle Kwan, the English-language skating forum holy-of-holies. Normally many of them feel no such inhibitions about trumpeting her superiority or talking about how inferior all other skaters are to Yuna, the unquestionable greatest skater of all time.
But I feel no such inhibitions! Let's start with their Scheherazades. I can safely say that I enjoyed Yuna's Scheherazade far more than Michelle's though my perception may be colored by the only Michelle Scheherazade I saw being the one where she blew her all-but-guaranteed OGM. Yuna had better spins, equally good if not better footwork, and far better toe jumps. Their edge jumps are about the same in quality if you consider Yuna's vastly superior Axel and Salchow canceling out the nonexistent Loop. And even then her 3Loop was better than Michelle's when she could still land it, so perhaps I could still say that Yuna's edge jumps were also vastly superior. Vastly tougher competition? Michelle's only threats in her career if she went clean were Tara Lipinski (for all of 2 seasons) and Irina Slutskaya (who was hugely inconsistent), along with maybe Shizuka Arakawa or Sasha Cohen in the last bit of her career. Yuna had the luck to be facing Mao Asada (who despite having all the talent and all the goods in the world only skated a clean competition about once per transit of Venus; what do we have, 2009 WTT and 2010 Worlds? That fits with the transit of Venus being twice in 8 years with a 100+ year wait) and Carolina Kostner (whose one-time clean competition failed to beat her anyway because of Kostner being physically incapable of repeating 3Flips). I guess if beating a two-fall Yuna with an invalidated combination counts as being competition, you could count Miki Ando, and if you count "losing" to Adelina Sotnikova, you could count her too (though of course I count neither). Again, not a clear advantage for Kwan.
Yes!! We must remember that Yuna was born in an impoverished, developing country where babies were shipped off by the millions to be adopted abroad!! In Korea after WWII, they were too poor to even eat white rice!! They had to eat unprocessed brown rice!! She learned to skate on frozen ponds because the nation was too poor for skating rinks back then! Then for much of her career, she had to skate in a shopping mall because that was where the only FS rink in Korea was. When Yuna started achieving success, she had to deal with 3/4 of the skating world uniting against her: the sneakily scheming Japanese, the brute-force politicking Russians, and the Americans, still powerful even in the death throes of their skating history. She even had to endure a grassroots campaign against her run entirely on YouTube! It was only by the great Canadian Brian Orser offering her protection that she was able to withstand the onslaught. Hers is truly a rags to riches story, the story of a modern-day Crusader vanquishing the infidels. Yuna singlehandedly caused the Miracle on the Han River, where South Korea went from a tiny oppressed backwater nation to the 11th biggest economy in the world. She personally founded Samsung and LG, and she was responsible for the vast improvement of Hyundai and Kia in the last 10 years. Compare this to Kwan, whose family could always afford any kind of rice, who did not push her nation's economy up in the rankings, and who didn't have to learn to skate on frozen ponds.
um... you realize the poster wasn't entirely serious, right?Yuna is not like 60 yrs or something. She was born in 1990 and Korea was already developed by then. RICE??? Are you kidding me?
Samsung, LG, Kia??? Yeah, she saved the world. Lol
Sounds reasonable to me. It's off season, people have little else to do.I think pandongfan is laughing silly out there somewhere reading this thread. He lit the match... and is now enjoying watching it burn. Offseason blues....
I am astonished that you are taking this position. Midori Ito won only one world/Olympic championship; Janet Lynn none. I guess they were not in the same league as Gabriella Seyfert and Miki Ando, with two, not to mention Anett Poetzsch with three.
If it was 6.0, Vancouver would have gone completely different than it did. Asada wouldn't have been forced to do 3 Triple Axels because she would have been able to do 2 Lutzes instead. There were no edge calls there and top skaters were almost never penalized for Flutz (ask Yamaguchi) unless they were both from the same country and the judges wanted a reason to rank one over the other. This actually still happens in IJS, and is why the scores and protocols from National championships are usually not reliable. A lot of coaches from the 6.0 era have been interviewed and pretty much said "who cares if the Lutz is off an outside or inside edge?!" That was status quo back then...
Thank you.
But there must be a fallacy that applies to pangtongfan's main thesis, too, right? As I understand ptf's argument, it goes like this. If the judging at Sochi had been fair, Yuna Kim would be a great skater. As it is, she's no where near as good as Michelle Kwan who was actually outskated in her two Olympic losses.
(Signed) A true Scotsman
I think pandongfan is laughing silly out there somewhere reading this thread. He lit the match... and is now enjoying watching it burn. Offseason blues....
Oh gawd.. this is exactly the kind of thread that makes figure skating fans look catty and immature.
As far as I'm concerned, Michelle and Yuna are both legends in their own right. They have both worked incredibly hard to achieve what they have, and with all the rule changes in the sport from when Michelle was competing till now, I think it's too difficult to make comparisons, especially sweeping ones like the person that started this thread.
This is unlike Kim whose health improved over the years, yet her skating still got significantly weaker from age 19 onwards, in part due to her lazy approach to competing which more befits a retired skater.
Agreed. TBH I'm now kind of annoyed w/ myself for responding to it. If they're not going to close the thread, though, I'm glad at least the title was changed.
I think pandongfan is laughing silly out there somewhere reading this thread. He lit the match... and is now enjoying watching it burn. Offseason blues....