I love Jenny Kirk as she is. Several factors are not in her favor for competition success. Some of you mentioned about:
1. her skating skills deficits, and I agree. But those are not incurable. She needs to fix the flutz (Cohen can get away with doing 4 flips, i.e. 2 flips and 2 flutz per program but not Kirk). She needs to improve on her speed and edges, and she is doing that. The roller skater Tara like double axel!!! Tara could get away with that but not Kirk. Frank is good at fixing problems like these, hope he is doing his job. Improve on her spins.
2. Her hip injury, it is always going to be there, and there will be good days and bad days, hope she will maximize the physical therapy and hope for the best.
3. She is too beautiful, I am serious, is she too pretty to be taken seriously. Will it make a difference if she changes her hair color to dark brown and skates to Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen ?
4 Better music choice and choreography.
chuckm said:
Jenny's FS music, while it is soft and ethereal as she is, doesn't have any punch. That is the "impact" that she is lacking. I think Jenny needs to get far, far away from that kind of music and select something with spark and fire. I think she is capable of performing at a higher level than she has been.
about the impact, I am reminded of Fumie's recent effort of ad for a boyfriend, so she can have more passion in her skating, but Jenny already has a boyfirend??
ITA. about soft and etheral
In order to have better choreography and better music choice she needs to have a world class choreographer who understands her and put her #1 in his or her list, pours all his/ her heart and soul into helping Kirk. Who will this be?? I assume since she is with Frank, Lori will be her choreographer. I have mixed feelings about Lori. She and MK had mutally made each other famous, back in the days when Lori was putting Michelle #1 on her list. There were some masterpieces, e.g. Salome, DOD, Taj etc. Then Lori wrapped herself around S&P when they hit the scene. They became her #1, and sure enough we had Love Story, and Libestod. I haven't seen any out of the world masterpieces from Lori since. (It is still not too late to shop for another choreographer.) It seems like Fumie is more on Lori's mind nowadays.
Looking at Jenny's music in the past, she had pretty much covered a wide variety, w/o top notch success, but she is not uncomfortable in any genre either. Off the top of my head, she had tried swan lake, an old work horse ballet, dance macabre, supposed to be scary and dramatic, die fledermaus, nice comic opera. Even though those weren't overwhelming success, IMHO still way ahead of elevator music ABBA, or Beatles concerto. She ditched ABBA, but she kept the Beatle thing, and I am very disppointed at Nichols choice here. Even if etheral is the theme, there are still pieces like e.g. RvW's Lark Ascending, Dvorak's American Suite, Mendelssohn's overture to Mid summer nights dream, even Eric Wolfgang Korngold's VC.
If her choreographer wants to try some more passionate dramatic pieces, there are plenty to choose from, e.g. Shostakovich VC 3rd movement passacalgia, or Lori can even resurrect Libestod from Tristan und Isolde.
Aside from that, CoP is NOT her friend--she has even fewer "in between" moves than Kwan or Cohen. She needs to expand her horizons to be effective in international competition.
Irina, Fumie, Arakawa do not exactly have a lot of in between moves. But I agree it does not hurt for Kirk to have some sort of signature moves. If she improves on her basic skating skills, I think putting in dramatic, difficult serpentine fw may help. She has done that in Chicago,
I think she should try her very best to make the olympic team, afterall being chosen as an Olympian itself is an honor. If singles skating does not work out, she can return to pairs. The US pairs scene kind of sucks currently, so Kirk still has a chance there post 2006
