renewing my relationship with the ice

It took me awhile to post this, but I had to collect my thoughts...

I haven't been following figure skating closely since 2001, when World's was in Vancouver.  The players back then were the likes of Yagudin, Kwan, Sale & Pelletier and Bourne & Kraatz and I actually took 2 days off work to watch the events at GM Place.  When you're a figure skater, you do things like that.

Since then, though, I've fallen off the skating bandwagon.  Maybe it was because I was in Dublin for the Winter Olympics and couldn't find any Canadian coverage; maybe it was because skating was becoming too technical and I wasn't interested in seeing who could land the most triple jumps in 4.0 to 4.5 minutes.

During the Torino Olympics, all the figure skating commentators could talk about was how some skaters are benefitting from new scoring system and some are not.  It drove me CRAZY!  Since when did figure skating become all about the scoring system?!  I miss the days when figure skating was sans politics - when I could just sit back and enjoy the performances.

And to top it all off, I'm sick of hearing Elvis Stojko say things like "Jeff Buttle needs to land a quad in competition in order to move up the podium...".  This coming from someone who doesn't have an artistic bone in his body!  Also, Jeff Buttle did us proud with a bronze medal at Torino.  As I recall, that is only one step down the podium from you, Elvis Stojko, with all your quads and triples!

To me, figure skating is not about how many triples or quads you land.  It's about the beauty of the artistic expression on the ice.  I still love figure skating and I think I always will.  I just need to get over the petty annoyances and enjoy the sport like I used to...