OPINIONS

I love figure skating. Once every four years I am privileged to enjoy the viewing of the ultimate challenge in figure skating, the Olympics. Last night I watched some incredible men's skating, some not so incredible skating, and some endearing skating where the sheer tenacity of the skater to keep going was impressive. Then this morning I went out on Yahoo and saw this headline: The night they killed figure skating. In a column written by, Elvis Stojko, the former silver medalist rants and raves about how Evan Lysacek, who did not perform a quad jump, won the gold medal, and that Evgeni Plushenko, who performed a quad and a triple combination, won the silver medal. In his opinion, this was evidence that the whole program has gone backwards in time. I disagree and am happy to see the Olympic judges did too.

In my opinion figure skating went to seed many years back when the men started performing the quad jump. All of a sudden this beautiful sport became nothing more than a competition on who could jump the highest and skate the fastest. In my book figure skating was never meant to be just about endurance and jumping, there is an art to it as well. If it is just about endurance and jumping, why have music and why talk about lines and form and interpretation. If you want only the technical performance, take out the music and let the skaters enter the ice and spend the next four minutes and thirty seconds jumping then be done with it. But until that time comes, I'll take pleasure in the performances like the one last night where Evan Lysacek skated with poise, polish and beautiful lines (not to mention numerous triple jumps executed perfectly), for he was a true joy to watch. Evgeni Plushenko on the other hand looked like a whirling dervish moving from one jump to the next with little art in between and his program was over at three and a half minutes as he stopped jumping and spent the last minute bouncing around on the ice. But like Elvis Stojko, this is just my opinion and like a--holes, everyone has one, including me and the Olympic judges.

Oh, and one last opinion on my part. I was never that big a fan of Elvis Stojko either. He spent too much time jumping and not enough time perfecting the art of skating and when he had trouble with his jumps he had nothing else to give us.