Just a few hours ago, South Korean figure skater Kim Yuna won the gold medal in the women’s figure skating at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. And it truly was a dominating win, with a total score of 228.56, more than 23 points higher than her closest competitor. Just amazing.
Actually, I just did the math. The women’s freeskate is four minutes, versus 4.5 minutes for the men. So assuming Yuna could keep skating at the high level for another 30 seconds, she could have scored a 168.8 on her freeskate, which would have beaten all of the men. Wow.
As a young person who watched Brian Orser in the Winter Olympics in 1984 and 1988, I can remember those competitions to clearly. So it is kind of wild now to be a small part* of that world, having worked with Yuna and Brian (and David Wilson and their whole crew) over the past year on a documentary. Meeting Brian for the first time I was surprised to feel myself geeking out.
If you are looking for more information about Kim Yuna, the New York Times has a great look at her triple-triple combination, and NBC had this profile of her.
And you can see the opening five minutes of the program I worked on — Hip Korea: Seoul Spirit, for Discovery Asia — at this Youtube link (sorry, no embedding)
Anyhow, a huge congratulations to Kim Yuna, her family and all the people who worked so hard to make that win happen. It was a great achievement.
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* And by “small”, I mean a very, very tiny part of that world
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