Category: sports

Kim Yuna blew away the competition with a 228.56 for Olympic gold in the women’s figure skating.

Asada Mao was second with 205.50, and Canadian Joannie Rochette was third.

FYI, Yuna’s score would have given her ninth among the Men, which is pretty amazing considering the women’s program is shorter, so has less time to build up points.

More to come. But it is 6am here in Spain and I need to go back to bed.

UPDATE: Okay, it looks like the Olympic Committee is working overtime to prevent people posting videos of the long program. But in the meantime, here is a great video from the New York Times, with Yuna and Brian Orser explaining her Triple-Triple jump combination.

UPDATE 2: Hey, that documentary I worked on — Hip Korea: Seoul Spirit, for Discovery Asia — has a preview up on Youtube (sorry, no embedding).

UPDATE 3: 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. Of course, you cannot compare men’s and women’s programs like that, but it sure is interesting.

So far, so good for Kim Yuna, who is leading the women’s figure skating competition after the short program. In fact, her 78.50 points is a new world record.

Here is her performance (at least for the moment), with English commentary:

Asada Mao is in second, with 73.78 points, and in third is Canadian Joannie Rochette (whose mother passed away just a few nights ago, giving her a backstory that would make overcoming-tragedy-obsessed producers at NBC actually explode).

I thought I should mention something because a small story like this can slip through the cracks.

FYI, you can see the very good NBC short report on Kim Yuna here.

Anyhow, great for Yuna. Now we are just 40 hours away from the long program and seeing if she can pull off the big prize.

Just a few hours now from the women’s figure skating* competition at the Olympics. Which means at long last, we are going to find out if Kim Yuna has what it takes to win the biggest prize in her sport.

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.

For what it is worth, I can definitely say that all the people on Team Yuna and at the Toronto Cricket Club are some of the nicest, smartest people who I have ever met. Yuna (and her mom) really have created an amazing team to help push her to her goal.

What happens now? Who knows? Yuna has a great chance to make history, but you never know. As Brian pointed out to me, the Olympics often see unexpected skaters rise up and take the gold, because the pressures at this time are unlike anything else, even the ISU’s World Championships. Good luck to her today and Thursday. It should be a great competition.

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* I refuse to call it “ladies’ figure skating”. Seems way too anachronistic to me (not that anyone asked me for my opinion).
** Okay, a very, very small, tiny part of that world.

Well, this is an interesting development. Only three cities have submitted bids for the 2018 Winter Olympics — Munich, Annecy and … (wait for it) Pyeongchang.

For the last several years, I have been pained by Pyeongchang’s previous bids for previous Olympics. Pyeongchang is a beautiful place, but its bids were simply not very good (yes, it got votes in 2010, but I still think the bid was fundamentally flawed).

But this time, they may be in luck. From what I can see on the Internet (dubious research, I know), people are pretty dubious about Annecy’s bid. Which leaves it pretty much a two-country race, between Germany and Korea.

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And as long as I am talking about sports, I should point out the Kim Yuna had a great short skate at the opening of the Trophee Bombard tournament in Paris yesterday (part if the ISU’s Grand Prix tournament). Yuna scored a 76.08; her nearest competitor, Yukari Nakano, a 59.64

As Philip Hersh wrote on his LA Times sports blog:

One short program does not a season make. But this one made it clear that Kim at her best will be impossible to beat, and Kim at 80% of her best still is better than anyone else. Athlete, artist — this young woman is breathtaking on the ice. Barring injury or early retirement, she can be the greatest women’s skater in history.