February 22, 2002
I have to admit
I have to admit that while Russia is one of my favorite places in the world and it breaks my heart to see such an emotional people suffer from years of being painted as a huge evil, their sour grapes bitching about the Olympics is really starting to piss me off.I'm really surprised that they are protesting the women's figure skating results. In their defense, they say that it happened with canada, it should happen to them too, but they don't bring up any sort of reason why they think the result was unfair.
Hughes' performance was clearly better than Slutskaya's. And everyone knew going in that the top three finishers had their destinies in their own hands. If it was already accepted that the top three finishers in the short all could win gold by winning the short program, then it should be accepted that the 4th place finisher could easily finish ahead of the 2nd place finisher by skating better.
It's a mathematical argument and it is frustrating that the Russians aren't paying attention to it - they will only be embarrassed later when they calm down to find out they are being headstrong. Since Kwan was in first, she was the only one of the skaters that could have had a worse free skate program, second to Hughes, and skill ended up with a gold. This means that the other two skaters would have had to have outskated Hughes in the free skate in order to get the gold. Slutskaya was only two places ahead of Hughes after an event that only weighed half as much as the free, she skated worse than Hughes, and that was that.
So it seems to me that the only basis they'd have for protesting this is if they actually believe Slutskaya skated better than Hughes. Either that or they are all of a sudden protesting the actual scoring mechanics after they were agreed upon before the Olympics.
I do hope that cross-country thing works out, though - if it's possible
for someone's hemoglobin/red-blood-cells level to be increased just from
where they are in a menstrual cycle, then that's not fair.
Posted by Curt at February 22, 2002 12:09 PM