The traditional english weather has given me pause for thought. And prompted me to finally write a post I've been meaning to do for a couple of weeks. Here in the lovely corner of North-East England that the Sports Wall calls home we're postively snowed under. The outside of HQ looks like a festive postcard or a freshly iced christmas cake. I happened to take a walk in it yesterday and it was like an arctic trek. Although I did find a field with no footprints in it and run around that for a while. Hee hee.
Moving on. What all this snow has prompted in my memory is that a couple of weekends ago I managed to catch a replay of the exhibition gala at the end of the figure skating events from the Vancouver Olympics on ESPN. Now I love figure skating and I'm not ashmed to say it. People say it isn't a sport but it totally is, these people are insanely fit. The gala was fantastic to watch and I'm glad that I stumbled across it again.
First I saw Stephane Lambiel (this wonderful creature to the left.) I adore Stephane Lambiel. He's so wonderful to watch. He's like the Prince Charming of figure skating. He has such grace when he skates and such amazing fluidity. He did a gorgeous routine, wearing a gorgeous sweater I must add. Then I saw Maksim Shabalin and Oskana Domnina who did their matrix routine which was fantastic, they're so natural together and just make everything look so easy. Then it was Plushenko. Evgeni Plushenko, such a consummate showman and he's the arch diva of ice skating. He was on cracking form though and totally worked the crowd. I saw Kim YuNa and Mao Asada who very very good. and I interrupted my tea to watch Evan Lysacek (this badass below.) He was great, he's a very striking skater and he's apparently the masculine hope of ice skating (stop giggling at the back, I didn't make that up.) He is a very powerful ice skater and his routine (complete with Vera Wang tux) was thrilling. So here's some love for an overlooked and underrated sport.
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