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While I wanted Kaori to win gold, I hope Alysa’s win signals USFS that over managing skaters, old fashioned overtraining, forcing skaters into molds, and making them crazy to keep the momentum/ keep every official and judge happy isn’t the only way to win.
people i know, people i played tag with on the ice and the woman who taught me to do an axle died. on this flight. my friend's brother, dead. he was so excited to go to the training camp. and fucking trump is saying this??
is the scoring system/biased judging pushing figure skating backwards?
(this is a huge rant about the state of figure skating and the scoring system that's probably going to get ignored but I've been wanting to get it out of my chest for a while lol)
look, one thing that really bugs me about figure skating (and one of the reasons i stopped following it like i used to) is that in the women’s field, you can load a program with quads and still not win unless you also have “good artistry”, meanwhile, in men’s, you can get insane pcs just for landing an absurd number of quads with little to no artistry at all (like, genuinely, you could just do crossovers between jumps and that’s it), and it’ll still be enough to win by a huge margin. i can’t help but see that as a clear reflection of the gender roles this sport is pushing more strongly nowadays (women = artistry, men = athleticism), and that really doesn’t sit right with me. back then, figure skating used to reward artistry and skating skills in a much more balanced way alongside jumps and technical content, and the idea that men only had to prove their athleticism while women had to be “artistic” wasn’t nearly as strong as it is now.
but lately, it feels like the sport has started to move backwards, falling back into these very traditional ideas of gender roles. and i don’t think that’s a coincidence, it mirrors how conservative views about gender have been resurfacing in society, and how we’re once again being told what women and men are “supposed” to be good at. seeing that mindset seep into figure skating, a sport that used to blur those lines much more in the past, is honestly just disappointing, and it kinda took my love for the sport away tbh.
I stumbled upon a tiktok a few days ago talking about how people who don’t watch figure skating have this perception that it’s a 'super gay' sport and therefore woke and liberal, but believe it or not, it’s actually the complete opposite. there’s a lot of male toxicity/misogyny, and it also has this (newly??) constant effort to not be perceived as too feminine in the male field, and to be seen as ultra-feminine and delicate in the female field.
i don’t want to name names and put all the blame on individuals for this shift in the sport, but i can’t help but remember some comments nathan chen made a few years ago about how he “hated” sequins, sounding like he thought wearing costumes like that was “cringe”/not cool or something, and how he wanted to focus on improving his jumps, when he was highly criticized for his ss and lack of artistry, and there were also some unfortunate comments from rafael about the same thing... but then nathan started getting higher and higher pcs, even though his skating skills and artistry didn’t seem to improve at all. it’s like he started caring less and less about the artistic side of his skating (e.g. his olympic costume...) and now we’re seeing the same thing with ilia, where the focus is mainly on the jumps and not the artistry, and the judging seems to be rewarding that more and more. it honestly feels like this trend is here to stay, and that’s just disheartening.
i feel sad for the skaters who keep trying to break out of these roles. like sasha, who was so determined to land five quads in her fs during the olympic season because that’s what she wanted to achieve, that’s the kind of skater she wanted to be, knowing full well that in the women’s field, something like that would probably never get the same result as to in the men's field (like, don't come and tell me that sasha landing five quads in the fs at the olympics isn't the same as ilia landing seven quads in the gpf, they even had the same mistakes in the short and both had the same comeback in the fs...) and then there are skaters like jason, kevin, or even deniss, who could easily focus on learning quads, but instead, they keep pushing to show their artistic vision on the ice (and don't even get me started on yuzuru or even yuma, I get frustrated even thinking about it, imagine how they felt/feel, I do think this shift in scoring is one of the things that drove hanyu away from competitive skating ngl). it just looks like these skaters are fighting an uphill battle, and it makes me sad for them, and as a fan.
