Day Four at the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships ChampionshipsReport and photographs by Marie L. Hughes
What a great day of skating and a great day for SkateFAIR.
On the skating side, the Mens Qualifying was terrific with many personal bests and lots of great skating. Two of my personal favorites are in the top five of the Qualifying group and I've fallen in love all over again with Evgeny Plushenko. That man just exudes charisma and his 4T-3T-2L is actually nonchalant. I'm in awe.
The Pairs also skated great with hardly any falls. The US teams all did well as did several others of my favorites. I got to wave my Dan and Hao Zhang banner and they are even ahead of Pang and Tong. It probably won't last (it never does) but I'm enjoying it while I can.
But the highlight of my day was getting to sit next to Louis during the Pairs Short and compare notes on the skaters. In fact, our whole section is very knowledgeable with two former competitive ice dancers to help us through the CDs tomorrow.
On the SkateFAIR side, we continue to be swamped with requests for buttons. We've been having trouble getting them into the MCI Center and haven't been able to give out nearly as many as we'd like.
However, by about 3:30pm, the Lowry's booth got set up enough and calm enough that I felt able to approach them about helping us. I used the black suitcase my mom donated to the cause and managed to get every single button and every single pin stored at Sandra G's hotel room into it! But when I got to the MCI Center, they were making everyone leave so they could set up for the Pairs event.
Luckily, I talked a guard into going to the Lowry's booth and one of the women running it (Rita Lowry?) agreed to meet me at a door near them. We sweet-talked another guard into letting us bring the suitcase into that door and not the vendor door. So starting tomorrow we should be able to give them out at will.
Some of the people we have given buttons to so far include Nobuo Sato (Yuko's father), Christine Brennan, an ABC Cameraman, and several coaches including Peter Cain, an Australian who is now working out of Dallas, who asked for many, many buttons to give out and said we were doing great work.
I have seen people with credentials wearing our buttons including some who look like coaches and a brave volunteer named Robin who told me that today she saw one of the ushers telling Cinquanta that he'd have to move out of the ISU VIP seating because "he didn't belong there." I wish I'd been there to see that.
I was there when Joyce, a fan sitting near us, decided to give a button to Cinquanta. He didn't take it but he did express surprise that she was against secret judging. He asked her "Do you want secret judging or secret skating?" No, none of knew what he meant, either. But Joyce recovered quickly and said that she wanted everything to be open. He gave her the most perplexed look. It was almost sad if it wasn't so scary and frustrating.
After that, he was very careful not to meet our eyes whenever he left the ISU VIP section and had to pass by our section. We did get to see Christine attempt to get him to comment on something. We don't know what she asked him but he kept throwing up his hands. I hope she was asking him about the fan reaction.
After all, the entire arena booed him when he was introduced during the Opening Ceremonies. It was spontaneous and LOUD. In fact, no matter how hard I listened, I didn't hear one person clapping. Either no one was or the booing drowned them out.
We clapped for the skaters with the flags from different countries that skated in the Opening Ceremonies. We clapped for the singers who accompanied them. We clapped for the skaters who did exhibitions. We even clapped for the judges.
But we booed Speedy, we booed Alfred Kortyek (one of the toe tappers) and we booed when they announced how the secret computer would randomly pick the judges.
Later on we got an on-site demonstration of why anonymous judging is bad and an opportunity to boo the sekret computer. First skaters' marks came up and many skaters had spreads of as much as 1.5 points. Then, the sekret computer broke. Seriously. It was as if we planned it.
The cameras in the arenas tried to show us what was going on but someone put a "2003 Worlds" graphic up instead. Finally, Inoue and Baldwin got a 5.9 for Presentation.
Now, I mean no disrespect to this hard-working pairs team. They skated very well and they deserved high marks and a good placement. But a 5.9 was just a ridiculous mark when you compare what they did to the top four teams. Of course, we'll never know which judge gave that mark or what their ordinals where. Maybe they were right in line ordinal-wise. Or maybe they just punched in the wrong number. We'll never know and that's exactly the point.
Why this confuses Cinquanta will forever remain a mystery to me.
After such a magnificent night of skating, sekret computer glitches aside, we headed off to the Metro and home to my moms where I found the 7000 labels she bought to help us fix the brochures with the bad date. I roped my husband into printing them out while I read my SkateFAIR news.
At was at this point that I learned that Ron Pfenning and Joe Jackson had announced they were starting a new skating federation, the World Skating Federation.
I'm never going to be able to fall asleep now!
