Dube and Davison Get a Gift
Salt Lake City gave us the new scoring system–of which I fully approve–but, there’s still plenty of politics in figure skating.
In the women’s short, Cynthia Phaneuf put down a lovely but imperfect program, downgrading her triple flip to a single. She still found herself sitting in fourth place at the end of the event, despite other skaters making less dramatic errors. Hmmm.
Today in the pairs free skate, Jessica Dube and Bryce Davison fought back hard after a difficult short that landed them in fifth place. While the program was beautifully skated with only one miss on the throw tripple lutz, the marks were very high and put them into first place in the free program. Like the smitten crowd, the judges wanted to get them to Worlds. And they did. Despite strong skating and two clean free programs from two other teams.
I agree that sending Dube and Davison to Worlds is the right move (I’m one of their biggest fans after all). But, when the skate doesn’t add up to the scores, figure skating loses.