Live, 8 pm Eastern: Men's Free Skate New York Times (blog)
That was good stuff. All I can say is “wow.”
Yevgeny Plushenko skated well but he had a few bobbles on his jumps. You have to give him credit for coming back after three years off and being able to skate that well. He had the quad, but based on the quality of his program and the difficulty of some of his elements, Evan Lysacek had the far better performance. Evan just had the better program and he is the first U.S. guy to do it since Brian Boitano in 1988. So that’s great.
Other than that big “ouch” at the beginning, falling on the quad, I actually thought Daisuke Takahashi skated very well. The quad just wasn’t there. He didn’t have the height and he was sideways in the air. But I give him a lot of credit for getting up because that had to hurt.
He did his triple axels very well, he made a mistake on a triple-triple, putting his foot down early. But I really liked his program. He’s very expressive and it was just cool. It was fun.
The difference now from when I last skated in ‘02 is, back then, you had to have the quad or you wouldn’t be considered with the top guys. Now it’s gone kind of backward because if you try to the quad and don’t complete it, you get docked a lot of points. The risk-reward isn’t there. This was a great example. He could not get the points to catch Evan’s clean program and Evan had no quad.
Well, that was something you don’t see all the time. That was weird for Nobunari Oda. You could tell something happened when he landed, his foot kind of collapsed and that’s not something he normally does. You might want to change your laces before the Olympic Games, note to self before next Olympics. It’s something you learn when you’re a little kid, you make sure your laces are good and the screws on the bottom of your boots are tight.
