ST. PAUL, Minn. -- It was a good thing only a few hundred (fool?)hardy souls were in the XCel Energy Center for Thursday afternoon’s pairs short program at the U.S. Championships.
That meant there was limited live exposure to some of the worst pairs skating ever at nationals.
And that is saying something, given the nadir the discipline has reached since three-time world medalists Jenni Meno and Todd Sand retired after 1998.
Read MoreGold, buoyed by having twin sister Carly make nationals for the first time, insists she is even better trained for this year’s meet than she had been for the Grand Prix Final. Her coach, the venerable Frank Carroll, agrees.
“She is as prepared as she has ever been or any human being could be,” Carroll said while walking to Gold’s Wednesday afternoon practice at the Xcel Energy Center. “If she doesn’t do well here, it’s psychological.”
Read MoreEarlier this week, Ashley Wagner dredged through a virtual scrapbook to tweet a picture of the last time she had skated in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
It was at the 2008 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, her first as a senior, when she was four months shy of her 17th birthday. She finished third, as she had a year before in the junior event at both nationals and worlds. This was an athlete on the way up.
That the sometimes jagged arc of her ensuing career has brought Wagner back to St. Paul this week to seek a fourth U.S. title at age 24 – a victory would make her, by a few months, the oldest women’s champion since Beatrix Loughran in 1926 – is a testament to her resoluteness.
Or, as she would put it, to her being stubborn and hard-headed.
Read MoreThanks to the miracle of modern technology, I was able to watch a theater of the absurd drama live from Munich, Germany Thursday morning.
All it lacked were sets by either Dali or Magritte behind the dais occupied by Richard Pound of Canada and his fellow luminaries on the World Anti-Doping Agency independent commission that investigated the sordid behavior that festered inside the international track and field federation.
The production was meant to elucidate a commission report that iterated and reiterated top elected officials of the IAAF – its Council – had to be aware of the rot within the organization.
It will be remembered instead for the surreal plot twist in which Pound repeatedly and unwaveringly defended the idea of letting 12-year Council member Sebastian Coe of Great Britain lead the federation out of the mess.
Read MoreWhen the other size 20EEE clodhopper drops in the international track and field doping and corruption scandal Thursday, let’s hope somebody quickly puts the shoe back on to boot the entire compromised leadership of the sport’s global governing body, the IAAF.
That would necessarily include the federation’s new president, Sebastian Coe of Great Britain, whose vow he can be part of the solution means less because he did not see how he was part of the problem and apparently still doesn’t fully grasp it.
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Philip Hersh, formerly Olympic specialist for the Chicago Tribune, has covered 20 Olympic Games. He often uses sport as a way to write about the culture of a country or athlete. READ FULL BIO
