Bouquets, brickbats (and some of both): a 2018 Olympic figure skating scorecard

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Bouquets, brickbats (and some of both): a 2018 Olympic figure skating scorecard

Lynn Rutherford and I checked in with our winners and losers from the figure skating competition at the recently completed 2018 Olympic Winter Games.

Some of my winners:

Eteri Tutberidze

Although early records are incomplete, the coach of Alina Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva is almost certainly the first person to be by the boards for both the gold and silver medalists in an Olympic singles event.

Skate Canada

The best possible realistic scenario for the Canadians was two gold and two bronze medals, and that is exactly what their skaters won -- and they were on the podium in four of the five events. No other country medaled in more than two.

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Sonia Henie, as controversial as she was legendary

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Sonia Henie, as controversial as she was legendary

I saw a tweet this week from Kiira Korpi, the Finnish figure skater who won medals three times at the European Championships, that referred to the last day of filming skating scenes for a Sonja Henie movie.  You can't find much information online about such a movie, but it is a biopic with the working title, "Queen of Ice."

That suggests it is drawing from a biography, "Queen of Ice, Queen of Shadows, the Unsuspected Life of Sonja Henie."  The book, written by a Hollywood screenwriter and Henie's estranged brother, paints a very unflattering portrait of the greatest figure skater in history, seen by many as a Nazi collaborator or sympathizer, criticized by Norwegians for her high life, little esteemed in her own country until the end of her life.

When I went to Norway in 1993 to do reporting for a profile on Henie that appeared in a Sports Illustrated Olympic advertising supplement before the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, I asked Jan Staubo, then his country's International Olympic Committee member, to assess the way Norwegians viewed Henie today.  Staubo, who had been a pilot and German prisoner during World War II, politely but firmly declined to talk about Henie.

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