Olympics Recap: Fire On Ice, or, “Believe What You Want But That Glacier’s a Fact!”
There’s something very special about this skater…read on to find out.
Monday night, while watching Meryl Davis and Charlie White take home a magisterial gold medal for the USA during Ice Dancing, all five male Addisonians ended up in a twitter conversation regarding how attractive the female halves of the pairs were. (Including Travis, heroically joining in from a stalled Megabus.) My own comment was that this relates to why I love figure skating, as mentioned in my earlier recaps: the particular meld of athleticism and aesthetic gracefulness. Female figure skaters in particular look like Gainsborough and Reynolds paintings come to life in their elegance, but more importantly, they have trained their bodies to do things hardly any of us are capable of doing. Quadruple jumps and spins on ice at incredible speeds on bodies that have less muscle? Call me astonished every time.
But no one will equal the grace of bronze medalists Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov, so remarkable that MY MOTHER called to tell me to watch them. Not as technically brilliant as the competition, they conveyed so much emotion and poetry to make up for any deficiencies: many tweeters called it “a true dance on ice.”
