It has recently come to my attention that a website, https://mobsports.com, has been wholesale copying and pasting the contents of this humble blog onto its own site without authoriziation or permission, and at times, even passing off my content as their own.   For example, a search of the word "Morozombie" on "MobSports" reveals that "MobSports" has stolen multiple blog posts from this blog and reposted it on https://mobsports.com without permission: https://mobsports.com/?s=morozombie  Adding insult to injury, however, "MobSports" has gone ..read more

One of the most intriguing questions with respect to the ladies' women's competition this upcoming Olympic season is whether the exquisite Alena Kostornaia will return to her former fighting form and re-ascend to the topmost echelons of women's skating.   Indeed, Ms. Kostornaia's career trajectory in the past season has been . . . tumultuous at best.  After dominating the 2019-2020 season by winning every single international event she entered with her majestic skating skills and impressively consistent triple axel, Ms. Kostornaia's career took a decidedly downward turn durin ..read more

The French poet Louis Aragon famously wrote that l'avenir de l'homme, c'est la femme (the future of man, is woman), but the opposite appears to be true in figure skating.  Ever since 2010, men's figure skating has been inexorably trending towards a high-risk, high-reward quads arm race in which the judges tacitly encourage a cynical type of numbers-crunching skating thinly disguised as choreography by improperly lumping together the skaters' Programs Components Scores with insufficient differentiation.  Hence we witness certain performances by the men that consist mainly of going fr ..read more

If the pairs event at the 2021 World Figure Skating Championships stands for anything, surely it would be for the golden touch of the great Tamara Moskvina in the pairs discipline.  Last season, our newest World Champions Anastasia Mishina/Aleksandr Galliamov failed to make either the Russian world or Europeans teams.  After joining Ms. Moskvina's group last spring, however, Mishina/Galliamov have looked like a wholly new team with their newfound confidence, performance ability, and improved programs.  Likewise, although Aleksandra Boikova/Dmitrii Kozlovskii falter ..read more

As I ventured over to Youtube to watch Mikahil Kolyada's The White Crow LP for about the 19301484th time during this famine of a figure skating season, a thought struck my mind like an ice pick to the skull: is Ilia Averbukh actually one of the best figure skating choreographers working today? I know, to even suggest such a thing would undoubtedly condemn me as an unwashed neophyte among certain of the figure skating cognoscenti. After all, Mr. Averbukh is often remembered for his wacky interviews when not being denigrated for representing the worst excesses of early-2000s ice dance befo ..read more

The Cold War currently being waged between Eteri Tutberidze of Sambo-70 and Evgeni Plushenko of the Angels of Plushenko has provided much fodder for figure skating-related discussion in a season notable for its paucity of skating, and the coaches' dueling Romeo and Juliet programs is certainly no exception to this state of affairs.  Both Ms. Tutberidze and Mr. Plushenko have selected not only a Romeo and Juliet long program for Daria Usacheva and Alexandra Trusova respectively, but both long programs use exactly the same music cuts, in the exact same or ..read more

One of the most fruitful, yet strangely unheralded, artistic collaborations of the past few years has been the combination of Satoko Miyahara's skating with the choreography of Tom Dickson. For five straight seasons--from Ms. Miyahara's senior sophomore season of 2014-2015 to the 2018-2019 season--Mr. Dickson choreographed at least one program for Ms. Miyahara, with stellar results more often than not.  Ms. Miyahara's weaknesses as a skater are not unapparent even to the undiscerning eye: Ms. Miyahara's jumps are lilliputian at best, and her skating can be perceived as lacking in dynami ..read more

Fantastic figure skating performances often earn their just rewards in the form of a medal, but the paucity of available medals inevitably results in some fine performances left empty-handed.  Unrewarded they may be, but not forgotten--here's a non-exhaustive list of some of my favorite relatively obscure(ish) performances that did not result in a medal, except perhaps in my heart: Read more ..read more

Gather around, small children, and let me to tell you the tale of the ISU Skating Awards. Once upon a time, around 2019, the ISU--likely concerned with the perpetually-flagging popularity of figure skating relative to the halcyon days of the 1990s--decided that the best way to advance the noble cause of figure skating was to hold an awards show celebrating the sport's athletes, coaches, choreographers.  Now, this was not a terrible idea in and of itself--industry award shows ranging from the Academy Awards to the Grammy Awards essentially function as successful glorified public relati ..read more

Note: I wrote the following post around January 2018, but never published it for various reasons.  Thankfully, my dim prognosis of the men's event at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics turned out to be incorrect: contrary to my gloomy expectations, the men for the most part skated well, and the most well-rounded and complete men's performances even made it to the podium (!). For entertainment purposes, I've decided to dust this post off and publish it now . . . ............................................................................................................................ With the ..read more