2026 Olympics

[Bill_S]

If you have comments or observations about the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, post your thoughts in this thread.

I'll lead off - Ilia Malinin's short program in the team event garnered a second place against Yuma Kagiyama. Besides a wobbly Axel, I believe that his footwork sequence is choppy/sloppy compared to Yuma's more skaterly and delightful footwork sequence. He'll have a chance to improve his score in the long program due to the number of quads that he is capable of, but I'd sure like to see more musicality and less thrashing about. IMO, of course.

[Bill_S]

While not figure skating, the women's Olympic hockey team includes a hometown native from here. She skated in youth teams when I was figure skating regularly at Bird Arena.

The Philips family loved hockey and spent a lot of time at the rink. I remember that her father, Guy Philips, would bring her older brother for figure skating lessons with the rest of us at 6 a.m. to improve his basic skating skills. It was apparent that this young teenage boy was not into being forced to take figure skating lessons from one of the female college student coaches.

Younger Gwyneth did not follow in his footsteps to take figure skating lessons, but I do remember seeing her at Bird Arena for hockey team practice after our evening freestyle sessions.

It's a small world!

[Bill_S]

The Milan media took notice of Ilia Malinin's bright-yellow skate laces, which were apparently given to him by hockey player Alex Ovechkin. Ovechkin made his yellow laces legendary. Perhaps we'll start to see a bit of variety in men's figure skating lace colors in the coming years.

In the last years that I skated, I used gray-colored Derby Laces to be able to see them better when lacing up (getting old is, well, you know...). I'm sure that I didn't start any trend locally, so maybe Ilia's experiment will catch on.

[Bill_S]

Ilia's freeskate breaks my heart. He must have gotten a case of nerves like I had testing, except that it would have been far worse under the bright lights and thousands of people watching - millions, if you include TV.

It proves that yes, indeed, ice is slippery.