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Post by Admin on Sept 16, 2022 7:39:52 GMT
Ilia Malinin made history on Wednesday when the 17-year-old, and the heir apparent to Olympic champion Nathan Chen among American figure skaters, successfully landed the first quad axel in competition.
Malinin pulled off the four-and-a half-revolution jump while winning the lower-level US Classic in Lake Placid, New York, before a small crowd in a mostly empty arena. It nonetheless sent shockwaves through the sport as the final and most difficult of the quadruple jumps had finally been conquered.
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Post by Admin on Sept 18, 2022 21:35:03 GMT
This and That: Ilia Malinin's Quad Axel, 2022 U.S. Classic & Lombardia Trophy 29 watching now Premiere in progress. Started 2 minutes ago Ilia Malinin's quad axel blew our minds at the 2022 U.S. Classic. But if the skating season started and no one could watch a replay on Peacock, did it really happen? We did love Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson, Yelim Kim, Rinka Watanabe, Kevin Aymoz and the new iteration of Kaori Sakamoto. It was more of the same from Guignard and Fabbri, Wakaba Higuchi, Amber Glenn and Hanna Harrell. We break it all down - plus updates on Gabriella Papadakis and Diana Davis and Gleb Smolkin on the latest edition of 'This and That'.
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Post by Admin on May 4, 2023 18:33:04 GMT
In our phone conversation, Boitano defended both young men.
“I said the same kinds of things when I was their age — and I was gay. So if we had had Instagram Live back then, I mean, who knows what I would have said?”
Boitano said that because figure skating is a sport measured both athletically and artistically, with abundant attention paid to the music skaters perform to and the outfits they wear, there’s a natural inclination for male skaters, gay or straight, to defend the athletic side of their sport.
“Most men in our sport are defensive about how hard it is, because it is so hard athletically,” he said. “Just try to fling yourself at 15 miles an hour into the air to do a four-revolution jump while lifting three feet off the ice, traveling 10 feet and landing on a 1/8 inch blade with two edges — and do that on seven jumping passes. If someone tries to negate it in any way, tries to tear it down, tries to question you about it, male figure skaters will defend it.”
Boitano, who has devoted much of his career to mentoring and giving advice to younger skaters, has spent time with both Malinin and Chen.
“These comments are not a representation of who these guys are as people,” he said. “When you’re taking questions, you’re expecting people to ask about skating, your jumps, your scores. You’re probably not prepared for this other stuff and you don’t have your thoughts in order and then you can say the wrong thing. They’re focused on competing and you can’t always be on top of everything and how you should word it at all times.
“So,” he said, "we’ve got to give them a chance to explain themselves when they have time to think about it. This is much more complex in the sport of skating than just people getting angry about something that was said on social media, and we need to understand that and talk about it.”
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Post by Admin on May 24, 2023 11:56:22 GMT
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