Sombreuil

Loved this so much I went and got the music - I would love him to use the Yoshida Brothers

Sorry - have I missed something? Haven't been following too closely lately

I think you'll find she would be grandfathered in - quite rightly, she is the Olympic champion

I think Javier lacks the hyper focus - he likes a life outside skating. Patrick too.

In one of the documentaries iirc he spoke of eating onigiri made with cold water at the evacuation place........

She's only doing what BESP commentators were urging in 2012 - 'wrap him in cotton wool' etc! Seriously it's fake news, old information etc etc. Take plenty of no notice as my mother is wont to say.

I hope they don't 'package' her at all - I hope they give her lots of room to make choices. A programme by DW is an obvious start given that he's practically the house choreographer, but she can use three different choreographers - SP, FP, and Ex and I hope she does. I am ambivalent about DW - he doesn't strike me as particularly collaborative, but I like some of his stuff - but there are a lot of choices out there, from the obvious (JB, SLB) to the new (MG) and I hope she gets a chance to find out who suits her best.

I found it irritating reading the US media in the 6 months or so leading up to the Olympics - I expressed the hope last summer that their hubris wouldn't pull Chen down, but sure enough it did. I also find it annoying when I come across NC uber comments that he was in a worse position at PC than YH was in Sochi because Yuzuru had been in seniors longer and he wouldn't have won if it hadn't been a splatfest and PC hadn't crumbled. Yuzuru spent spent those extra years gradually building up the PCS etc that were gifted to the quadsters in their first seasons. That gradual acquisition of credit for your abilities also tempers your nerves - if you have experienced difficult skates, lost a lot of marks and risen above them it helps you keep your nerve when crisis hits again. If the points are thrown at you, you don't experience that unless you have a total meltdown that the judges can't ignore. I think Shoma not getting to the podium in his first WC helped him with that. NC crumbled quite spectacularly at PC in the short where Yuzuru at Sochi was magnificent - that goes for team and individual. The old saying that you don't win with the SP but you can lose with it holds good. I find the title of his SP darkly amusing. Yes Sochi FP was a splatfest, but frankly none of it was as bad as N's SPs at PC. He landed his jumps in the FP - good for him, but he had no pressure by that point. Patrick might have stumbled a bit but he still ended up with silver. Yuzuru didn't win in the way he would have wanted to but as BO says, a win is a win. He did it at PC in extraordinary circumstances and with great style. (I have got to resume ignoring US media and all those other forums)

I'm glad - he had a good run in the GP last season (partly due to all the injuries/illnesses, but still..) - wouldn't want to lose all the older ones at once.

Compared to Yuzurus xylitol ads????

I think grown up Canadian niceness and good manners will trump childish immaturity whichever TCC coaches are there

Neither -he can send Tracy to one and Ghislain to the other

What are the parents thinking? I know three ‘tiger mothers’ ( none of them are Chinese, they’re Scots/Irish/English but they display the same qualities) and while they don’t hesitate to coax, bribe and if necessary coerce their children into doing their music/sports/homework in ridiculous quantities they would draw the line at letting any outsider do it and definitely if health issues were involved.

For the non Russian speakers/readers - Polina is out but do they say what she will do?

He’s going to have more luggage than JW at this rate. Hoping that someone will take Polina on - i I despise this backstabbing bullying attitude - ‘we don’t want you , but we don’t want you to have any kind of a career that we don’t control’ 🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞

How will this be looking to Russian audiences? That photo of Eteri with Alina gives me the shivers when I think of similar photos with Evgenia and before her Yulia- if I were a cartoonist I could have a field day with this.

He loves to skate - and he didn't get to do it much in the last 12 months. Just hope he doesn't overdo it.....

Evgenia seems to be free and out of there - does anyone know what Polina's situation is?

It’s a remarkably childish and unprofessional reaction.

It’s the parents of these teenagers who need to take a good hard look at what their children may be letting themselves in for, for the sake of possible not certain stardom ....

I don't know... the weather is pretty idyllic this weekend for a trip to Ashdown forest https://imgur.com/a/uwHzw4H

'Working hard' can be a nice way of describing over training. Satoko is a 'hard worker', and I can't help wondering whether her stress fracture was a result of over training. I remember seeing Takahashi interview Uchimura after watching him train and expressing surprise at how few run throughs of his routines he did, saying that he (T) did constant practice, whereas U prioritised quality practice over quantity, treating each practice as though it was competition after mentally rehearsing it a lot. One of the reasons he managed all those years unbeaten was not having an injury serious enough to wreck his competition performances- was that luck or was it partly due to not hammering his body with repetitive practice? Watching that documentary about Evgenia, seeing her bashing on with a broken foot, it seemed counter productive to me.

Does it look as though Pluschenko's school is headed in the same direction? I know nothing about the various schools and their perceived strengths/ weaknesses but his is new, so is he trying anything new or just retreading the same stuff? I would ask about Lipnitskaya and her school but it's too new to tell ; Pluschenkos has been up and running for a couple of years so is there any indication?

I'm too old for this stuff - my children will be too amused if they ever work out what it's for..

I'm teetering on the brink of ordering a bag - this is so far outside my comfort zone - but the design is so pretty.....