Vulnavia

I haven't listened but I believe Boitano is still fairly active in doing stuff with USFS, so him saying questionable things about Yuzu isn't too surprising. Try not to let it ruin your OGMiversary.

The problem is that the judges are going to continue to treat Nathan as if he's the full package even though he's not. All of Yuzu's programs are better than anything that Nathan has ever done, but if the ISU and USFS are determined to crown Nathan as the new king it's going to be an uphill battle for Yuzu no matter what his programs are.

Maybe Yuzu watched Johnny's commentary at USNats and decided he didn't want to perform Otonal anymore

I know it's random and silly but I totally want Yuzu to be the most viewed skater on the Olympic youtube. I think he and Yuna currently have the most in terms of total views of their different programs, but in terms of a single program he's got a way to go to catch Lipnitskaya's 13 million views on her team skate from Sochi.

This is totally random, but with all of the Notte Stellata talk lately I've realized that we've been slacking off because the Olympic version is not at a million views yet:

Reminds me of Max Kovtun after Worlds last season when he called Yuzu a god, dismissed a Nathan fan trying to get him to compliment Nathan too by reiterating that Yuzu is already a legend, and then said in an interview that he couldn't care less that Yuzu lost to Nathan because Yuzu's performance impressed him more.

In my experience, a lot of Nathan fans are very quick to characterize any criticism of his skating or his scores as "hate", or they'll say that he shouldn't ever be criticized in any way because he works so hard (as if working hard is unique to him and not something that all elite athletes do). Also just generally speaking, people who know deep down that their fave is overscored are going to be prickly and defensive when scoring discourse starts. It's not always worth engaging with that, and similarly, I feel that not all skating forums are worth my time and energy to read. That forum does not make my cut.

I think Max was conflating two things that are somewhat related, but separate, and he should have been more specific and clear. Nathan and Alysa aren't overscored because they're Chinese-American. They're overscored because they're American and USFS is a powerful fed that politics aggressively for their chosen skaters. Where Nathan and Alysa's Chinese heritage will come into play is with NBC when they start pushing their media narratives going into the Olympics. Someone upthread was wondering whether the American media would be dumb enough to assume that Nathan and Alysa will have massive popularity among Chinese fans simply because they're of Chinese descent and yes, the American media absolutely will be dumb enough to think that. They're not going to look into the Chinese fandom and realize that Yuzu is way more popular than Nathan and Alysa combined, or that some Chinese fans aren't that into Nathan because of stuff like the Mao's Last Dancer program. But the thing is that while narratives that are created for PR and politicking purposes do often affect the scoring, there's not a direct equation of Nathan & Alysa are Chinese-American = inflated scores, and Max shouldn't have mushed the two things together in such a vague way.

If I were Brian I would have told Doug Haw never to speak to TSL again a long time ago.

Then he shouldn't have been speaking to Hersh about the situation at all, and especially not before he discussed it with Yuzu. (Or if he felt that giving no comment would look bad, he could have just simply stated that there is no problem at all between Yuzu and his coaching team and that they'll be with him next week at JNats.) Just like he should not have been doing 'everything is shiny and happy and wonderful here at the Cricket Club!!!!!' posts on Instagram while his top student was alone at a major competition, regardless of the circumstances. I've worked in PR and social media and I evaluate Brian's terrible PR game from that perspective. Not everyone who disagrees with you is some hysterical overly emotional fan just flipping out and overreacting.

I saw that too and I'd say there's a reason why the person who said it only has two followers. But yes, unfortunately we're going to hear more and more of this stuff now.

Yes, Brian probably will say something like that. Luckily, Ghislain was with Yuzu in Torino and he understood why Yuzu did it and played it perfectly PR wise in the media. And speaking of Ghislain, no break for him, he'll be at the Korean ranking competition with Jun in a few days.

He's bitter because deep down he knows that Yuzu will always be the superior skater and that no matter what happens, Nathan will never be as globally popular or beloved as Yuzu. You can become powerful by gaming a system but earning loyalty and respect on a large scale is a different story.

I guarantee you that if Nathan were to recycle a program next season, the narrative among his fans and the US media would immediately shift to 'OMG look at how Nathan's decision to recycle is such a great opportunity to show how much he's grown as an innovative balletic artiste, what brilliance!', and they wouldn't care in the slightest that they sounded like huge hypocrites. Kinda like how the narrative in Vancouver was that their American champion was much better than Plushenko because Plusenko had nothing but jumps while Lysacek was such a well rounded skater who should win without quads, but now that they have an American champion who is a good jumper but not well rounded at all the narrative has shifted to 'our champion is the quad king! Quads are everything! Who needs great skating skills or spins or meaningful artistry when you have quads!' No matter what Nathan does, it will be right, and no matter what Yuzu does, it will be wrong.

So you defended Kavaguti's comments without actually having read them? O...kay. Well, I did read them and I stand by what I said yesterday. I think some people are using "semantics" to give Kavaguti a pass by claiming that she was only criticizing a small subset of fans, but there's actually no indication that that's what she really meant and there was no reason for her to drag Yuzu's name in at all if her real goal was just to complain about some Japanese fans not meeting her personal standard of the proper way to be a skating fan.