On Plushenko: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! What a complete douche.


On this:

RobotGumshoe wrote:

Even if you win, your still an effeminate figure skater.

Bullshit. Female or no, certainly you can appreciate the fact that a program like this:



is not effeminate in the least. On the contrary...yowza.

Just remember who wears the knives on their feet.

lavalarva wrote:

SoldierHawk wrote: Just remember who wears the knives on their feet. Ugh... Your post reminded me of that ice skater who got cut in the face by her partner's skate in a competition. It looked really damn painful.

That was bad. The worst was US speed skater JR Celski though...the fell wrong and slashed his leg with those really long speed skate blades...came damn close to nicking his femoral artery, and nearly bled out on the ice as it was. He's healed now (won a bronze just a couple days ago), but yeah. Skaters of all stripes, be they speed, hockey or figure, are a lot more hardcore than most people give them credit for.

Josh and Ice, the skater you're trying to think of is Johnny Weir. Unlike most male figure skaters, he *deliberately* embraces that...overly feminine/androgynous thing. What the commentators said really WAS nasty, and in very poor taste, and also, Weir wasn't criticizing them for insulting him (he loves controversy and loves trying to shock people), rather, he was criticizing the way they were making it sound like it was a band thing to be and/or act gay. And I agree with him wholeheartedly on that. If you're not comfortable with him, recuse yourself from commenting on his skating. Don't make comments (in a globally broadcast Olympic competition no less!) that make you sound like a homophobic asshole.

I never did understand why people find figure skating to be specifically feminine/gay though. Honestly. (I mean, Weir doesn't count because he does that stuff deliberately just...because he can, I guess.) I know, especially in the past, that a lot of the guys' costumes have been a bit flamboyant by male clothing standards, but good grief. The jumps they do require ridiculous amounts of strength, as do the spins, and the footwork is ALL technique. Its also exceedingly rare to see a male figure skater execute a traditionally feminine type of spiral (glide) or spin, because most just don't have the flexibility for it.

I dunno. Maybe I've just watched it for so many years I've just lost touch with how the non-obsessives see it. But I very rarely watch a man skate and think, "dude, he's moving like a girl." (In the same way I very rarely watch women's hockey and think, "dude, she's acting like a man.")

*shrug*