Utterly Baseless Winter Olympics Predictions (algebra-based)

1) Norway and the United States will win as many total medals as Russia, Japan, and 2 x Sweden!

2) US Women will place no higher than fifth in figure skating.

3) There will continue to be no groundswell of support to bring back compulsories in figure skating (although there should be)!

Calling Dorothy Hamill!!

From the NY Times:

"Alissa Czisny, 22, the reigning national [women's figure skating] champion, said that [Sasha] Cohen’s effort was admirable but that her task was not an easy one.

'For me, it would be difficult to come back after four years,' Czisny said. 'I take the spring and summer off, and I have to get back into the competition mode. To take four years off and then come back is pretty impressive.'"

I'm picking Sasha Cohen over Alissa Czisny -- and I'd do so even if Ms. Cohen had been on crutches the better part of these past four years...that's how doubtful I am of our current national champion.

Why the NBA is no better than Figure Skating

In an earlier post, I admitted that, while I like competitive figure skating, it's not a sport for a variety of reasons. Watching even bits of the NBA Finals strongly suggests proves that frequently professional basketball ain't much better.

Why? Because so much of the scoring (as in who gets to shoot free throws and, as a result, so often win) depends upon:

Who has the ball
Who is defending
When in the game it is
Where the game is being played (i.e., in which bloody city!)

If the same action in the same game can be called completely differently depending upon such factors as these then there might as well not be rules at all.

In baseball, the strike zone can vary from umpire to umpire, and even from league to league, but one ump tends to call his zone fairly consistently throughout any given game.

Not so in the NBA...too many refs seeing too many of the same things things in too different a way.

And how can .5 seconds take so long to pass? Hell, even a skater's long program is never that long!



PS: Let's see if Laker Pau Gasol can spin Kobe into the air and if Kobe can then land successfully while still be moving forward seamlessly...and, you know what, he'd still NOT be called for traveling because, well... because he's Kobe Bryant.

PSS: And tell me Gasol isn't related to Laker Head Coach Phil Jackson somehow?

US Women's Figure Skating: Feel good now, but it won't end well

Let me, as Richard Nixon used to say, make this "perfectly clear": I like competitive figure skating. I find it entertaining to watch; I recognize both the difficulty in doing it well and the inherent athleticism that it requires to do it at all.

I also freely admit it's not a sport.

It's not a sport because winners can be declared due to intangible factors (reputation, maturity, order of performance, etc.) and silly scoring rules (did someone actually mention on the air last night an opportunity for late-in-the-program "bonus" points?!!!).

In true sports, sometime the "lesser opponent" wins ... consider the 2008/9 Arizona Cardinals. If reputation had any role in the decision, they wouldn't be in the Super Bowl. And what would anyone think if a run scored in the 9th inning was somehow worth more than a one scored in the 4th?

I am inspired to write this since the US has a new women's figure skating champion, whose performance was not as clean as the second or third place finisher. She fell once (!) and did lesser jumps, but she was more "mature" and "radiant" and "shook off those mistakes." From my viewing, she didn't shake off nothing -- only the judges did!

Hey, I know it's her 8th trip to the Senior Nationals; she was the local favorite; she has Brian Boitano as an advisor; but she simply wasn't as good a skater last night as the runner up.

In two months when she falls again (as she has done in the big competitions throughout her career) and loses in the World Championships, remember how "warm and fuzzy" we all feel for her now -- and realize that few true sports, and even fewer champions, are warm and fuzzy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/sports/othersports/25figure.html?_r=1&ref=sports