#I have the whole set of heavenly sibs

[cosmicwhoreo]

Looking out into the Heavenly skies.

[sheikah]

I’m sick of the Papadakis & Cizeron camp shitting on their fellow athletes so I’m going to rant about it 

So a friend showed me today that Papadakis retweeted this article. 

Seems innocuous enough, right? Who wouldn’t want to retweet something so flattering, something complimenting your skill and your art. It’s an honor. 

Except that the article is a grossly biased opinion piece, and its author’s comments about P and C’s competitors are frankly disgusting. I think it says a lot about Papadakis as a person that she would retweet this article, spreading its claims to her followers and showing implicit support of its ugly criticism of both the Shib sibs and Tessa and Scott. In case you think I’m exaggerating, let’s look at some of the more glaringly offensive passages, shall we?

“[T]he art of self-expression can be questionable, too. I still can’t wrap my head around the decision by Maia and Alex Shibutani, who won the bronze medal, to skate to Coldplay’s sensual ‘Paradise.’ 

This American brother and sister, revered for their precision and joie de vivre, are elite athletes. But when they pressed together in head-to-toe camel spins — each holding onto the other’s extended free leg and waist to the lyric “Para-para-paradise” — it gave me pause. I couldn’t have skated to that with one of my brothers. (And I know that reading this, they are relieved.)”

Um, what? What? I don’t even know where to start with this. This is billed as an article about how great P and C are, but right out of the gate it starts tearing down the teams they shared the Olympic podium with. And why attack the Shibs like this? 

Full disclosure: The first time I heard about a brother/sister ice dance team, I was well and truly squicked out. I had only ever really watched Davis/White and Tessa and Scott and with the memory of their routines fresh in my mind, it made my skin crawl to think of doing some of them with my brother. But then I actually watched the Shibs, and I saw that there is a very evident difference in tone when one watches their skating alongside someone like Tessa and Scott. Passion and sexual tension are replaced with beaming, innocent smiles. They’re just a brother and sister having fun. Dancing doesn’t have to be sexual. I’m from South Louisiana, and in the past have done my fair share of Cajun and Zydeco dancing with every member of my family. Watching the Shib sibs reminded me of those times. It’s wholesome. And their song choices are usually careful to be sensitive about this. Their Olympic free dance was no exception. “Paradise” is not a “sensual” song. It’s about a determined girl chasing her dreams. The commentators on my stream during the Shibs’ dance talked about how special the song is to Maia. You can read the full lyrics here. There is no mention of a man. There is a no mention of a relationship at all. It’s about a little girl growing up and finding out how hard it is to succeed, to find the “paradise” you dream of when you’re young. I found it incredibly moving to watch Maia and Alex skate to a song about the difficulty and eventual payoff of chasing your childhood dreams as they made their own dreams come true by medaling in the Olympics. 

So what I can’t understand is why the author of this article had to denigrate and sexualize their performance. The only creepy, sensual, incest-y things happening are the ones in the author’s mind. So I imagine that actually, her siblings would be perturbed, not relieved, reading this article. 

But the hate doesn’t stop there. She goes on to attack Tessa and Scott next, reducing their Olympic skates to being “sentimental,” implying that they are only the favorites for sentimentality and for their long tenure rather than their passion or skill. 

Most egregious of all was her description of their iconic Moulin Rouge free dance. She said they skated across the ice with “gaping mouths” and that their performance was a “red light.” In skating terminology that is, as far as I know, synonymous with a failure. To skate “lights out” is to get “green lights”--full technical approval from the judging panel--on all required elements. A red light means something was executed incorrectly or was in some other way not adequate in its required category.

In what world was their beautiful performance a failure? 

Maybe their mouths were open because, oh, I don’t know, they were breathing hard as they worked their way through their extraordinarily athletic and technically complex routine--one that garnered worldwide recognition and acclaim because it fucking rocked.

Or maybe the author is referring to Scott’s mouth being open as he literally sung the words of “Come What May” to Tessa while they skated. That’s the kind of on-ice chemistry and passion Tessa and Scott have. They get totally and overwhelmingly caught up in the music, the moment, each other. It’s why the world loves them. It’s part of why they won gold. But instead of recognizing that and focusing on strong points of P and C’s own free dance, the author has to try and tear Tessa and Scott down. 

So if the author is this hard on Tessa and Scott, surely she can recognize the faults in even P and C’s performances, right? Wrong. 

She had this to say about their short dance: 

“This wardrobe glitch cost the pair points and put them behind the Canadians going into the free dance. Skating, especially on the Olympic level, is a sport with a mystifying judging system. But as a dance critic, I judge skating by different rules, and to me, no team, gold medal or not, matches the artistry of Ms. Papadakis and Mr. Cizeron.”

I had a lot of pity for Papadakis and what she suffered with her “wardrobe malfunction” in the individual short program, but it was not easy to retain that feeling watching her attitude for the rest of the games. It was she and Cizeron’s first Olympics and they got a silver medal, but instead of gratitude I constantly saw what looked like anger and resentment on her face. Still, I told myself that she was just upset because of the embarrassment of having her dress come open in the short dance. Totally understandable.  As time goes on, though, I’m finding it harder to sympathize with her. I think that the dress fiasco actually worked to her advantage. Why do I say that? Well, let’s look at two moments that I noticed in their short program. Disclaimer: I’m a new fan and no expert in ice dance but I know enough to know that the following are mistakes. 

Here’s their lift:

She nearly topples over backwards. To prevent this, she flaps her arms in a desperate attempt to retain her balance, fumbling before her arms finally settle in the position she was meant to take when she gets into the lift. 

Again, I am sad that this happened and believe her dress could have factored into this. She clearly was preoccupied worrying it would slip off in front of the whole crowd when Cizeron lifted her. But that doesn’t change the fact that she made this obvious, wobbly mistake in the lift. 

Then there are their twizzles.

I’m not sure how well you guys can tell, but these are not in sync. I broke it into two gifs so that you can see that in the first one, Cizeron drops his skate first. They didn’t start or end these at the same time, and they were much too close, moving even closer as they got into the last set in the second gif. This should not have been given a level 4 and a green light. But it was, along with the lift above.

Why I am bothering with this? Because it’s insane that they still received the score they did. I am not a professional or a judge and I noticed these two mistakes. There are probably more. Despite that, they received an overall score of 81.93 for this performance. To compare, at the world championships with the same routine they scored 76.89 with no wardrobe malfunction. The judges essentially took the wardrobe malfunction into account and were overly merciful with the scoring, instead of docking them for what happened. In spite of that, P and C seem to believe--and their supporters certainly won’t stop saying--that they were somehow unfairly robbed of gold because of what happened in the short dance.  It just isn’t true. Their mistake-ridden routine still earned them a score 3 points ahead of the third and fourth place teams--Hubbell/Donohue and the Shibs, respectively. And they trailed behind Tessa and Scott’s innovative, nearly-perfect, world-record-breaking short dance by less than 2 points. 

So I don’t want to hear any more about how their supposedly earth-shattering free dance should have won the gold if only Papadakis’s dress hadn’t broken. Because that’s a lie. 

Their free dance is lovely. It shows skill and precision and is beautiful to watch. But it’s not groundbreaking. It’s not memorable. And for fuck’s sake, it isn’t “ethereal.” Ethereal is defined as “of or relating to the regions beyond the earth; celestial, heavenly; unworldly, spiritual.”

The Northern lights are ethereal.

The whole Pemberley sequence in Pride & Prejudice 2005 is ethereal.

Jon Snow’s booty? Ethereal.

This? This isn’t ethereal. 

It’s just pretty good ice dancing, with gaping mouths.