We’re not attending the exhibition. There are some skaters we’d like to see, but it’s pricey, not included in our ticket package, and we are exhausted, but happy with the experience.

You’ll know by now that Sasha didn’t do as well as she wanted. She didn’t complain, but there was something peculiar in the way she didn’t warm up before her long-program skate. She’d fought her boots all the way through the short program warmup, still skated well; but those boots look new-ish, and she’d stop now and again and fuss with the right boot—anybody who skates knows that problem: a bad boot day: you lace up and don’t get the tension right at the bottom, so you fuss with the top, where the tension of the laces either feels too loose or too tight. You have bad boot days frequently with newer skates. But she fought her way through that creditably enough on the short program. But on the long, she skated the circuit of the arena, then did a few little deliberately ‘popped’ jumps, no spin, just loose; and after that went back to her coach and talked while the others in the flight skated. That’s not a warmup.  Which probably indicates she was having a problem, and the name of it is probably a very slight build and getting a little older. A competition schedule is hard practices and an all-out performance at the edge of what you can do; and years tell on you. That lack of warm-up was possibly just “I’ve got one more skate in this body” and she didn’t want to exit with an injury. When you’re younger, it’s hard to understand that situation, but as you get older, your rebound from a fall isn’t quite that fast. And a high-level skater prepping for competition will typically take a couple of falls a session, no padding, just relying on their muscle to save their bones. At my age, one fall and I’m pretty well off the ice for that session: I’ll get up and skate around a bit, but I won’t stay on—the impact sort of rearranges the whole body, and you need a day to recoup. So I doubt it’s a serious injury, but just the cumulative pounding you take in a high-level competition. Sigh. At a certain point we’re no longer made of rubber.

Mirai Nagasu is one beautiful skater; Rachel Flatt is less lyrical, but quite an athlete, and her edges are immaculate—ie, when she jumps, there is no doubt of her being on the correct side of her blade, and she doesn’t get downgrades on the judges’ review of the tape. There’s one skater who tends to go inside-outside-inside-outside-inside as she approaches a jump, and that’s just scary: she needs to fix that, even if she has to take a year off: she’s young, she has time, and I think her coach would do her a favor if she yanked her into intensive re-do on her jumps for a year. She’s too good, and what she’s doing is courting a blown knee, imho.

Well, but that’s our highlevel skating fix for a while.