awww..that was some amazing performance by Yuna!!
I'm excited for Yuna and Korea on their first gold medal in figure skating..!!..
I also thought Asada was amazing as well..i can't imagine having the pressure from your country to bring home the gold..and being only 19 !! i hope Asada could see that she was amazing..and that her country will be proud of her regardless....that said..our 16 year old Mirai was spectacular too..she is really adorable..and likable.
including the very touching performance by Joannie i couldn't have asked for a better olympic competition. ^__^

@ nycgrl > totally agree with you on NBC coverage..it drove me crazy on tuesday when..friends got together to watch the skating..and i think we saw like 5 skaters all together..and we had to watch from 8 to 12..it was absolutely ridiculous..

last night however...i tried to record it..so i could fast forward everything..turned on the tv around 11 pm..and they were just starting the last group of skaters..unbelievable..how annoying is that..??

@Slim: Heh, me and my mom started at 9 pm. My mom wanted to see Kim Yuna, so we watched it... they showed a clip of some woman, than suddenly went to the men's skiing jumps. It was pretty entertaining... but I didn't really want to see it. I just wanted to get to the ice-skating!

2 Hours... later...

Sometime before it was like "24 minutes til Woman's Ice Skating!". Than they showed a girl from Austria, and that was it. So only til the very end they stated "We will show the top 6 skaters, uninterrupted etc etc".

I totally had no clue they were going to start at 11 pm... *sigh*.

I don't usually keep up with the Olympics... so... For Kim Yu-na, I wen't through all this-and-that to watch a single performance TT___TT

My mom's not really a nationalistic person, and sometimes argues with Korean culture.. being Korean herself, but for some reason, that totally changed when she saw Kim Yu-na. "Well, I guess she can just sit back and relax.. .etc etc... she kicked their butts..." XD

Only thing I didn't like was Miki Ando vs. Rachael Flatts... Miki was such a mechanical skater, yet I was so disspointed that she still beat Flatts.

Let's put it another way.

"Mao, I'll let you finish. You delivered two 3As, but Kim Yu-Na delivered the Greatest Skate of All Time!!! OF ALL TIME!!!"

People are complaining that NBC didn't show the final group of skaters until 11pm, but they showed it live, didn't they? So it's not like they could have moved it up. They could have made it clearer when the skating would start, but they of course want the ratings of people waiting to watch figure skating.

They also could have shown more groups of skaters, but not everyone wants to watch an entire night of skating, and USA medaled in the event they did show (the aerial jump).

@8 goldlilys, i have to agree with you on the whole biased scoring thing. i did think kim yu-na's performance was fantastic, but i thought mao asada's was awesome too. i mean, technically speaking, triple axels are supposed to insanely difficult, right? i mean, if only one woman in the olympics has ever done them... but anyway, although yu-na is great and everything, i think south koreans really go overboard with national pride sometimes. still, congratulations to yu-na and asada!

Wow, Yuna's performance made this year's Winter Olympic for me. Never heard of her and Mao before and hadn't been into figre skating since well... 2 Olympics ago.

Yuna siimply blew me away with her grace and eloquence on ice, she is like a swan on water that somehow doesn't feel human with the stuff she does and how she respond to music, her moves and tricks feels natural rather than rehearsed, something you definitely don't see in other skaters. Having caught Mao on the Short program first, i thought wow she was amazing, and then Yuna came on, then i know what magic is.

These girls are simply stunning and great rivalries will spark great competitiveness and they can only get better each time and pushing each other to do better.

Having done some research, i found this clip which I thought was really touching, photos of their story since kids on ice, and even more dramatic and epic than any Korean drama because it is real and so much more episodes to be told, as they are both still only 19.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chxfpsJgtxY

I know much has been made about this Korean Vs Japanese rivalries, but that says to me more about the spectator looking for an excuse for competition and national pride rather than the competitors themselves. I suspect these 2 would not be as as good without the other. If they compete since children, they are each other's biggest motivators through the blood sweat and tears.

What they can do with their bodies is simply magic and we are really lucky to have these 2 girls pushing the envelopes of what is possible in this day and age. It is interesting how Asian women are doing so great these day in figure skating since Michelle Kwan who inspired all the little girls who followed. It would be interesting to see if Mao can boost herself against her biggest rival, it is a lonely place at the top, and one who stayed on top too long and young can only get complacent.

I read Yuna would be ranked number 9 in men' s program and she would still have 30 seconds to perform. Simply awsome!

truely this is a triumph for

@Figure Skating Coverage,

Actually a lot of guys bitched about there being TOO MUCH figure skating coverage. It is what it is. The biggest event of the Olympics is definitely going to be the Gold Medal Ice Hockey game. That's going to be KEERRRAAAZZYYYYY!!!!

I forgot to mention Mao scored over 200 at the Olympics which a year ago would have been the world record then and enough for a gold, except for the fact Yuna broke it already in 2009. The fact a score of over 200 is still not enough for gold, so one can imagine her utter devastation despite coming second at the medal ceremony yesterday.

What has the girl gotta do? It must have felt hopeless. It is time to go back to the drawing board and may be go for a quadruple :P

Kim was amazing and so was Rochette. Very inspirational! And they were Trending Topics on Twitter today! http://bit.ly/a9IaX7

I have yet to see the performance, but I saw the medal ceremony and loved the tears of joy. It was so moving because the Canadian bronze medalist was crying some bittersweet tears and we had Kim Yuna just glow with emotion as well.

I was a tearful mess before work this morning.

She and ALL the Korean skaters (short track and speed skating) dominated the ice! They are all heroes!!!!

Just to defend the guys a little: female athletes usually peak earlier than male athletes, especially mentally (tho, also physically). How many 19 yr olds or under males have ever won major figure skating titles? Then compare that with the females.

And as someone who only watches figure skating once every four years, I found it hard to believe that Asada's LP score was basically the same as Rochette's. Judges, really? Were they really that close?

If Kim wanted to get back to a normal college life now would be the time to walk away from figure skating in the afterglow of winning the gold. The hero walking off into the sunset, then perhaps coming back 3 yrs later to tune up for the next Olympics if she felt like it.

I smiled the entire time watching :)

@ 8 goldlilys & 81 blah - Triple axel is not the only thing the judges look at. There are many other elements figure skaters earn points for. Kim Yuna doesn't have the need to do triple axel since she earns enough points from other elements--speed, transition, artistic ability, the distance and height of each jump, etc, all of which Yuna excels in (and her triple lutz and triple toe combination is actually worth more points than triple axel and double toe combination Mao does, **surprise surprise** and that's why being the only one doing triple axel doesn't do much in terms of the score in the scoring system). I command Mao for taking risk by doing triple axel but I heard the reason she does it is also because she isn't so good at lutz technique so she needs triple axel to make up for it (notice that she didn't include any lutz jump in her program from the breakdown of points JB linked above). In addition to that, Mao made some mistakes while Yuna delivered a clean performance during the free skating, so that 18 points gap seems valid to me.

To all those people who don't understand why Yuna got such high GOE points..

I think the difference is that Yuna did much more to draw in the audience. There were points where you could tell she wasn't just skating but also performing. She had much more personality than Mao did in my opinion, and that's what made the difference. Yes, Mao's program was great. She did the triple axels. But hers to me felt like one jump after another, maybe because she was under so much pressure going right after Yuna. No to mention Yuna's triple-triple combination has a slightly higher base score than Mao's triple axel-double toe loop (I believe) combination. Her triple axels also seemed a little shaky to me, as Scott Hamilton pointed out right after the program. So I don't think the 18 point gap in the free-skating score was ridiculous.

I mean, the scoring is broken down to all the elements. If you look at those, it makes sense. What's amazing is that a point per element adds up. With Mao's little slips taken into consideration, the gap no longer seems too much. It's just Yuna and her team being smart about taking every point they can out of the judges, and again--they ADD UP

Has anyone seen torrents with the ladies short program? I can find the long program on several trackers but not the short one.

@flo

Plushenko won his first Olympic silver when he was 19, and his predecessor Yagudin won his first World Championships when he was 18. That said, some people - male and female - are late bloomers, so it's way too early to say what Patrick Chan is capable of.

Very touching clip of Kim Yu-Na's career, including her rehabilitation through injuries. Puts everything in perspective of the difficult journey she (and many, many skaters around world) travel to get to the Olympics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JQ8NCNyC6E

(And she's Catholic!! Her English name's Stella Kim!!)

hi am awesome hi i was bored..