Today's Olympians of the Day are co-OotDs. And there's four of them. I think figure skating has become more hype than substance, but occasionally you get a few truly good stories, like the ones above. The first picture is of the Gold Medal winners, Russians Tatyana Totmiyanina and Maxim Marinin. It's possible, if you have one of those "I gotta see this" itches that makes you watch graphic video on the internet, that you've seen this pair before. Back in October 2004, at an event called Skate America, Marinin lifted Totmiyanina high into the air, and started spinning. But as he completed his first revolution, he hit a rut in the ice, tripped, and dropped Totmiyanina to the ice. She fell on her face, and sustained a concussion strong enough to erase all memory of the incident. It was a truly horrifying crash, bad enough that I really don't want to post a picture of it here.
Anyway, "Tot and Max" as they are known in skating circles (and which I will call them from now on because spelling her last name is more challenging than most of the things I did in high school algebra) put together an unbelievable performance last night. I don't really know how judges, um, judge figure skating, but I think their free skate last night was good enough that you didn't need a strong technical background to see that they just had it. Sure enough, they won the gold.
Below them are China's Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao (Dan's the girl, just go with it), who had a similar bit of adversity to overcome, but on a very immediate level. Early into their free skate, the Zhangs (who I swear I heard aren't related...hmmm...) attempted a move that is apparently their trademark, a throw quad salchow. For those of you who don't speak figure skating, it's a move in which the guy hurls the girl up into the air and completes four revolutions (the standard for difficulty is three). The salchow part has to do with footwork, and I don't really care to find out the details. Anyway, the attempted quad throw didn't work, and Dan crashed hard to the ice, her legs splaying out in opposite directions like a newborn deer. The music stopped, and Hao came over to help her up. She was clearly in some serious pain, and the pair skated over to the entrance to talk to their coach and a trainer about whether or not they should continue. After five minutes of Dan sobbing, and finally composing herself, they started up again. The rule in the pairs competition (maybe just the free skate, I don't know), is that if you have to stop for injury, you can restart from where you left off without penalty. So they did, and completed a very, very good performance, with Dan showing no signs of taking a fall that would have had me in bed for a week. They took the silver medal, China's first in the pairs competition. Quite stunning to see them pull that off. Hopefully this will be the last time I give OTD to figure skaters, although I reserve the right to post pictures of Sasha Cohen's performance to, y'know, brighten up the place.
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