Introducing... Clip of the Day

One more “test” this week before I take off for a few days!

Time to see if my Clip of the Day idea works as easily as it should. Think of this as your moment of Skating Zen… with all apologies to Jon Stewart at The Daily Show, of course.

For this maiden voyage, I simply put “Figure Skating” into the You Tube search engine to see what popped up. Since I only plan to feature performances from ISU-sanctioned events, I skipped over the various montages people have crafted for You Tube’s audience. I skipped over the home video attempts as well. (Sorry; I’m sure they’re lovely.)

And the first qualifying “performance” I came up with today was Mao Asada’s free skate at 2007 Worlds (as seen on Japanese TV I believe). Which really makes sense, as Asada is arguably the finest the sport has to offer at the moment. You might want to scratch the arguably, since she just won the ladies’ event at Worlds a month ago. But ironic or not, this clip from last year’s event (at which she actually won silver) might show her in a better light.

For last month, she won the gold despite an agonizing wipeout on her triple axel. A slip on the takeoff edge, crash into the boards, oh-my-god-is-she-all-right kind of wipeout.

Sometimes irony is, indeed, the backbone of competitive figure skating.

(It helps to know how the rest of the event proceeded, too.)

Here’s the clip; let’s see if it works!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gh02KrNbGaQ