Notes on Nebelhorn 2009

Savchenko & Szolkowy won by 20 points. Lambiel won by 26 points! Davis & White won by 31 points!!

Czisny won by about 1 point. Well, someone’s gotta make it interesting.

What else can I tell you about this week’s Nebelhorn Trophy? Well…

+ Sav/Szol no longer wear the day-glo purple and pink for their SP. Collective sigh of relief, as that also means it won’t freak everyone out in Vancouver next February.

+ The U.S. team of Castile/Okolski (who finished 4th) is the latest to jump on the Claire de Lune bandwagon… it’s their FS music this season.

+ Lambiel may be back (he’s now officially qualified 1 spot for Switzerland in the Olympics), but his triple axel isn’t.

+ Yannick Pansero is back to blowing one program big time (13th in the SP) while nailing the other one (4th in the FS). Maybe it’s an early-season thing he does?

+ Ryan Bradley, who apparently uses Mozart’s Amadeus (really?) for the FS, finished 4th overall…and his triple axel has apparently run away with Lambiel’s. (If you see either jump, be sure to report it to your local TAMIAN (Triple Axels Missing In Action Network).

+ Davis and White are skating to Phantom of the Opera for their FD, and apparently are already doing it very, very well (standing O’s abounded in Germany).

+ As for Czisny, it wasn’t that she collapsed in the FS with a horrible skate… even though she dropped a jump or two from the repertoire…it was the downgrades that nearly lost her the title to Kiira Korpi. She got FOUR of them. Yikes. But she apparently didn’t have any such problems in the SP, so hopefully this was just her sometimes tentative nature rather than a deeply-rooted technique problem.

+ Oh, and you might want to keep an eye on China’s Yan Liu during Grand Prix season. She won the FS and finished 3rd overall here.

But don’t watch her yet, as I’ve got Czisny’s new SP as the Clip of the Day . I take back what I said last week about being sorry she’s replaced The Swan…this Zorro number is already looking pretty smart for her.