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On Skating

There's more to say about women's figure skating.

 -Let's start with Tara Lipinski. People criticized her when she retired from competitive figure skating so early. (That's the trajectory. You win your gold, then you retire; you skate for "Stars on Ice" and make a trillion dollars in places like Buffalo, but you don't have to worry about all the pressure anymore. There's a mold where you accomplish your retirement basically before you're even teething; Tara is in that mold, and Sara Hughes. Yuna Kim is an outlier. She won gold and then came back and tried to win gold again, and people thought she had succeeded, but Russian corruption meant that an inferior imposter stole Yuna Kim's second first-place prize. Those Russians!)

 -Anyway, Tara Lipinski sort of went underground for a while, and then she reemerged as an all-star sports commentator. She bought a huge, gaudy mansion on Kiawah Island, and you can find the footage online. Google: "Tara Kiawah Lipinski Island." In her Google video, Tara talks a great deal about recreating "grand old Southern styles," which makes me wonder if she is using code to express Republican views. Who's to say? Tara seems unashamed of her money, and of a certain idealized notion of the South. (Her favorite movie is the problematic soap opera "Gone with the Wind"; it gave the world Ms. Lipinski's personal heroine, Tara the First!!!!) Lipinski has questionable taste. For example, she says she really loves Paris, and so she has converted one of her mansion's nine or ten thousand wings into a modest re-staging of a Paris street scene. The walls are painted to suggest exteriors of boulangeries and--I don't know--the Picasso Museum. Tara--blessed with tremendous self-esteem--has also built in various reminders of her Nagano victory--right into the blueprint of the house! (She has '98 engraved in the fireplace--to represent 1998, the year of her win. And she has the symbol of that particular Olympics--some kind of flower?--chiseled right into the floor.) 

 -"The house is my sanctuary," Tara intones, solemnly, "but the beach is my happy place." Or something like that. And then we watch her cavorting in the waves, twirling her white muslin gown, throwing coquettish glances over her shoulder. Or something like that. It's not nice to sit at your computer and giggle at footage of Tara Lipinski--who is, after all, a notably accomplished young lady who is skilled at identifying precisely what she wants, and then pursuing it. But what can I say? Sometimes, I wonder if Tara and Michelle Kwan are friends. Or friendly-ish. Or business-friendly--in the manner of Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone. Jennifer Lawrence spends her time thinking about relations between Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss. Right now, I'm more interested in the Lipinski/Kwan question.

 -Michelle Kwan was famously graceful after losing her gold to Lipinski. Her coach took her aside. He said, "Many people will say you deserved the gold. They are wrong. For those brief moments, Tara Lipinski gave a better performance. In that sliver of time, Lipinski was a better skater than you." And Kwan was able to "internalize" that message and appear before the press without even an ounce of self-pity, or even the suggestion of subtextual self-pity. Brava, Michelle. And then she rallied for a second--or third? or fourth?--act and won a trillion more international prizes, because she simply loved competing. (In this way, she differs from Lipinski and Hughes.) Now, Ms. Kwan is pursuing some kind of advanced degree in geopolitics, or something like that. Her best performance was to music from "Tosca"--post-Lipinski-fiasco--and it's great because, after landing all the jumps, she does some ecstatic, moving footwork. I never should have turned up my nose at Michelle Kwan. Go to Google and type: "Tosca" and "Kwan." Treat yourself.

 -There's so, so much more to say: What's going on with Sotnikova? Was Tara born into money, or did the Tara Lipinski Dream House grow simply out of her post-Oscar winnings? Is there anyone on Kiawah Island who is not white? How did Sarah Hughes fare at Yale? I have a memory of Lipinski skating to "Journey to the Past," from "Anastasia," but did I make this up? Why has renowned skating commentator David Lease been called "no fan of Yuna Kim"? And is it true that Yuna Kim is some kind of major pop music star, in South Korea, on the side? When people say that Yuna Kim is viewed--in South Korea--as "a queen," precisely what do they mean? These are important issues. They will need to wait!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8U0FYnk9zw

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