Well, the second night of frustrating soccer this week. Tuesday night we got pounded 4-nil because we only had nine guys show up... and only two of us seemed to be playing any defense. Tonight, indoors, we lost 3-2, their 3rd goal came off a flukey bounce, and I had the game-tying goal with two minutes left off a great on-timer -- except I muffed it, putting it right in the goalie's lap. We didn't exactly have everyone playing their hardest up and down the field, and we fell apart. I had another disapearing act in the second half -- another chicken and the egg type 'did I break down because of the team breaking down' thing.

But I wanted to talk about figure skating. Yeah, you read that right. Not only has it become a bizarre parody of itself, not unlike heavyweight boxing, but all this shock and indigination over this latest Olympic controversy has me thinking of college football and the BCS title game matchup. All three have one thing in common: the rankings and determination of matchups, as in boxing and the BCS, and the "winner" in a figure skating competition, are based on almost entirely subjective judgements, with a bit of objectivity thrown in to lend it "credibility." What the BCS and boxing has that figure skating doesn't is a legitimate, unbiased, unsubjective result: boxing has the K.O., and football has winners and losers of games. In fact, to go a step further in "defending" the BCS against figure skating, is that there are very objective numbers that can be fed into computers, and poll-voting coache's and sportwriter's brains, that help determine rankings, and thus the arbritrary 1 vs 2 matchup for the "BCS title game," which is only a trumped-up version of the mythical championships of old. There are won-loss records, records for those teams opponents (so-called "stength-of-schedule" quotients), points for and points against, and so on.

Where boxing loses out in this is when fights go "to the cards," i.e. the fight goes the distance, and the winner is determined by the judges scorecards. However, even this compares favorably to figure skating for one simple reason: there are two combatants, and they battle each other. In figure skating, the two dueling skaters or pairs aren't on the ice at the same time, in fact, these judges sit through, what, a dozen or more performances, arbitrarily doling out scores after each one.

So, what do we conclude? I'd say it's something we've really known all along, that figure skating isn't a sport at all, and has no credibility as an objective athletic endeavor. I'd say it's performance art, and we all know that judging art is, in the end, a largely pointless endeavor.

So I watch these latest proceedings from Salt Lake with a sense of sly bemusement. There is nothing about this "scandal" that reveals anything we didn't already know about figure skating. The beauty of this is the simple fact that this is just the biggest, most visible example yet of this, and even the most die-hard figure skating people can't be in denial any more.