U.S. Figure Skating Championships!

This weekend is the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, and I'm looking foward to a weekend filled with lots of great skating.

I'm disappointed, however, with the strength of the U.S. ladies' field this year. Michelle Kwan has retired (although this week's video is still in her honor), and Sasha Cohen has withdrawn from Nationals this year. It took me a while to like Cohen, although I now appreciate her tight technique and amazing extension, and think that she's the best chance the U.S. ladies have to win big at the World Championships.

Without Cohen, that leaves 3 major competitors for the title of ladies' champion: Kimmie Meissner, Katy Taylor, and Emily Hughes. And quite frankly, from what they've shown this year on the Grand Prix Circuit, none of them has what it takes to beat the ever-stronger Japanese women. Kimmie Meissner has excellent jumping ability, being one of the few women in the world who has landed a triple axel in competition. And she is the reigning world champion. This season, however, she placed 2nd at Skate America and 3rd and Trophee Eric Bompard, which wasn't enough to qualify her for the Grand Prix Final. I love Katy Taylor's long program (to the music of Legends of the Fall), but her finishes this season weren't strong: 12th at Skate Canada and 11th at Skate America. Emily Hughes is a very polished skater, but she comes across (to me at least) as very cool and distant on the ice. She is a stronger contender than Taylor, finishing 3rd at Cup of China and 5th at Skate America, but still, she is not a skater who can compete with the likes of Miki Ando, Fumie Suguri, and Mao Asada--the Japanese women. My bet would be on Meissner or Hughes to win, but honestly, neither of them is a skater that I really get excited about watching, the way I did when Kwan skated.

So, when it comes to the World Championships, who am I going to cheer for? Well, at the beginning of the season, I was really excited by the skating of Yu-Na Kim from South Korea, and when she won the Grand Prix Final, I was impressed that she was able to beat the very strong Japanese presence there. A strain on her back, however, has made her ability to compete the rest of this season unknown.

Unless one of the U.S. women really wows me at this weekend's Nationals, I think I'll put my support behind Sarah Meier of Switzerland. Her third place finish at the Grand Prix shows that she has the ability to compete with the top skaters in the world, and she has an elegance and maturity that many of the younger skaters are lacking. And, at the age of 21, she's no longer a teenager, which is somehow strangely satisfying to those of us who are getting older but still wish we could be champion figure skaters.

So, to those of you who watch this weekend, enjoy the skating!

And to N.I. in Berlin and K.I. in Wisconsin, Happy Birthday! :)