World Championships!

First night of televised World Championship coverage, and ESPN showed the men's short and free programs, as well as the original dance. Here are my initial thoughts...

• I don't like Tanith Belbin's hair color. She's better as a blonde.
• And, even though I'm a big fan of Tanith and Ben in the ice dancing competition, I was really impressed by the performance of Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon of Canada. When interviewed after their performance about their Twizzles--which she did well, but he messed up--Marie-France teased Patrice, saying, "Well, mine were fine. I don't know what happened." Any team that makes me laugh is worth cheering for.
  
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• I think this World Championships is showing off the advantages of the new judging system. After both the men's short and the original dance, the competition was wide open. The top three dance teams were separated by .5 points, and the top 10 men were all within 10 points of each other. In a men's competition where there are a lot of strong, yet inconsistent competitors, this means that anything is possible.
  
• And I also think that the television coverage is doing a great job of promoting the system. One of the problems I had with it is that without a top mark of 6, it seemed like it would be difficult to know how good someone's score was. But all the broadcasts I've seen have done a great job of showing competitor scores in relation to each other (such as "Belbin and Agosto need 153.67 to win"), as well as in comparison to previous personal bests by the skater. And the more you watch, the more you develop a metric for what is a good short program, etc. score. Quite frankly, I think it's great for the sport, and makes things a lot more exciting.
  
• Tomas Verner's (above right) long program was awesome! I'm always excited when relatively unknown skaters totally blow their programs out of the water at a major competition, saying, "Look at me!" in the most effective way possible.
• I have decided that my favorite aspect of figure skating is the straight line footwork sequence. Two skaters who were amazing at this were Alexei Yagudin and Michelle Kwan. In my opinion, Yagudin's straight line in his short program at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake is perhaps the best straight line sequence ever.
• Along those lines, I think Daisukie Takahashi's long program was much better than Brain Joubert's, even though Joubert won the gold. Takahashi has the performative aspect of skating down in addition to being athletic, and in my opinion, his jumps look a lot more effortless than Joubert's. Plus, Takahashi's straight line sequence was the best in the competition, while Joubert's was singularly uninspired (this marks the first time I've ever agreed with Dick Button on something...stupid Dick Button...most irritating commentator EVER).
• Regardless, though, congratulations to Brian Joubert (above) on winning France's first world gold medal in men's figure skating since 1965!