Super C

Yevgeny Plushenko did not win gold in the men’s figure skating although he landed a quadruple toe loop. Some sports commentators criticized him for concentrating on jumps and for playing “to the crowd, eliciting applause with each shimmy of his hips and nod of his head” instead of focusing on his skating skills.
Evan Lysacek did not take this risk because even though a perfect quad toe loop is worth 9.8 points, if the skater falls, it is worth zero. Instead, he decided to do what would work best: “Each stroke I make, each step I take, each jump, each spin, is of equal importance. Sometimes it’s easy to forget about the simpler moves and to take them for granted.”
Olympian sports journalists tend to forget the simpler moves, and clichés “proliferate like wildflowers.” Athletes will leave Vancouver “awash in medals,” and fans all over the world are “glued to the screens,” while “hair raising feats of athletic prowess” “catch our eyes.” The quadruple cliché that the ice was “a sheet upon which he hoped to write” the “final chapter of his career,” “making his performance one for the ages” will get zero points because it tries to “reach deep, but comes up short,” fails to “nail it,” fails even to “get the idea off the ground.”
Since only ten of the twenty-four figure skaters attempted quads, and only three of them were successful, it becomes “blindingly clear” that the majority of the figure skaters have “far outstripped” their commentators, realizing that the risk of doing a quad doesn’t match its reward. Figures of speech easily lose their luster, and what once was an original and intricate move very well worth its salt, simply doesn’t cut the ice anymore.