Michelle的最新文章（关于全美锦标赛和适应COP）

　

Michelle Kwan is Set to Defend Her Title Posted By: Judy Tseng Figure Skating

Five-time world champion and eight-time U.S. champion skater Michelle Kwan is feeling strong and ready for Nationals. In less than two weeks, she will face off against Sasha Cohen, Angela Nikodinov, and a host of young skaters in a quest to break Maribel Vinson's record for the most consecutive U.S. national medals. "I'm in very good shape," says Kwan. "I'm doing run-throughs, and skating up in the mountains [of Lake Arrowhead, California] has been an advantage." When asked if she noticed Michelle Kwan Forum members wearing purple at the previous national championships to support her, Kwan laughed and readily divulged the colors of her new Vera Wang skating dresses. "I hope they'll be wearing burnt red for the short program and gold for the long." This should prevent the fans' prediction error again. Last January, Michelle Kwan Forum members decked out in purple were surprised to see Kwan come out in a coral orange dress instead.

Kwan, age 24, says it is "sort of a strange feeling" to be compared to legendary skaters. With a competitive skating career spanning more than a decade, she is a stand-out in a sport littered with burned-out or injured teens. "I still feel like a little thirteen-year old on the ice.... Just when I think I've seen it all, someone gets on the ice at the world championships and strips down!" Kwan chuckles while recalling the then-not-so-funny incident from this past year's competition, where a man advertising a gambling website jumped onto the ice as she prepared to begin her long program. As always, Kwan is asked about the Olympics. Though she always thought that after the 2002 Olympics, she would hang up her skates, Kwan seems content to be where she is now. "I'm the luckiest girl alive," she muses. "I get to do what I love, skate to beautiful music, ... dressed in Vera Wang. Yes, I have thought about the Olympics-- how could I not? It's an everyday process. I do think about the Olympics, but I'm taking one step at a time." A reporter from Shanghai asks Kwan how her Chinese roots have influenced her. Kwan responds, "I guess my work ethic comes a lot from my parents [who immigrated from Hong Kong and China]. They're very focused on whatever they do," for example, in raising Kwan and her two older siblings. Kwan says she did watch Skate American and parts of other competitions this fall. She was able to analyze the Code of Points judging system and what the other skaters did. She compares having to adjust to the new judging system as being "like teaching an old dog new tricks." She has to "maintain the integrity" of her skating, "yet follow the rules, get level threes, and still win." Kwan says she has added a few variations to her spins and her footwork will stay the same. She always views her programs as works in progress and is willing to make changes to them later after getting ideas for improvement from officials. When asked about Canadian Jeffrey Buttle, who now trains with the same coach, Rafael Artunian, Kwan says she just saw him at the rink thirty minutes earlier and is glad to have him as a training partner. "It's awesome having Jeffrey Buttle training at the same rink. We push and cheer each other on. It's great to have that sort of environment at the rink." Kwan's sense of humor and self-deprecation emerges as she explains why she has stayed relatively injury-free during her long skating career, the exception being a stress fracture in a toe in 1998. "It's because I'm lazy!" she jokes. She describes herself as competitive and loving to push herself, but at the same time, she is cognizant of her physical limits. "When I get tired and I know I'm going to hurt myself doing another triple lutz, I'd rather back down and try again later. It's about knowing your limitations. I give it [her lack of injury] to being lazy." Though Michelle Kwan has been

　　　　　这篇比较长，希望大家能够耐心看下去！我觉得说得还是非常客观的，算是写得不错的一篇文章。

　　　　　　　　　　　For First Time, Kwan Takes On the System

Rule Changes for Judging Force Five-Time World Champ to Change Approach

By Amy Shipley

Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 28, 2004; Page D01

　　

Months ago, figure skater Michelle Kwan and former Olympic champion Christopher Dean huddled at a practice session, listening to a piece of music -- Ravel's Bolero -- that Dean and Jayne Torvill had used in a legendary performance. As they planned choreography for this winter's competitive season, they sought the perfect mix of passion, emotion, drama, power and richness.

And mathematics.

For the first time in her career, Kwan recalled, she clutched a piece of paper while on the ice, studying point values attached to various spins, jumps and footwork. Kwan, one of the most popular and accomplished skaters in the sport's history, wasn't sure if she needed creativity to make the challenging piece come to life, or a calculator.

Because of her decision to sit out the past two International Skating Union Grand Prix seasons, Kwan has yet to face the sport's new computer-oriented judging system in which a panel of judges grades each element of a skater's program as it unfolds. The system made its debut more than a year ago in the aftermath of a judging scandal at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics in which a French judge and her federation president were banned from the sport for attempting to rig the outcomes of the pairs and ice dance competitions.

It is aimed at bringing more objectivity to a sport once considered rife with corruption and cheating. There have been questions, however, over whether its focus on scoring a program's technical aspects could constrain skaters like Kwan, a five-time world champion whose artistry has been known to bring judges to tears.

Kwan said final preparations for the Jan. 11-16 U.S. figure skating championships in Portland, Ore., her only tuneup before the world championships, have been anything but relaxed. The U.S. championships will be contested under the old scoring system, a far more subjective one in which judges rank skaters only in two broad categories on a 6.0 scale. How she will fare under the new judging system remains the biggest mystery of the skating season.

"It is a little nerve-racking," Kwan, 24, said in a telephone interview after a recent skating practice at Lake Arrowhead, Calif. "Getting ready to compete with new footwork, new spins, it seems like there is a lot on my plate. I've got to do this and I've got to do that. . . . I've always had great success under the 6.0 system. I'm very curious about how I will be judged under the new system. . . . I also see it as a challenge: Either you step up to it, or you don't."

Kwan's absence from the Grand Prix circuit has been analyzed by many and criticized by some, given the opportunity those events afforded to test the new system -- an opportunity every other elite skater has seized. Kwan, who said she bypassed the circuit to allow her preparations to move at her own pace, has done just five major competitions since the fall of 2002 -- two U.S. championships, two world championships and Skate America in 2002, entering as a last-minute replacement.

这篇文章分析的非常精辟。看完了就会知道COP对于Michelle并不像有些人说的那样是世界末日。只要她第二个分能打起来，应该是处在比较有利的位置。

http://www.iceskatingintnl.com/current/content/cop_kwan.htm

by George S. Rossano

由于文章篇幅很长，在这里摘录一些结论性的东西。

1. The skater without a triple-triple combination who is strong in the program components or other areas still has a reasonable chance of beating a skater with up to three triple-triple combinations.
2. Spending an excessive amount of training time to acquire a triple-triple combination might not be cost effective for some skaters.
3. The fact that a program with three extremely difficult triple-triple combinations has such little incremental value over a program with no or one triple-triple combination illustrates in a dramatic way that the method CoP uses to scoring of combinations is total nonsense, and that the point model for jumps in CoP is still incorrect.

1. A well rounded skater strong in all aspects of skating, but without triple-triple combinations or a triple Axel or quad, has little chance of beating a skater with the triple Axel or quad, unless that skater falls down in their performance or is dreadful in all aspect of skating other than jumps.
2. A skater who attempts a triple Axel or quad remains competitive for the gold medal even if they make a serious error in these jumps, other than a fall or a pop to a single or double.
3. After a skater acquires all the triple jumps through triple Lutz, it appears more cost effective to spend training time acquiring a triple Axel or quad, than several triple-triple combinations.
4. The great value of the triple Axel and quads has such a strong impact on the ladies event, it makes the ladies event, in effect, a one-jump competition.
5. Once a few ladies consistently have a triple Axel or quad, the ladies event becomes primarily a jumping contest.
6. There are several ways to combine the same group of triple and quad jumps that have the same points for base value, but different intrinsic difficulty and risk. Of these possibilities, the choice that entails the least difficulty and the least risk is the one that should be attempted in competition.
7. These examples again illustrate the defects in CoP in the method of scoring combinations, the poor balance between solo jumps and jump combinations, and the poor balance between jumps, spins, step sequences and presentation.

i am very glad to see that kuan is doing her best efforts to adpot to the cop.she is so acttive and selfconfident  that i belive she will  get her goal!no matter what the result would be ,i surpot her forever!

还没看过新规则下给关打的分~估计她也就是在第二个分上面争取了~

好象第一个技术的分每个人都那样