Two points in particular are worth mentioning about the Ashley Kane Greeneble/Timothy Leduc pair, who have just won the U.S. Championship and advanced to the Beijing Winter Olympics.
The first is about Leduc, who will make history at the Beijing Winter Olympics to become the first Winter Olympics in history to publicly state that they do not belong to the gender dualism, in other words, they are what we often call the Q in LGBTQ (Queer/Queer), which is a member of a large conceptual group that includes other genders or sexual orientations that do not belong to traditional gender and sexual orientation cognition.
On the official website of the American Figure Skating Association, Leduc chose the pronoun "They/Them", which is also a common pronoun for people who recognize non-traditional gender in the English context, but in the context of Chinese, I will still use ta to call it.
In fact, in the centenary history of the Winter Olympics, especially in projects such as figure skating, where there is a huge difference between the proportion of sexual orientation and the general proportion of society, there must have been athletes from queer ethnic groups participating in the Winter Olympics, but in any case, as the first Winter Olympic athlete to disclose his queer identity, it is still of great historical significance.
Recently, the controversy over competitive sports and gender has also been a hot topic, mainly because of whether transgender people are eligible to participate in the competition corresponding to their perceived gender after undergoing surgery and hormone injections. On the one hand, I agree with the objective fact that many people's gender perceptions are different from those of their biological sex, and respect their efforts to make changes to achieve cognitive and biological gender consistency, and support their fight for the rights they deserve. But on the other hand, the physiological advantages of male-to-female transgender people in competitive sports do exist, and the gap between physical functions cannot be completely balanced through hormone injection, and the fairness of transgender people to participate in competitive sports competitions is a very contradictory issue.
But at least in the case of Leduc, there is no doubt in this regard, after all, ta assumes the role of male partner in traditional figure skating, and his participation has no impact on the fairness and impartiality of the competition. Even so, the Russian ice dance master Zulin recently used insulting words when asked by the media about his evaluation of ta, which also caused an uproar in the American figure skating circle.
The second more interesting place is a little sigh. As we all know, of the four events in figure skating, the worst in the United States has always been a double. After all, ice dance is the foundation of figure skating, women's singles is the YYDS of figure skating, men's singles in the United States can only barely rely on immigrants and gay men to support, the double is really an orphan who does not love his father and mother.
Basically, the female partners of the American pair skating are second-rate talented players who are not talented enough to compete for the place in the women's singles, and the male partners are first filtered out of the top talents by American football, baseball, basketball, tennis and ice hockey, then filtered out the top talents among immigrants by football, and finally filtered out the third-rate talents left after some of the remaining talents in Asian, Eastern European and gay men's singles. Even so, in the gloomy and declining American figure skating is still a sought-after resource in short supply. Given the issue of talent, it is not surprising that American figure skating has been in the doldrums of pair skating.
But in recent seasons, the Gribble/Leduc duo has emerged and has the strength to compete for medals in any Grand Prix, or even on four continents, which I think is inseparable from their Russian coach, Nina Mosel. Compared with the previous cycle, the top three pair skating combinations in Russia are all from Mosel's door, in this cycle, the balance of Russian figure skating is obviously tilted from Moscow to Petersburg, Moselle does not have a pair of super powerful national combinations, but her experience is played here in the American pair.
In addition to the difficulty of having a three-week (3Lo) rear outer knot ring on the single jump, their free skating is also very interesting. Compared with the traditional pair skating project, the performance mode of seeking interaction between men and women, the female companion Greb not only chose gender-neutral pants, but also the costumes of the two look almost the same, and there is no traditional sense of priority and subordination in this project. In the free skating performance, although it is the track of "Love in the Country", the interaction between the two in the show is very small, and I feel that they want to present the concept of one person being another person's shadow, one person being another person's doppelganger, whether liked it or not, in short, it is a very interesting program.
At the Beijing Winter Olympics, the pair's goal is not only to help the United States win silver or even gold medals in the team competition, and the reasonable expectation in the individual competition should be to skate into the last two groups, that is, the top eight.
When I saw Gribel/Leduc, I also wondered if the domestic pair skating could let go of the glory of the past and boldly hand over young players to coaches like Moser or Moskvena to debug and build, would it bring some new feeling?