Kristi Yamaguchi 1996 Ultimate Four Short Program

Kristi Yamaguchi 1996 Ultimate Four Short Program

Category:

Sports

Tags:

• Kristi
• Yamaguchi
• Figure
• Skating

[grafgirl27]

Beautiful performance. She shows how outstanding a skater she still is. Winning the short program over MK in front of ISU judges who were probably biased against the pros in the first place. Nobody else in the world could do that at the time, even by doing much harder jumps. Tara couldnt come close to beating a clean MK at this point in time even by doing much harder jumps. Yet Kristi does it with the same jumps, she is so great.

[dinh]

Kristi is amazing. That layback was so beautiful & touching.

[stefrevollo]

@ollieian Well the layback was not her strength and believe me it has nothing to do with the tempo. Besides, what's tempo got to do with anything do you want a revolution per beat? A faster layback would have perfectly worked...

[ollieian]

@stefrevollo matching the music- not everything has to be faster....did you want her to go faster and ruin the tempo of the song?

[Dylvente]

@stefrevollo Good analysis. 

[stefrevollo]

@Dylvente Kristi has a very reliable technique on the lutz, and a natural one, as there is less counter-rotation than the way other skaters do it, a little bit like Michael Weiss (although his lutz was textbook) and the toe is not picking very far from the left foot, those two things allow a lot of prerotation. Her lutz is borderline in terms of outside edge. That, the preroation and the lack of power, length and height don't make it a reference lutz like Harding or Malinina.

[stefrevollo]

@dinh technically it was poor though, slow, no major back arch and few revolutions. The layback was never her strong asset. The layback in the combo spin is better though :)

[Dylvente]

@jeac2274 Yes, after posting that comment I saw that performance! It was so strange because until then she had made it look like she was incapable of missing it.

[jeac2274]

@Dylvente Yes. Look up "Kristi Yamaguchi 1995 Ultimate Four short program". She had a bad-bad night, but it was also great seeing a champion having a bad time in competition. She was mad! Love her.

[Dylvente]

Did she ever, ever miss the lutz? She always landed it! How in the world did she do that? Of course, the rest of the program was also exquisite.

[nashleigh79]

anyone know who designed kristi's costume? it's so exquisite.

[onetwocue]

wtf! "never before have so many asians dominated in our sport" is this commentator saying that skating, gymnastics, and tennis are only white people sports?