Men’s free skate tonight! And then figure skating at this Olympics will be halfway over already. A quick note about pairs: it’s a good thing for Shen/Xhao that they had such a big lead after the short program because their long program did not go as well. One of their lifts could have ended in disaster. In fact, the other Chinese pair, Pang/Tong, had a fantastic long program and ended up with the Silver. I think back in the day, with the old scoring system, if you won the long program you were the overall winner. Must not be the case anymore. Anyway, back to the men: after Tuesday’s short program, the top three (Plushenko, Lysacek and Takahashi) are super close with scores of 90.85, 90.30, and 90.25. The Gold is definitely up for grabs.

As for the other sports, I watched one of the semifinal races for short track last night (the final is toward the end of next week) and…wow! That looks like mass chaos on the ice. They skate 45 laps around the short track and teammates can switch into the race pretty much whenever they want. I saw one crash but it’s amazing there weren’t more. Yesterday was a very successful day for Team USA with six medals, three of them Gold. Later!