Late Results for Thursday, February 23

Figure Skating: In women's figure skating, 25-year-old Anastasia Gimazetdinova of Uzbekistan was 29th after the short program with 38.44 points, and did not advance to the free skate (the top 24 did).

Freestyle Skiing: Clyde Getty, the 44-year-old from Colorado who's representing his parents' country of Argentina, is getting a bit of attention at these games; he's easily the media favourite among last-place finishers in Torino. During the 1990s he was on the U.S. team, but switched to Argentina when he could no longer make the cut. This is his second Olympics. He drew notice when he face-planted on the landing one of his jumps, losing both of his skies, in the preliminaries for the men's aerials on Monday, but his age (on the high side for just about any sport except curling) and his raw enthusiasm don't hurt either. He ended up finishing 28th, incidentally, with a score of 79.88; the next-to-last-place finisher's score was 70 points higher. (He received zero points for landing on his second jump.)

Standings to date: Argentina adds a second last-place finish; Uzbekistan enters the race.

Late Results for Monday, February 20

Figure Skating: In the ice dance competition, Ukraine's second team, Julia Golovina, 23, and Oleg Voiko, 25, finished 23rd (one team had to withdraw due to injury) with a score of 128.49. The gold medallists' score was 200.64.

Ski Jumping: The last ski jumping event -- the large hill (K120) team competition -- ran today. Wherein the Chinese team of Li Yang, 25, Yang Guang, 21, Wang Jianxun, 24, and Tian Zhandong, 22, finished 16th in the first round with a score of 206.1 -- about 70 points behind the 15th-place team and nearly 270 points behind the gold medallists -- and did not advance to the final round. (Only the top eight teams did so.)

Standings to date: Both China and Ukraine edge closer to the top with their fourth last-place finishes each.

Qualifying Rules: Figure Skating

Part of a series looking at just how hard it is to get to the Olympics; see previous posts on biathlon and cross country skiing, ski jumping and nordic combined, speed skating, short track and snowboarding.

In figure skating, countries are assigned spots rather than individual athletes qualifying themselves. Each country can have no more than three per event, but if memory serves the actual number they're entitled to send depends on their skaters' results in World Figure Skating championships. In the individual events, there is a quota of 30 skaters; in pairs there are 20 teams, in ice dancing, 24. Who gets sent -- i.e., how many slots are allocated to which countries -- is mostly determined via the World Figure Skating championships; a few spots are through an international senior qualifying competition, and one spot per event is reserved for the host country -- Italy, in this case (obviously).

Late Results for Thursday, February 16

Figure Skating: Of 30 skaters to enter the men's singles competition, 24 qualified for the free skate. Of the six that didn't make it out of the short program, 27-year-old Han Jong In of North Korea was 30th with a score of 42.11. Qualifying skaters had between 55 and 90 points.

Skeleton: Of 15 athletes entered in the women's skeleton, Polish sledder Monika Wołowiec, who turned 30 on Tuesday, finished 15th with a combined time after two runs of 2:05.30 -- about 5½ seconds behind the gold medallist. Wołowiec currently lives and trains in Park City, Utah; here's an article about her from the local paper, The Park Record.

Speed Skating: The team pursuit finals for both men and women ran today. Only eight teams were in each event, and all teams made it to a final of some sort. The last-place finishers will be the ones who placed second in the D final. On the women's side, that was China; on the men's side, that was Japan.

Standings to date: China and North Korea enter the standings, Poland moves into sixth place and Japan moves into eighth. Romania still leads, followed by South Korea and Russia. Remember that the standings can be found via the sidebar at right.

Late Results for Monday, February 13

Speed Skating: The men's 500-metre competition consists of two races, with the final score being the sum of both runs. South Korean skater Kwon Sun Chun, 22, fell during his first race and ended up finishing 37th, with a combined time of 94.79 seconds. That's 25 seconds behind the gold medallist, and nearly seven seconds behind the next-to-last-place finisher, who fell during the second race.

Figure Skating: The North Korean pairs team, in last place after the short program, withdrew after an injury during practice. That left the field open for Bulgarians Rumiana Spassova and Stanimir Todorov, who finished 19th in the pairs event with a combined score of 111.25. For comparison, the gold medalllists' total score was 204.48.

Standings to date: South Korea's lead strengthens with a third last-place finish -- will anyone be able to catch them? Bulgaria joins the standings, where, except for South Korea, every country has only one last-place finish. But the Olympics are still young; we've only completed day three.

(Post corrected. I mistakenly identified Ukrainians Andrei Bekh and Julia Beloglazova as the last-place finishers in pairs figure skating; they only finished last in the free skate. Thanks to Electric Landlady in the comments for the correction.)

Chinese Figure Skating Coach: DFL in 1984

Nancy Toby points to the story of Chinese figure skating coach Yao Bin. Right now he coaches powerhouse figure skaters Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, but in the early 1980s he was one half of the China's first-ever pairs figure skating team. As might be expected, it didn't go very well for Yao. From the NBC Olympics site's bio of Shen Xue:

Shen and Zhao's coach, Yao Bin, was a member of the first-ever pair that China entered in international competition. Bin and his partner, Luan Bo, made their international debut at the 1980 World Championships, where they finished 15th and last, and Yao says he remembers the audience laughing at their performance. Luan and Yao were also last at the 1981 and 1982 World Championships, and last at the 1984 Sarajevo Games. Since then, however, Yao has developed a powerhouse Chinese pairs program.

Laughing at the performance -- good Lord, how bad was it?