Its an Olympics year and as I have been every year since I was seven years old, I’ve been glued to the television for the full proceedings this year.
Whenever I watch the Olympics, I always look at the athletes and think do they ever wonder how they got there? Did they turn a cartwheel or put on an ice skate and discover there were better or faster than someone else on the same apparatus but then soon discover that they were a lot faster and then somehow they landed at the World championships or Olympics? Does anything ever prepare you for that? Do they go out on the ice or the field and think “how did I get here??” or do they think they really belong there??
Those kinds of thoughts crossed my mind last week when I attended the Figure Skating World Championships here at the TD Garden. The Garden is a Boston venue that I have no yet learned to love, but the night of figure skating, somehow it was OK. The crowd was nice and nobody tried to frisk my mother, with whom I was attending.
We went to see ice dancing and the Alex and Maia Shibutani were absolutely wonderful, robbed of the title if you ask me. Nobody asked you. I know.
I got some photos of them and a couple of the other pairs because why waste an opportunity to get a good photo. No, I wasn’t going for a kind of an impressionistic thing with the pictures. TD Garden, bless their hearts, does not allow cameras into their venue with interchangeable lenses so I had to use the mini camera to make the skaters look like clay figurines that skate:
wrong side of the camera 