3 Sports You Missed, Vol. 6

Two of the sports are figure skating because the figure skating was incredible.

Hey all, sorry for a couple of empty days. Writing The Daily Cinderella every day for a few weeks and covering the East Regional in person really drained me and I needed to recuperate.

I promised I would bring you three sports every week, but really one sport mattered this week: The World Figure Skating Championships in Boston.

By this point, you should know what happens when a world championship is hosted in any sport in America: Team USA wins a lot! And in Boston, Americans won three of the four gold medals on offer. I’m going to write about two of those, and I’m also going to post this video of Madison Chock and Evan Bates winning their third straight gold medal and their first since getting married last summer. I would like to highlight their bonkers decision to dance to “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck, arguably the least danceable song in the western canon.

I don’t know if they got extra points for dancing to a song in 5/4 time but it’s truly sicko stuff from their choreographer. (If you don’t know what time signatures are, try dancing to this song in your house. IT’S NOT GOING TO WORK.)

Anyway: Onto the Sports:

I’ll never have that recipe again

Nobody expected Alysa Liu to win this year’s World Championships. Not even Alysa Liu!

Liu’s championship-sealing free skate at her first Worlds since unretiring from the sport in 2022 seems to have been something like an out-of-body experience. Sometimes athletes are shocked when they finally win The Big One, but she seemed genuinely confused how she had managed such a flawless performance, holding her head, repeatedly panting “what?” and “what the hell?” As she put her blade covers on, mics caught her quietly asking “how did I do that?” to nobody in particular.

(Also, MacArthur Park, incredible choice. The Dumbledore version would’ve crushed.)

In a post-skate interview, an overwhelmed Liu told NBC’s Andrea Joyce “I couldn’t believe I won the short (her skate two days earlier), I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m the best in the world’… I have to process this.” I have never heard a world champion athlete in any sport say “I don’t think I’m the best in the world!” Ever! In all my years covering international sports!

Normally athletes in these moments say how their big win validates their years of non-stop work. But Liu notably did stop working for about two full years—an eternity in skating. She quit the sport in 2022 due to extremely understandable burnout, having won the national championships in 2019 at just 13 years old, the youngest to ever do it. She won again in 2020, made the Olympics in 2022, and decided she’d had enough at age 16, hoping to experience a normal-adjacent life after achieving international fame as a middle schooler.

There’s a strange dichotomy in figure skating. The sport demands skaters show passion and emotion, but the way you get good at it is by intense and constant training from the time you are a literal child, which seems like it would sap a lot of the necessary passion and emotion out of you.

Taking some time away from the sport apparently allowed Liu to rediscover what she loves about it. The result was four minutes so brilliant even the performer could not explain. She nailed every jump. She hit every music cue. She did something even she didn’t think she was capable of.

Normally these writeups include some broad gesturing at a what’s next. If this person won in 2025, they’ll be in great shape to win at the Olympics in 2026! But projection feels pointless when inspiration can create something like Liu’s skate.

The flippin’ Quad God

Ideally, I’d like to have three sports things from three different events in here—but damn! Look at this ridiculous nonsense Ilia Malinin did!

This is not just the best performance of the year, but truly one of the greatest skating performances of all time. Malinin became the first skater ever to land all six types of quadruple jump (loop, toe loop, axel, salchow, flip, and lutz.)

And oh yeah! Malinin ended his free skate with a backflip—those are legal now! Backflips were controversially outlawed in 1977 due to safety concerns, with Sonya Buraly famously doing it anyway at the 1998 Olympics. In recent years, France’s Adam Siao Him Fa had been doing it and taking the deduction, leading to the International Skating Union legalizing the move ahead of the 2024-25 season. The backflip is still not a scored elementosand Malinin didn’t get any extra points for doing it (although it can improve his artistic score.) He basically just did it because he can, at the end of a completely dominant performance that was more or less guaranteed to win a world championship.

Malinin was actually supposed to do seven quads in the routine, but bailed on his second quad lutz attempt. So there’s actually room to improve next year in Milan.

International Sports Ass-Kicking of the Week: Bodied in Bandy

I swore that I would bring you the biggest blowouts in the world of international sports. It’s rare, though, that Team USA is on the losing end of those. So I’ll seize the opportunity! Here’s Sweden beating Team USA 22-0 in the semifinals of the Bandy World Championship. Team USA actually held the Swedes scoreless for almost 20 minutes… and then allowed 22 goals in the final 72 minutes.

This was not the biggest blowout of the event—Sweden also beat Hungary 31-0. (No, I can’t explain why there were big cardboard ghosts on the corners of the ice.)

What’s interesting is that the 22-0 loss came in the semifinals. Team USA finished in fourth place, their best showing yet. (The women’s team won bronze!) It’s baffling that a team could be so close to the top of the sport and yet capable of losing the semis so badly… but it kinda makes sense when you think about what this sport is.

Bandy, as you can see, can be described as Big Hockey or Ice Soccer—skates and sticks, but it’s a 90-minute game on a soccer field-sized rink with 11 players per team. And there just aren’t a lot of countries on earth with soccer field-sized ice rinks. Canada, which you’d expect to be good at Big Hockey, didn’t send a team to the world championships, because they don’t have a Big Rink in the country. (We do, it’s in Minnesota.)

There are basically only two countries that are good enough at bandy to win: Sweden and Russia have combined to win 40 of 41 all-time World Championships (Finland snuck in and won the 2004 title.) The sport is even called “Russian hockey” sometimes. But Russia is banned from international competition in most sports right now, leaving just one championship contender. And they put up some big numbers.

So only five nations sent teams to Worlds. The Americans beat Hungary, which put them in the top four, but they’re still miles away from being on par with the Swedes.

Sports You Won’t Miss

World Men’s Curling Championships: Already underway, in Moose Jaw, Saskachewan, through April 6th. Updating from last week to say the semis and finals should be streaming here in America on Olympics.com. 👍👍👍

NCAA women’s gymnastics championships (regionals): April 2-April 6. The full-stop championship will be April 19th but the tournament is starting this week. Streaming on ESPN+ 🐭🐭🐭

World Synchronized Skating Championships: In Helsinki, Finland. April 4th and 5th. Streaming on Peacock 🦚🦚🦚

FEI World Cup Finals (Equestrian, show jumping and dressage): In Basel, Switzerland. Streaming on Youtube—very democratic of the equestrian folks! ▶️ ▶️ ▶️