Near Perfection, A New Event, and A Family Affair: Sochi Day 1

     As opposed to London 2012, where television coverage of the whole Olympiad was kicked off with the Opening Ceremony, this year NBC decided to get a jump start on things, starting off their broadcast schedule Thursday evening with preliminary competitions in team figure skating, slopestyle, and women's mogul, with coverage of the Opening Ceremony to follow tomorrow.  So, we were left today without an Opening Ceremony to watch, but still plenty to grab our attention.

     The first event being talked about is team figure skating, which takes the existing figure skating events(ice dance, men's, women's, and pair) and combines them all together, so that they are each assigned a point value for a specific place in the standings.  At the end of it, the countries are ranked by how many points their teams have compiled. Today saw the men's and pair competitions, and the whole shebang was led off by the home team, with Russia's Evgeni Plushenko leading off the proceedings(if the name sounds familiar, that's because Plushenko also skated in 2010, finishing second behind Evan Lysacek[who is sitting out the Sochi games]).  After Plushenko, Jeremy Abbott stepped up to bat for Team USA.  Abbott might also be a familiar face, mainly because of his 9th Place finish in Vancouver thanks to an ill-timed fall while skating.  Alas, lightning struck twice, and Abbott once again fell while attempting a quad spin.  The next skater of note after Abbot was Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu, and boy is he a skater of note.  First off, he's only 19 years old.  Secondly, he turned in a performance that was damn near flawless, easily the best one I've ever seen.  He wound up receiving a score of 97 from the judges on the routine, and I am quite interested in seeing what his future holds.

     Moving on from figure skating, we saw a new event take center stage, the slopestyle contest.  Several Olympians made their debuts during this year's event, but the most impressive performance of the day was from Canadian Max Parrot, who turned a very dominant performance.

     After slopestyle qualifying, we moved to women's mogul(which is where the competitors ski down a hill dodging small piles of snow.)  This event was dominated by America's Heather Kearney, who won gold in this event in Vancouver.  However, one of the most interesting stories from mogul comes to us courtesy of the Canadian team.  Team Canada was represented in the prelims by Maxime Dufour-Lapointe, who was then followed by her sister Justine, who was then followed by her sister Chloe.  That's right, there's three of them, which hasn't happened since 1980.  We shall see what happens with the Dufour-Lapointe sisters.  Next up on Friday, the Opening Ceremony awaits...