Sochi by Two Blog #6: From Good to Bad, Part 2

By Adelaide Ponte Usdin and Wendy Ponte

February 9, 2014

As you may recall from our last post, we survived a 2 hour and 40 minute ride with a lost cab driver trying to find our new hotel, only arrive just as our 7:00 Team skating event was about to start. We put our luggage in storage and told the hotel we would check in upon our return.

We made a mad dash for it so we wouldn’t miss any more of the event than we already had. Unfortunately we did miss the Men’s Long segment, but made it just in time for the Ladies Long, which was followed by the Free Dance–the final part of the Team event.

Tonight we noticed how different the cheering sounds in Russia! People who cheer in the United States often sounded something like “whooooooo,” but whenever a Russian skater entered the arena, it often sounded like the Russian crowd would say “ohhhhhh.”

We were once again struck by the team spirit of this event. This time we noticed that teams were also very supportive of skaters from other countries. In fact, more than once we observed standing ovations from teams for a skater not from their own country. You can really tell that the skating community is there for each other through every and all competitions. 

Valentina Marchei had the skate of her life. In the beginning of her program she did something with her skirt where she showed her leg to the judges in a little flirty way. The audience gasped! Yulia Lipnitskaia and Gracie Gold both skated flawlessly (coming in first and second, consecutively).

The Free Dance warm-up began, and the first thing we noticed was the changes in costumes. Meryl Davis returned to her former turquoise-colored costume (during U.S. Nationals she had worn a lilac version of it). Tessa Virtue, who likes to change costumes often, had a gorgeous strapless red dress with a sheer skirt. (Adelaide also notes that Meryl Davis had a new dress for the short Dance, which she thinks is an improvment).

Cathy Reed had a new Kimono-style dress, which we both felt works better than her previous pink one. It had sheer sleeves and was in red and white, with a touch of black.  We thought the Reeds skated with more attack and confidence than earlier in the season. We thought that Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabri’s Romeo and Juliet program was very well suited to them and Adelaide feels they are much improved.

The big surprise of the evening was Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov’s skate! They have a tough one-foot lift and, as usual, Nikita’s twizzles were crazy. But the details and finesse of the program have progressed so much that their scores were dangerously close to those of Virtue and Moir’s, coming in at 103.48. Are we looking at the next generation of Uber Dancers?

Virtue and Moir’s cantilivered lifts were gravity-defying, as always. We thought that Davis and White had a moment of hesitation at one point in their program and a brief wobble in one twizzle, but if so, it wasn’t enough to stop them from scoring their season’s best on the long.

The event was followed immediately by a flower ceremony to honor the top three teams. Medals will be given out tomorrow in the main plaza.

Now for the bad…

Upon returning to our hotel, they were unable to find our reservation! We were devastated to have yet another exhausting glitch in our trip. Each time we think we are finally through all of the problems and can finally get settled and enjoy our time here, we seem to be hit with another blow.

We called Tara, but she was in the middle of an event for one of her athletes and it took her some time to get back to us.  It was finally discovered that the hotel had spelled my last name wrong. But this took until 3:00 in the morning. We spent three long hours camped out in the hotel lobby, and this on top of very little sleep the night before (because it took so long to get back to our previous hotel), an early wake up in order to check out, and almost three hours in a lost taxi.

The room, once we got into it, is not even as nice as Wendy’s college dormitory at Boston University, with two single, hard beds, a carpet that feels like fine sandpaper, bath towels the size of a kitchen towel, and quilts that barely cover one person (no extra blankets, one towel each). To call it a 2-star hotel room would be pushing it. We won’t even mention the price that was paid for it.

We are very close to heading back to Connecticut.