Figure skating...

I'm not sure there's anything to say about figure skating that hasn't been said before, but I got sucked right into the women's competition last week and it's got me thinking.

Those girls - young women - are tough little athletes, all muscle and nerve, but they go out there and wear ridiculous foo-foo dresses and the more they are like princesses, the more they are loved. Now, granted, the gold medal winner managed to make unbelievably athleticism look easy-peasy, and that's certainly nothing to scoff at... but it's all too clear that women athletes are supposed to be pretty, graceful, and feminine. Which is really even harder than just being an olympic-level athlete. The boys don't have to wear fake nails and glittery eyeshadow and ludicrous dresses. At least they let the women wear pants now, but I don't think any did for the free-skate. That little firecracker, Irina Slutskaya, who wore pants for the short program, knows that you have to look girly to get the high artistic scores.

Manolo the Shoe Blogger has already lamented the terrible fashion of the ice skating world... and he is SO right. I saw only two really nice dresses this year - a yellow one on the Swiss skater, and an all-blue one on Emily Hughes. Sasha Cohen's velvety thing was acceptable since she was skating as Juliet. Most everything else was just awful. Why must there be so many trashy cutouts and fleshy panels? So many sequins? Why not pretty dresses with nice lines and tasteful embellishments?