Kagiyama is the most overrated skater since Patrick Chan. There, I said it

. (And, yes, I've seen him live.) His jumps look awful to me.
I can't quite fully agree with this. Kagiyama's 4s is a thing of beauty when it's on. Sadly, this season, it hasn't been as reliable of a jump as it has in the past. I wonder if the 4f quest is somehow messing with the solidity of the 4s.
But I do agree with him being overrated. I think he gets far more credit than he deserves merely by having Carolina Kostner & Misha Ge on his "team" - it's as if people are projecting all of Ge's choreographic genius & Kostner's chef's kiss skating skills onto Kagiyama & turning him into some super-human artistic, pure skating phenom who is the antidote to the technical phenoms like Ilia & Shaidorov.
Like any other skater, he has some fantastic programs & others that are not - and sometimes this comes down to individual taste. It's been a tough season for him - neither of his programs this year were special. I said this on X & I'll say it here... About the only thing interesting in his FS was that silly red & gold crystalled bull shirt. I question if he knows who HE is as a skater or if he's just going along with all of the advice & input from these wiser, more experienced & accomplished skating glitterati who have joined his team in the last couple years.
Granted, not as bad as Adam Siao Him Fa's. He and his countrywoman Schild throw themselves into the air seemingly with no body awareness. How they land anything is beyond me. He was bombing into quads that had no chance.
It's been a tough season for Adam, battling through the ankle injury. Hopefully he'll get some rest & come back in the fall with his quads in better order rather than the "wing & a prayer" approach he had this week. Usually his technique is better than Schild's, but, this week, not so much, lol.
Jason Brown is making me eat crow

. I momentarily doubted my own eyes when Malinin's second quad lutz was called a triple, and I thought Brown might actually win the free. I'm rooting for Brown to get an Olympic medal just to see the caseyedwards meltdown that would ensue.
LOL! I've accepted, maybe even embraced, the idea of a second Olympic team medal for Jason. It would be awfully hypocritical of me to want to deny Jason another Olympic medal when I was fully on-board with Karen Chen getting the TE nod in 2022 for doing exactly the same thing for the Team USA women that Jason's done for the Team USA men and saved our third spot not once but twice (thrice in Jason's case) at the pre-Olympic Worlds.
Also - caseyedwards melting down over that is a bonus I hadn't thought of!
Poor Lopareva and Brissaud. I've never liked their free dance, but this is politiks

like we haven't seen since the 90s. The French fed must really believe in F-B & Cizeron's potential. I wonder if Canada will regret releasing her if Gilles and Poirier end up FORTH FORTH FORTH in the grand Canadian tradition.
I'm sure they do, but I think GuigFab are the ones who should be really worried. MF is still Canadian after all. She will work her politicking in favor of two IAM teams & the top Canadian team ahead of a non-IAM Euros team. Sure, LopBri got dumped, but so did GuigFab - their FD score took a hit despite their RD score being just .25 lower than their CoC score (which is their best apart from the early season home-cooking at Lombardia).