The Canadian figure skating judging system is in major need of less Paulas and more Simons. For realz.

First, the U.S. mens' final today was very edge of your seat, nail biting worthy and exciting! Though he did not make the Olympic team like I had hoped, Ryan Bradley did a wonderful job on his LP today. I was so proud of him! He really took the mistakes he made in his short and used them to fuel a spectacular performance. Unfortunately, his SP did cost him, but it sure was close between him and Johnny Weir. Only 7 points. Is it terrible that I was sitting there hoping and praying that Ryan would manage to edge Johnny out of third? Had it only been based on the LP, he would've gotten silver. Ryan truly was the second best skater of the day.

The 'best' label, however, goes to Jeremy Abbott hands down. Wow....and...wow. He basically blew everyone out of the water today. A near flawless program. In fact, I didn't notice a single mistake. Of course, I'm not a figure skater, so maybe I'm not knowledgeable enough to have spotted them. If there were any, they were very minimal. Jeremy ended up finishing 25 points ahead of silver medalist, Evan Lysacek. Again, wow. While Ryan is my all-time favorite male skater, I wound up spending most of my time watching Jeremy's routine with my mouth hanging open. Ryan still owns on the entertainment and audience interaction factors though. I would love to see him skate live some day! And Jeremy too!

And our Olympic team is gonna be, as expected, Abbott, Lysacek and Weir. No shake ups :-(

So, I always wind up with some sort of drama or frustration issues after these kind of things. This time around I found myself fairly content, but slightly disappointed about Ryan, knowing that we do have three strong skaters who made it on the podium and will in turn be going on to compete in February. Johnny and Evan have a little work to do on their LPs before Vancouver. Though today may have just been a result of the pre-Olympic jitters and a fluke. It happens.

Anyway, the drama didn't come until after watching the mens' final at the Canadian Nationals. They have a couple of pretty good guys up there. Not quite at the level of our American men, except for Patrick Chan that is. He's "above" the level of our guys. After his LP, he received a higher score than Jeremy's skate. The commentators at the U.S. mens' final today were talking about how Jeremy had edged into the amazing category with his cumulative score of 263. So then, Patrick's score of 268 should indicate that he managed to out-skate Jeremy, right?

Wrong. Okay, let me state that I really do like Patrick Chan and I think that he's a great skater. I enjoy watching him and hope for the best for him at the Olympics. But there is NO way that he skated better than Jeremy today. I'm aware that it was different countries and different judges, so you're gonna end up with different opinions. I am starting to wonder if we need a universal figure skating judging boot camp before the games in February. I can't seem to remember either Jeremy or Patrick's exact scores on their LPs. After a little calculating of what I recall their SP scores being (Patrick - 90, Jeremy - 87), Patrick must've gotten roughly 2 points higher than Jeremy received on his LP. Patrick had no quads in his program, Jeremy had one and landed it nicely. Patrick made a few noticeable mistakes (even I spotted them) and as previously mentioned, I didn't see any in Jeremy's skate. How does that work out?

Yes, I know they weren't judged by the same people. It sure would be curious to see how each of them would have fared had they swapped countries for the day. Man, Jeremy's scores might've been off the charts if he had skated in Canada tonight, while Patrick would've received a rude awakening here in the states. Personally, after watching him skate, I would put him right below Ryan. Not just because I'm biased and madly in love with Ryan, but to be honest I don't think he's on the level (yet!) of the top four we saw today. They showed a clip of Patrick's SP before his LP and even there he made a couple of mistakes. Which tells me that his SP score was considerably inflated along with his LP.

Someone on twitter the other night tweeted about how they were shocked that Patrick scored higher than Jeremy did on Friday without a triple/triple combination in his program. I tried to mentally give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he must have been so amazing that he didn't need the points from that combo. After today, I'm starting to think that the Canadians are just plain over-scoring their athletes. What they don't realize is that this is actually hurting them by giving them false expectations. I really hope that Patrick tries to track down and watch the performances of his Olympic competitors at their National competitions. Because if he just goes off of the comparison of his score to others in order to determine who his biggest competition will be, he's gonna be in big trouble.

I had every intention of just coming on here and making this a quick rant, but as usual when I get going, I have a hard time reeling it back in. On another note, the Australian Open is going on right now. Unfortunately, they're not giving us free live feed of the matches :-( I loved that the US Open did that in September! Now, I have to resign to listening to the Australian Open radio and watching the scores as they change. It's so much more fun watching it live though. Oh well. I'm actually listening to the Nadal/Luczak match this very moment. So far, it is tied 6-6 in the first set. But I'm gonna have to go to bed and won't get to finish listening to it. Hopefully, Rafa comes out on top. On the ladies' end of things, Maria Sharapova has already been knocked out of the running. She lost to Maria Kirilenko. Bummer. Justine Henin and Roger Federer are the ones I'm hoping win this year. So, we shall see.

I really need to go to bed. I'm heading up to Seattle later today to go see the 100 Monkeys concert in Seattle with Stephanie tonight. Yay! And the ladies and ice dancing competitions are happening later this week at nationals! So, good night! Oh, and remember that Pigs Can Fly! (showing some Jeremy love :-)