Jackie Wong

There's been more interest in figure skating this season than I have seen in the past two Olympic cycles.

Beijing Olympics was obviously weird because it was COVID Olympics and we didn't really know what was going on and nobody really knew what was going on.

And it made it harder for everybody to train.

Yeah, everybody to train, everybody to sort of get excited about it.

There was nobody in a crowd.

You know, I was like one of maybe 1,500 people in the arena, and most of them were journalists.

So it was kind of crazy, but yeah.

You know, in the US especially, because the US is coming in with three of the four reigning world champions for the first time ever in the history of the Olympics,

There is, I think, a renewed interest in the U.S.

for figure skating because they've heard something about it.

And there are some very interesting personalities who are coming to Milano from the U.S.

So I expect this to be a bigger Olympics in terms of viewership than at least the last two, if not more than that.

Yeah, so the Russians literally have two skaters here because they have been banned from international skating union events over the past Olympic cycle.

So ever since the 2022 Olympics, because of the invasion of Ukraine, they and Belarus were banned from the ISU competitions.

And last year, there was a rule from basically maybe a compromise or an agreement between the ISU and the International Olympic Committee that there would be neutral athletes who would be able to compete.

And so long story short is they get one spot for each of the four disciplines, and they don't get a team.

Right.

So they were told they needed to submit athletes to be vetted for those four spots.

And so they submitted four entries, two of which, the pairs and the dance, were vetted and then actually not allowed to compete because somehow they had...

They were supportive of the war, or they had ties to something or other, and they were found to, one of them at least, right, of the pair at least, was found to not be eligible for that based on the rules that the IOC and the ISU set.