This is the first of five posts with my photos from the ladies’ free skate at this year’s World Figure Skating Championships in Helsinki. (I promised four posts to my Twitter followers but decided that an introduction was needed.) Since I did not take photos at the ice dance events (explanation to follow when I write my wrap-up), I was free to completely fill up my 32-GB SD card with more than a thousand photos of the ladies’ free skate (and also the men’s, to follow in another day or so). I went hog-wild, as it were, and so each skater gets more than a dozen photos. I found in the course of doing the editing that jumps in particular don’t present well in still photos, so most of what you’ll see here is spins, but I’ve included a few jumps for each skater when I could — typically the first of the program and the first in “bonus” time, allowing me to pay a bit more attention to the rest of the program rather than staring through the viewfinder with one eye closed the whole time. This also means that I didn’t catch any of the falls (of which there were unexpectedly many, with a significant effect on the results).
For this introductory post I’ll also show the technical panel, introductions of each group of skaters, and the victory ceremony in a single slideshow. (I’m assuming you already know the results from Friday evening if you’re reading this on Sunday!) I’ve included a couple of pictures of the TV crews doing their thing as well.
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