Face it, team figure skating at the Winter Olympics feels a little contrived, weird

GANGNEUNG, South Korea – Some Winter Olympic events are thrilling. Some, let’s face it, are a little bit boring. And some are just kind of weird.

Figure skating’s team event drifted past its midway point on Sunday afternoon at the Gangneung Ice Arena, and sits firmly in the final category.

It is like the mixed doubles at a Grand Slam tennis event, where it is nice to win, but no one pays too much attention, and beyond the participants there’s scarcely a soul alive who remembers who won a year later.

In figure skating the teams do their thing on the main ice, obviously, but in terms of importance it doesn’t have a lot in common with the intensity and prestige of winning in an individual discipline.

It all feels contrived.

The team members who are not skating show up to watch sometimes and more often don’t. When they do, they have a nice purple bullpen to sit in at rink level, and are encouraged to bring along national flags to wave.

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Nathan Chen hasn’t been spotted in the cheer section since his struggling performance in the men’s short program on Friday. You get the sense that compared to whatever success comes his way in the men's individual event, the bronze Chen will win in the teams is worth little.

Bronze medal? Hang on, doesn’t the team event still have three of its sessions still remaining?

Yep, it does, but barring a sabotage plot from a rogue North Korean cheerleader the Americans are going to win bronze, just like they were going to win bronze before the event. They have no chance of breaking into the top two monopoly of Canada and Russia, little chance of dipping out of the top three.

It is as predictable as it gets, there being enough space between the combined abilities of the squads at the head of the list to strip away any competitive drama. Perhaps unsurprisingly, half the crowd had left by the time the pairs took the ice for Sunday’s third session, following on from the more popular women’s program an hour earlier and the ice dance prior to that.

The skaters want to do their best, of course they do, but it has the feel of a warm-up.

Chen, the great U.S. hope, fell on his butt on Friday and slipped to fourth, but it didn’t cause a mortifying reaction in Bradie Tennell, the American women’s champion, who was the fifth-placed out of 10 female skaters.

“It doesn’t really affect me because we are two different people,” Tennell said, when asked about Chen’s fall. “Everybody handles stress differently so obviously I wish him all the best. Yeah.”

Yeah.

Alex and Maia Shibutani went for the American team in ice dance and have been near-constant fixtures in the team support section.

How to cheer, and when to cheer, is part of the process.

“You know your teammates and you want them to put on their best performance,” Alex Shibutani said. “Everyone is different, some of them like whistling and hooting and hollering, others like to stay in their zone.”

This is a sport where selfishness and introspection are a prerequisite for success. Cracking that icy wall a little bit and having a collective element on the schedule isn’t the worst idea. The end product isn’t bad, just weird, and in truth, it feels like the figure skating competition hasn’t truly begun yet.