- Joined
- Jan 27, 2014
Man, people just really won't let this utter MYTH die, will they?
USFS sends a B team - in Olympic years ONLY, because of the proximity to the Olympics.
Every other year they very definitely name an A team.
Now, certain skaters - like Ashley Wagner - have some deluded notion that they're too good for 4CC and choose not to go. But the USFS definitely does not treat 4CC as a 2nd tier comp.
Oh, and: Australia is not the 4th continent. Oceania is. If New Zealand had skaters with the minimums they could send them. And we were guests of the Asian Games. Our skaters couldn't win medals.
Ashley Wagner wasn’t too good to go to 4CCs and defeat Mao Asada for the title, apparently. And while she usually withdraws they didn’t even (bother to?) assign her to the team in 2017.
But while USFSA generally sends a strong team to Four Continents, it’s also true that that initial team is often not actually there in the end (for various reasons), and I think they’ve tended to assign a weaker substitute list most years than they do for Worlds. None of which helps contribute to its image very much.
It doesn’t help that the women, for a long time our most popular discipline, have often performed relatively poorly at 4CC.