In my last post, I compared Olympic sports to facets of competitive air guitar. Today, I'd like to add an appendix to that list to show you an Olympic athlete incorporating air guitar into his performance on the ice!
You probably guessed by my wording that we are talking about a figure skater (and because someone isn't going to sit up on their luge and start air guitaring in the middle of sliding down the track). Wait, though! Don't run from the room! I know a lot of people don't want to watch figure skating and have already seen about 100 hours of it in the week of competition that's happened so far. But this one's cool, I promise.
This is Kevin Reynolds of Canada. This video is his short program at the Canadian championships; he skated the same one at the Olympics but I couldn't find video of that yet. My friends, he is skating to AC/DC, and he air guitars not once but twice in the program. Take a watch:
** I tried to set it to start where his skate starts but I'm not sure that worked; if it starts at the beginning, fast-forward to about 2:55, something went wrong with the music and there was a delay at the beginning and a bunch of pointless jibber jabber
And yeah, he wiped out on one of the jumps, he did that the other day in Sochi too, so what, he's fantastic. The spin sequence during the intro to Thunderstruck - I mean, of course you would spin. It sounds like spinning. And really, doesn't this whole routine strike you as very air guitar-esque? Maybe all figure skating is, but it's usually to snoozy classical tunes so the parallel is harder to draw - but what I'm driving at is the matching your movements to the music, making big dramatic moves when the song does, I mean the only reason he's swooping around instead of playing power chords is because he's got to conform to the rules of his sport. It's just the nature of the motion that's different, really.
Hey, kid, if you need something to do in between figure skating competitions, I know another competition that would be glad to have you. Right? I bet he would destroy.
----
Anyone see any other examples of athletes breaking out their air guitar? I feel like snowboarders' victory celebrations are probably a good place to look, but I don't recall seeing anything as of yet.