#and by 2003/2004 they won juniors lol

[saucylittlesmile]

While I was researching at @sunskate’s costume question, I ended up on this YouTube channel. The uploader has got an amazing, astounding variety of old skating events. While it is possible that I have seen videos from them before, I don’t recall them off the top of my head - and the quality is great too. Meanwhile, although I have seen these skates before, it is always interesting to see them as a whole rather than just the program. For someone like me who always enjoyed even the small moments on broadcasts beyond the competitive skate, a whole show like this can be a bit of a gold mine.

This particular video doesn’t actually feature V/M. It is a broadcast that they aired it for a while that highlighted the gold medallists at the novice and junior levels, and as we saw from the 2001 edition*, sometimes the earlier levels too. In the 2002 season, V/M were competing as novices, and according to their book, they had a fall in their competition which ultimately left them in third place. As such, their skate is not highlighted here as the show only made room for the gold medalists. However, if you watch the opening credits you will see V/M in a small snippet of their free dance that year. I don’t recall ever getting a video of that dance, and certainly this does not give us any real inkling of it; however, it spoke volumes to me that the bronze medallists were still promising enough, that they made it into that sequence.

*Previously, I had only ever seen edited versions, whereas this is the entire episode, though VM are only in a small section. I always seem to forget just how much younger and tinier they were than their competition in the early years. 😂