Battle of the Blades - Week 1

OMG! Battle of the Blades is my new favorite show! It's on CBC every Sunday and Monday for the next six weeks. This show pairs hockey players with figure skaters to see how well the hockey players adapt to figure skating. It's hosted by Ron MacLean and Kurt Browning, and the judges are Dick Button and Sandra Bezic with a guest judge each week. This week's judge was Kelly Hrudey who you could tell had a lot of fun watching the big brawny hockey players skate a little routine with their partners.

The pairs are Bob Probert and Kristina Lenko (see photo), Claude Lemieux and Shae-Lynn Bourne, Glenn Anderson and Isabelle Brasseur, Stephane Richer and Marie-France Dubreuil, Ken Daneyko and Jodeyne Higgins, Tie Domi and Christine (Tuffy) Hough-Sweeney, Craig Simpson and Jamie Sale, and Ron Duguay and Barbara Underhill.

It's a lot better than you might think because the hockey players already know how to skate. Most of them have adjusted pretty well to the toe picks on the figure skates, but a few of them obviously didn't because they ended up wearing their hockey skates. Probert, Domi and Duguay all wore their hockey skates, but then Barbara Underhill sported a pair herself for this first round.

The judges gave the highest marks to Duguay who clearly visited Studio 54 a time or two when he played for New York. It kills kills kills me to say this, but if I had voted it would have been for Claude Lemieux. *choke choke, gag gag* Seriously, Lemieux and Bourne had the most elements in their program, including a full overhead lift, AND Lemieux did the whole thing on figure skates! I was really impressed. Actually I was impressed with all of the guys who all did a lot better than I had expected....except for Probert. *sigh*

I wish I could say my Red Wing skated figure eights around Domi, but he clearly had the hardest time adjusting to the fluidity of movement needed for figure skating. And after the skate-off on Monday between Probert and Richer (who had the two lowest vote tallys), the judges voted off Probert.

Next week the remaining seven pairs will be skating to music by Frank Sinatra, and the guest judge is going to be........drum roll........Don Cherry! YES! Grapes himself will be critiquing Tie Domi's ability to adapt a lovely skating routine to a lilting Frank Sinatra melody. (No, pigs aren't flying and hell hasn't frozen over.) If that's not enough to get you tune in then I don't know what is.