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As expected, Todd arrived in Salt Lake City last night, checking into the hotel around 11 pm, about the time your faithful reporter was crawling into bed <g>. Which meant he was on hand and ready to go this morning for his scheduled 10:30 am practice session at the Steiner rink. It was a short program practice session and the big news is that the quad is out of the short for this competition. The game plan is to revert to the triple flip/triple toe combination, along with the triple lutz out of footwork and the solo triple axel. Today's runthrough left a bit to be desired in that he doubled the flip, landing a double flip/triple toe, although the axel and lutz came off nicely. Prior to the runthrough he did land a nice quad/double toe combination (within 16 minutes of taking the ice) and after the run-through he concentrated on lp choreography, landing a lovely triple axel/triple toe and a nice triple lutz/triple toe.

The really big news on the Todd front concerns 13th Warrior. Most of you will be thrilled and delighted to know that the Amish Klingon costume has been relegated to the dustbin of history. A new costume is on the horizon, hopefully for Worlds, but in the meantime the old 13th Warrior costume has been resuscitated. Also, the program has been rechoreographed so that the quad will now come much later rather than at the start. The program now opens with the triple axel/triple toe combination, followed by the triple flip/triple toe combination, followed by the triple lutz (or triple lutz/triple toe if one of the previous combinations doesn't come off as planned). *Then* comes the quad, followed by the solo triple axel, followed by the triple loop and finally the triple salchow. This way, if he misses the quad it will come at a point where he will already (hopefully <g>) have landed a bunch of other triples and if he successfully completes those the adrenalin level and confidence might just result in a successful quad. All in all, I do think this is much better plan than before.

We had a chance to see how the new jump arrangement worked and looked at this afternoon's practice session. The men had their first session at the Delta Center this afternoon. It was a sp/lp session (skater's choice as to which program music would be played) and as the session at the Delta tomorrow is a short program session and both sessions on Thursday will be at the Steiner, today's session was really the only chance the men had for a complete long program run-through on competition ice on other than the day of competition itself (when no one in their right mind would choose to do a complete run-through). Ergo, not surprisingly, most of the men opted for their long program music and many, including Todd, attempted complete run-throughs. Todd's effort was pretty darn good, all things considered. The opening triple axel/triple toe came off very nicely, as did the subsequent triple flip/triple toe and solo triple lutz. The quad was tripled (technically producing three triple toes, but after two triple triples, who cared?), but the second triple axel was landed right afterward beautifully. A nice triple loop followed, and then of course the next scheduled jump ended up as a kind of doubled pop - the next jump being, yes, you guessed it, Todd's favorite jump and mine, the triple salchow. However, a spot for a final jump remained, which spot would ordinarily be filled with a double axel, and since he had already done too many triple toes, he ended the program by repeating the attempt - this time successfully. Before the run-through and after it, he did manage to land several quads - for a grand total of three altogether.

As for the rest of the competition, everyone is present now except Michael Weiss (who as far as I can tell is not even in the city yet) who was also the only major player not present for any of the day's practice sessions. Min Zhang joined his Chinese colleagues today and I have to say I am *very* impressed with this guy, even if he doesn't seem to be terribly consistent with his jumps. Yunfei Li did demonstrate he does have a triple axel, but he's far from consistent with it and his rather questionable technique is probably the reason why. Chengjiang Li looked strong again today and left us wondering if he's planning to do a quad salchow in his short program, save it for his long, or keep it in reserve altogether. The three Japanese were once again all over the place and generally all over and on the ice as well, as their jump problems continued, while the Canadians were kind of up and down. After a couple of misfires, Sandhu unleashed a quad sal/triple toe that earned a very vocal expression of appreciation from his teammate Ben Ferreira - here again, I have no idea if this is still a work in progress or if Sandhu is planning to try this jump in competition any time soon. I could see a lot of improvement in Sandhu, especially with respect to his speed in general and the speed of his spins, but his jumps seemed kind of on again, off again. Ben Ferreira looked much stronger today and also seems to have improved quite a bit since I last saw him at Skate Canada. Jayson Denommee, on the other hand, continues to have jump problems, and is not looking terribly good, IMO. Finally, Matt Savoie took a few more spills today than he did yesterday, but on the whole he is continuing to look rather good.

Todd has two practice sessions scheduled for tomorrow. The first is a free skate practice at the Steiner Rink at 1:10 pm, the second is a short program practice at 5:00 pm at the Delta Center.

Well, that's all for now from the trenches. More tomorrow, hopefully beginning with the short program draw in the morning (it's scheduled for 9:30 am, SLC time).