Figure skater Adam Rippon has pretty much been giving us life both before and during the 2018 Winter Olympics, but last night really brought us the cherry on top of the already fabulous cake.
Rippon scored his first ever medal, a bronze, after his flawless performance in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The song in which he performed to was Coldplay's "O" off of their 2014 album Ghost Stories.
As thrilling as this is for him, there has been widespread frustration at how the judges scored him at a lower level than the two who received Gold and Silver medals that evening: Patrick Chan of Canada and Mikhail Kolyada for Olympic Athletes of Russia.
Both Kolyada and Chan fell during their performances, something Rippon didn't do, but the judges felt that their routines had a higher level of difficulty than Rippon's which led to the higher scores (even with their missteps). This led to several Twitter users, including Saturday Night Live's Leslie Jones, to voice their frustrations online regarding the outcome.
Regardless, Rippon has clearly become the star of the 2018 Winter Olympics, as his outspokenness regarding his feelings towards homophobic Vice President Mike Pence and his incredible performance last night proves what a force he has become in the LGBTQ community. Congrats Adam on a job well done!
For those of us who follow
For those of us who follow figure skating, we're both happy and unhappy about Adam Rippon at the Olympics. His being on the team is a matter of skating politics (the unhappy) but he's also underrated and at times unappreciated (why we're happy he's in Korea). He's also strikingly handsome. As little as a year ago he was boy next door cute but now he's an adult and his performance was mature. Now he did an amazing job last night, but the team event is like junk food, enjoyable but not always satisfying. The men's single event is what he's there for and what matters, so I hope the media does not follow his every move as they have done to other skaters so that he loses his concentration. Skating commentators love building up potential medalists, treating them like celebrities, then love to be faux sympathetic when they crash and burn.