Alas, les juex olympiques are over, and it is now business as usual.

There is never a dull moment, either.

I watched all the figure skating, and I'll only say that American figure skating needs to understand that uber-flexible, mechanized little girls are not the future of the sport.

I was jazzed to finally see three women over the age of twenty-one atop the medal podium this year. It would be the first time since 'Nam. Literally.

Seriously, people. Since the sport eradicated the archaic discipline of figures--taking the figure right out of figure skating--our world (the skating world) has been crowning pre-pubescent, leggy little girls and rewarding its athletes for their youth and lack of breasts.

It didn't used to be that way. For those of you who don't know and probably don't care, competitive singles skating used to have three events instead of just two; the short and long programs were just an afterthought to the figures competition, where skaters traced figure eights and serpentines onto an ice surface clear as crystal.

It was really freaking hard. As one of those aforementioned little girls, I hated them. I just HATED them. I was no good at them, and I didn't have the patience to perfect them. Fortunately, I thought, at the time I was skating, the United States Figure Skating Association (now simply, U.S. Figure Skating) was phasing them out of competition.

Back in the days when figures ruled the sport, the champions were Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Katerina Witt--all fully and in certain cases, amply, developed women at the time of their Olympic Glory.

Now here's the thing. These women were juveniles compared to the level of athleticism consistent to elite figure skating today. They weren't doing the hard triples and their techniques were clunkier. Clearly, the fully developed female body does not jump and spin faster. But their artistic marks were through the roof and they were DAMN good at figures. Like, a programmed machine could not have been more precise.

The weight distribution and body control was completely mature--giving these ladies an edge (again, literally) when it came to tracing patterns on the ice. There is a reason people under the age of 18 in the United States can't operate meat slicers. They don't have the sense of hand-eye coordination and balance that would ensure no bloody disasters. Same thing with figure skating.

And lest we forget, before there were jumps and spins and flashy choreography, there were figures.

I could rattle on about it, but my point is that the sport--at least as far as the discipline of women's singles goes--is evolving farther and farther away from its roots. And in the process, it is alienating the skaters who probably love it the most--the older, mature, stage-momless, self-motivators.

Just like kids have a lot to learn about life, little girls bursting onto the international skating scene before they've even lost all of their teeth don't know jack shit about the sport.