Half Full ... Or Half Empty?

You know that old line about two ways of looking at the glass of water.
The optimist sees it as half full. The pessimist sees half empty.
So it is that there are two ways of analyzing Canada's performance in the pairs event at the Tokyo worlds.
On the one hand, Canada remains medal-less in the pairs discipline since Jamie Sale and David Pelletier won the world gold in 2001 in Vancouver.
On the other, we were the only country to put three teams in the top 10.
Valerie Marcoux and Craig Buntin had the best Canadian finish. But their sixth-place final standing was a step back from the No. 5 slot they owned a year ago in Calgary.
Still, add that sixth-place finish to the seventh earned by Jessica Dube and Bryce Davison, and Canada keeps three pairs spots for the 2008 worlds in Sweden. That's important for the future.
Half full? Half empty? Depends on your point of view.
For Marcoux and Buntin, it was a bit of both.
And not exactly in the right order.
The three-time Canadian champs were positively brilliant in the short program with what had to rate as their best skate of the year. They were well positioned to maybe make a move up from that fifth-place finish of 2006. Then everything came off the rails in today's free program, and backward they skidded.
Now questions are starting to be asked by some about the future of this pair. For sure, it will be a summer of deep thinking for this eminently likable duo.
Not so for Dube and Davison, who are clearly the present and the future of the pairs program in Canada. Given what they went through a little more than a month ago in Colorado Springs — Dube's face was sliced open by her partner's skate blade when they got too close on side-by-side camel spins during their Four Continents free program — just making it to Tokyo and competing well was admirable in itself.
Surely, there must be a world medal in the future. If Dube, the queen of bad luck, can stay in one piece, that is.
Canada's No. 3 entry in Tokyo is also a team on the rise. Anabelle Langlois and worlds rookie Cody Hay leaped up into the top 10 with an enchanting free skate, and things can only get better for them on the road to Vancouver 2010.
No questions at the top, though. Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao showed they're back as the class of the pairs world. They've indicated, however, that they plan to take at least next season off, meaning a new champ will be crowned in Gothenburg.
One final note of interest: For the first time since 1960, the pairs podium didn't include a team from Russia or the former Soviet Union.
That's 47 years, if you're counting.
And the end of an era, indeed.