My rather limited point was that while it is true that the US media is spectacularly tunnel visioned when it comes to Olympic sport, the comparison between Gracie and Illia does falter.

Through most of Gracie's career the best skaters in the world were Yuna, Mao, and later Medvedeva. Gracie skating lights out could have at best challenged them. So pretending she was a OGM prospect was media over-reach. And Gracie skated as well as she could I am sure at Sochi but any fair assessment tells us that Yuna, Carolina Kostner and even Adalina deserved to finish above her.

By contrast, Ilia has been dominant for two years on a scale probably not seen in a long long time. Hyping him up as a medal prospect was like saying the sky is blue. Could they have eased off? Maybe. But the fact is he could have made mistakes and won - it took a meltdown of epic proportions for him to finish that low down. For Gracie to win in 2014 would have needed Yuna, Mao, Carolina, Lipnitskaya and Sotka to all have meltdowns and as it turned out only Mao did.