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Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Mandela Effect - Kristi Yamaguchi?

Mandela Effect - Kristi Yamaguchi?

I am so entertained by the idea of a Mandela Effect even if I don’t believe in it (except that it really was Berenstein Bears). I have wondered for years about a memory of my own that I have never been able to substantiate: in the late 1980s/early 90s, I remember watching Kristi Yamaguchi skate on TV and during her program, she skated too close to the edge of the rink and tripped over a lip of wooden edging, taking a chunk out of it and falling into/near some photographers. But she re-entered the rink, finished her skate, and possibly even ended up doing quite well. Then, to the audience’s delight, she presented the judges (?) with a piece of the wooden siding that she broke off during her fall.

I have never found evidence that this actually happened. I have medium-level Google skills (not great, not terrible), but every few years I pop in a few key search terms and never find anything. Part of the problem may be that there are so many words that could describe the rink…edge…thing that she tripped over/through. And any “edge” + “figure skating” query tends to go straight to The Cutting Edge.

So I’m left with a few possibilities:

  1. It never happened. None of it.

  2. It happened, but it wasn’t Kristi Yamaguchi. The thing is, though, as an adolescent I knew my skaters pretty well. So the mistake of coding it as Kristi Yamaguchi would have had to come years after the fact as I forgot who the original skater was. I still think this is unlikely because my memory of it being HER is so vivid and it was such a big deal that a skater as skilled as Kristi had made such a big mistake.

  3. It happened, it was Kristi, but it was some kind of exhibition skate that made the mistake not remarkable enough to make it to internet permanence 30 years later.

  4. It happened, but only in an alternate Mandela Effect timeline that no one else remembers.

  5. It happened, and my Google searches just haven’t uncovered evidence of it.

So in this post I guess I’m asking you if you remember Kristi Yamaguchi literally falling out of a skating rink, and also if you have any other weird candidates for the Mandela Effect.

Grieving

Grieving

August 2019 books

August 2019 books