"The Back Flip in the Long Program"

With the close of every Winter Olympics comes a difficult period of adjustment in which we must deal with the fact that we have become over-saturated with detailed knowledge about a wide variety of winter sports. It is not so much the over-saturation that is difficult, but rather the reality that the bulk of this knowledge is going to collect dust for another four years (by which time we will have, of course, forgotten it, and thus need to be saturated again--so perpetuating the cycle). In the spirit of milking our newfound, collective status as Winter Olympic Experts just a little longer, I thought I would dedicate this post to the explication of a beloved idiom that my friends and I developed a few years back while sitting in a pub and watching (what else?) an international figure skating competition. Here it is:

"back flip in the long program"

Origin: In women's figure skating, back flips are verboten. Not really sure why; if anyone has some insight into this, I'm curious. Quite possibly the issue is an aesthetic one. At any rate, if a female skater performs a back flip in international competition, she is disqualified. At one time, there was a French skater named Surya Bonali who always seemed to come up short in the medal department, but had a kick-ass back flip (bear with me here, the point is coming). I seem to recall that on the particular day my friends and I happened to be watching Bonali skate on television, she had a messy fall partway through her long program that would have put her out of medal contention. But she finished the program with a back flip and so was disqualified instead of having to face the indignity of placing fifth (or whatever it was).

Usage: "Back flip in the long program" can be used to describe any situation in which someone purposefully screws themselves over to avoid embarrassment/failure. It's like, you know you're going down anyway, so you compensate for your shortcomings by grabbing an alibi.

Painful personal example: Back in grade 8, I went to all the school dances, hoping that the boy I had a crush on would ask me to dance. But whenever the d.j. threw on a slow song (Stevie B.'s "Because I Love You (The Postman Song)"--aaahh! again, the parentheses!--still has some particularly bitter associations for me) , I wouldn't hang around the edges of the gym, waiting for the invitation to dance that I knew wasn't coming. Nosirree--I bolted out to the hall with my friends, where we made sarcastic comments about all the dorky people who were sentimental and sappy enough to actually dance to a slow song to begin with. A clear-cut case of back flip in the long program. Had I stayed in the gym, I, like Surya Bonali, would have only had to face my disappointment head-on. Better to disqualify one's self with flair.

So there you have it. I encourage you to go forth and use this turn of phrase whenever you believe it is apt. Just remember, if you actually pull too many back flips in the long program, you'll never make it to the podium. And yes, that can be construed as a sexual metaphor.