Christine Brennan

USA TODAY Sports

SOCHI, Russia -- Figure skating never, ever disappoints.

Just when you thought you'd seen it all – a knee whacking, a broken skate lace, a wardrobe malfunction, a cheating French judge – something new happens to remind us why skating still is the most entertaining soap opera in all of sports.

I could start with the disastrous performance on the first night of the team competition by four-time U.S. national champion Jeremy Abbott, who completely bombed in his short program but then decided to call the debacle "a very positive step."

I could, but I won't.

Nor should we begin with the world champion Russian pairs skaters, who announced after helping their team take the lead Thursday that they are bagging the long program Saturday, which could help Canada – not Russia – win the inaugural team competition.

No, let's start with the fact that an hour after the competition was over, with the United States declared to be in seventh place based on a tie-breaking formula few knew about or understood, U.S. Figure Skating spokeswoman Renee Felton said there was no "basis" for officials to use the tiebreaking procedure at all because it was "an intermediate result."

She was right. What the lords of the sequins were doing was the equivalent of the Masters talking about making its cut after only 18 holes were played.

So the United States was officially in seventh place but was really tied for fifth with France and Germany, two nations it should beat when the competition resumes Saturday night.

Got it? Of course not. No one does. That's figure skating for you. Fun to watch, almost impossible to understand.

But this, we get: What in the world was with Abbott? He was just awful. He fell on his quad, turned a planned triple-triple combination jump into a triple-double and popped his triple axel into thin air.

This wasn't any old typical Abbott international meltdown, such as his terrible ninth-place finish at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. This was worse. He didn't just let himself down, he let his team down. He put the Americans, who are favored to win a medal, in a big, but not insurmountable, hole. There are two nights left, a cut to be made, and a few nations who have nowhere near the depth the United States has across all four disciplines.

But still, Abbott's showing was a total embarrassment. There's not much worse you can say about an athlete after you say he's completely unreliable. Sadly, that's Abbott. Never one to be able to master his nerves, he picked the worst possible time to perform horribly.

After saying he was "torn apart" by his short program, he then uttered one of the more confounding lines in figure skating history:

"For me I think it was a very positive step. You're all going to think I'm crazy."

Yes, we are.

"You know, like I just fell on my butt. I have another chance. I've been skating extremely consistently here. I think I just needed to kind of like work out the bugs, shake off the demons."

That comment just won the Olympic gold medal for utter self-absorption. Abbott has almost no chance to win a medal in the packed men's event, even if he skates very well. His best chance – every American's best chance, except for gold-medal favorites Meryl Davis and Charlie White – is in the team event. And Abbott just made that opportunity a bit more difficult for the Americans to reach.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the Russians, so happy to be skating on home ice and in the lead after the first two short programs Thursday. The 31-year-old veteran Evgeni Plushenko was as terrific as he could have hoped to have been. And the pairs team of Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov were even better, helping Russia to that early lead.

But they couldn't stand prosperity. After Volosozhar and Trankov won their segment, they pulled out of the long program to get ready for the pairs competition next week.

"We did want to bring good results for our team and not to fail Evgeni Plushenko," Trankov said.

And then they did.