I got to see some Youth Olympics vaulting yesterday, and a British girl (Alissa Downie) had that frosty look of death during competition everyone used to talk about Aliya Mustafina having. And that reminded me of how much overkill Mustafina’s “Ice Queen” persona used to get in the American press. And that made me wonder: did Russian advertising ever make use of that?
I’m not Russian, and I have no idea what their advertising is like, but I figure they have got to love Aliya Mustafina at least as much as I do, and so she must have done some product advertising for things besides sports equipment and sportswear. But did they ever make use of the icy glare in her ads? I hope so!
Wow, in America, she would have been in some ad for Starbuck’s where a guy with a hot cup of coffee has Aliya Mustafina stare at the coffee, and it turns to iced coffee, and the announcer says: “Hey, want an iced coffee, but you don’t have Aliya Mustafina to freeze it with her icy stare? Then come on down to Tsarbuck’s (Starbuck’s could be ripped off as Tsarbuck’s easily enough), where we’ve got lots of cold coffee drinks, without necessitating the frosty glare of Aliya Mustafina.
And then I guess Budweiser could use her in an ad for their Ice Beer, where she’s at a party, and everyone’s beer freezes over, and then the announcer says that you can get great ice beer even if Aliya Mustafina won’t come to your party.
(You know, I wonder if Russians even think of Mustafina’s glare as icy, so much as focused. I never thought of her as the “Ice Queen”, so much as I thought she was a fierce competitor, honed with laser-like precision on the task at hand. So maybe Russian ads have her doing ads for Lasik?)
BTW: Aliya Mustafina, the All-Around World Champion, was injured before the Olympics, and then she won the gold medal on the one event I didn’t know she did well: uneven bars. Holy crap: you can’t keep this woman down! If she lost her legs in an accident, she’d win the sprint races on her arms. If she were paralyzed, she’d become the world champion of Chess. Enough with the “Ice Queen” stuff, I think she’s just resourceful, determined, talented, unrelenting, etc., and will not allow anything to hold her back, no matter what it is. I’m glad our women won, I love them, but you’ve got to admire someone like Aliya Mustafina, no matter who you are, or where you’re from. And I hope she’s an advertising superstar in Russia: she ought to be!
