No doubt, and I think he knew that going in, hell, he wasn't even going to bother a year and half out, largely because I think he knew that in order to win - to overcome that huge prejudice - he was going to have to a) have a program so difficult that the technical points possible would be all but impossible for anyone else to match b) put aside all that other stuff, the fan clubs, the costume design, the web stuff, the TV show and do nothing but train for two years solid to be able to execute that program. In other world, he would have had to have pulled off something on the order of what Shaun White did on his second (and unnecessary) run - just blow the other competition out of the water. And there is a precedent for that.
Perhaps one of the best figure skating coaches ever was Jutta Müller, and she faced a similar deal, having a female skater who was not near the perfect ice princess model, and who could have easily been dismissed had she not been so awesome in BOTH the technical and artistic that she could not be denied. So she pushed that girl to be so awesome in the technical jumps, landing 5 triple jumps including a triple two loop in a single routine, that it made it all but impossible for any of the other women to gain enough points. That woman, who pushed boundaries - including, speaking of making the judges cringe, making the IOC change the costume requirements, not once, but twice (once for being much too sexy, the other time for being too butch), was Katarina Witt.
All of that is exactly what Culture on Ice is about, it's a feminist analysis of gender in skating, and all that stuff is pretty well known inside the skating community, and in fact, many depend on it. And Weir wasn't even the first. Canadian figure skater Toller Cranston should have won the gold back in the 70s, but didn't, pretty much for the same reason. Though what he did was force all the men to become much more artistic in the programs, a trend that continued right up till this Olympics where the rules (point scoring system) were radically changed to put far more emphasis on the technical aspects, and far less on the artistic - the results of which we all saw.
In the meantime, if it's any compensation (and since this is the USA, it sure does) Wier is going to make huge mountains of money compared to the people who finished above him, I'm sure that will be some consolation.
(p.s. I got very into figure skating watching the 68 Olympics, which I tuned in just to watch the skiing. Then, in HS, where I spent most of my winter weekends at Squaw Valley, when it was too bad to ski I'd go skate in the Olympic Arena there, many people were training at that rink, and they helped me understand a lot more of the inner sport, and the almost byzantine scoring system. I've been a junkie, mostly for the women's figures, ever since then.)
