With Ron Artest — oops, I mean Metta World Peace (is there a symbol for that?) — eliminated in Week 1, the athletic prowess in Dancing with the Stars was just cut in half.

Now, the hope of Aerys Sports Nation hangs on, you guessed it, Hope Solo. Forgive me for the horrible pun — it’s late and I had to watch some horrible dancing.

Hope and her partner Maksim were the first couple to dance tonight, and considering she interrupted her practice to hop north to Portland, get honored for her 100th career  U.S. national team appearance, and shut out the Canadian national team on Thursday, she looked pretty damn good —  both with her jive moves and in a cute faux Solo jersey tied up at her chest.

Nothing I’d want to see on the field, though, of course.

http://youtu.be/5L_CCJPIGJ0

She definitely needed to work on her fluidity and apparently had too many “kicks” and not “flicks,” but I thought she was better than the 19/30 score she received.

Especially when much worse dancers — Carson Kressley, for example — received 18 points. If you love Hope like we do, go to ABC.com and vote for her.

Now, I don’t usually tweet about dancing shows, so when I started commenting on some of these folks other than Hope, naturally a few of my followers thought that my Twitter account had been hacked. A few observations from myself and the Twitter peanut gallery:

• Is Elisabetta Canalis on this show solely because she’s George Clooney’s ex? Somehow, her performance gained her more points than Hope from the judges, but it looked like she couldn’t wait to get far enough away from her partner, Valentin Chmerkovskiy, who happens to be the brother of Hope’s partner, Maksim.

• Kristin Cavallari-Cutler (oh, wait, they may be reconciling!) actually performed decently, gaining 22 points out of 30. But really, with everyone getting between 17-23 tonight even the suckiest of the suck were given a long leash.

• Oh, Carson Kressley. He can’t dance worth a lick, but he sure looks cute doing it. Judge Len Goodman had the quote of the night — “The worst dancers on this show are the most fun to watch.”

• Poor Chaz Bono barely got through the dance without his knees falling off. He was supposed to be doing a quick step, but it looked more like he was dancing in quick sand.