Torville
and Dean’s iconic, Bolero,
performed at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, fomented a revolution in Ice
Dancing, the most tradition-bound of skating’s competitive
disciplines, and helped propel figure skating to a decade of
unprecedented worldwide popularity, particularly in the United
States. That popularity gave rise to a growing number of televised
professional championships and ultimately to an expansion of the
ISU’s traditional skating season into the current ISU Grand Prix
season.
While
the celebrated British ice dancers immediately left the amateur ranks
following their gold medal performance and dominated the pro circuit
as an artistic force for the next decade, it was Christopher Dean’s
role as mentor and choreographer to the brother and sister ice dance
team of Paul and Isabel Duchesnay that kept the flame of Bolero alive
in the ballroom world of ice dancing. The tide turned in 1990 when
the Duchesnays won the Free Dance at the World Championships in
Halifax. It didn’t matter that they had finished second to the
Soviet dancers Klimova and Ponomarenko. The top Soviet pair’s
intricate dance to a medley from My Fair Lady looked provincial and
quaint, an anachronism compared with the Duchesnays “Missing”
routine, with its raw energy, unusual lifts and moving tableau of
unique positions. By 1991, all of the top dance pairs, including the
top two Soviet teams had joined the revolution and brought out
programs in the so-called ‘avant garde’ style, with Klimova and
Ponomarenko splitting with longtime coach Natalia Dubova over the
dramatic change in artistic direction.
The
apex of the ice dance revolution came almost as suddenly as it had
arrived with the newly converted Klimova and Ponomerenko’s
transcendant A Man and A Woman’ program
at the 1992 Albertville Olympics. Along with Paul Wylie’s two
classic programs and Mishkutennok and Dmitriev’s moving
Liebestraum at the same games, it could be
argued that figure skating as a whole had reached a zenith in terms
of its popularity and overall quality at Albertville. The rise in
popularity would continue in the shortened two year run-up to
Lillehammer, when the summer and winter Olympics switched to
alternate years. Once more, figure skating was the crown jewel of
what would be a very memorable winter games. Even the shadow of the
Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding controversy only seemed to enhance the
mystique and glamor of figure skating.
Between
Sarajevo and Lillehammer a generation of enormously popular and
talented skaters and a number of vaunted rivalries were allowed to
continue with the rise of professional championships. You had
Rosalyn Sumners vs Katarina Witt, the battling Brians (Boitano and
Orser), as well as Browning vs Petrenko, Klimova/Ponomarkenko vs the
Duchesnays, and of course the ever-popular Torvill and Dean and the
darlings of pairs skating, Gordieva and Grinkov. Before this era,
and the arrival of cable t.v. sports, figure skating was something
you got to see once or twice a season on network t.v. The U.S.
Nationals and the Worlds, and every four years during the Olympics.
Suddenly, figure skating was everywhere including prime time
broadcasts of the new glitzy team competitions.
While
the women’s final in Lillehammer had ratings with Superbowl
numbers, this wider audience of the mid-late 90’s soon became
disenchanted with the favoritism of judging and a system of scoring
they didn’t understand. It has to be said, however, that these
newcomers to figure skating fandom lacked some basic knowledge of the
sport, say the difference between edge and toe jumps, or a camel and
a spiral, or that attitude in a layback spin is the proper position
of the free leg and not a sassy facial expression. Thus, they were
focused more on what grabbed them viscerally. The kind of music and
moves they found pleasing. So a kind of subjective imprecision was
equally at work in what was popular with an audience. You could not
expect judges to view Elvis Stojko’s Dragon
program as an artistic equal to something like Rudy Galindo’s
instant classic Swan Lake,
and you could not blame the lay audience for questioning why Alexei
Urmanov was given the gold over Stojko at Lillehammer. When I review
both performances, I’m reminded that skating had become little more
than a triple jump competition by the 1990’s, because neither of
these men were as good pure skaters as either Paul Wylie or Rudy
Galindo, two skaters of that era who were never considered in the
same league as the big jumpers. It is appalling to see the empty
choreographic space and telegraphed jumps you see in Stojko’s
program, and the way he morphed into a hockey player as he raced
around the ice rink between jumping passes. Even his fast footwork
lacks technical refinement. And for a man so proud of his martial
arts prowess, Dragon
does not seriously attempt choreography that looks anything like a
tribute to Bruce Lee. It’s opportunistic and lazy. Everywhere the
rock and roll Elvis is present. Whatever Urmanov’s infelicities and
flaws--the slow spins, stiff posture and overly mannered
quality—Stojko’s inattention to good basic skating strokes,
position, line and choreographic intent left the judges little
choice. I remember rooting for Urmanov only because I could not
stomach the elevation of what amounted to a thumbing of the nose at
what skating was all about—line, edge, precision and the
integration of a total technique into a coherent aesthetic. He
never conceded to the stylistic superiority of the pointed toe or
efficient crossovers, and eschewed anything he considered as the
sissified aspects of the sport. Don’t get me wrong, he could spin
and jump and he had speed, but because he eschewed many elements of
good skating technique as embarrassingly beneath his masculine
aesthetic, the judges basically told him, ‘Same to you, buddy.’
Professional
championships, on the other hand, were the perfect place for people
pleasing performances like Stojko's. Lot’s of gimmicks, camp,
props and kitsch and plenty of rock n’ roll standards blazoned
melodramatically through broad gestural choreography. These
performances lost my interest pretty quickly, except for a handful of
memorable ones, like Boitano’s darkly moving Music
of the Night, because many of them were
technically watered down, with fewer difficult jumps, less demanding
footwork and spins, especially in the so-called artistic programs.
If amateur skating of the 80’s and 90’s had become increasingly
focused on jumps, you could say that the professional
championships were far less demanding of
overall technique, but just as respectful of a skater’s reputation and
popularity and maybe even less accountable as to the criteria used in
judging. It was perhaps the only instance I’m aware of where the
standard for professionals in a sport was less rigorous and inferior
to their amateur counterparts. This was mainly due to the primacy of
entertainment here over true competition, a part of which was
certainly a desire on the part of competitors to lighten the demands
of an Olympic style training regime. Rosalyn Sumners stopped
including triple jumps in her routines as a professional. Viktor
Petrenko was a prime example of what happened to the sport as a
whole. After a time in the professional ranks he'd begun to lose his
hold on the audience. When it became noticeable that audiences
weren't much moved by what he was doing on ice, he was forced to
self-examine. What he concluded was that he'd spent too much time
winking, flirting and hamming and not enough focused on actual
skating, whereas, Paul Wylie, the man he'd beaten out for gold in
Albertville, with his continued emphasis on complete skating and
well-choreographed programs had supplanted him in the audience's
affections. I recall hearing this discussed on one of those
professional championnships in the middle 90's. You see, when it
came down to it, the rigorous demands of amateur skating and the
tension created by those more demanding competitions, had never been
duplicated in the world of professional skating. Except for the very
best artists in the sport, the overall product had a cheapened and
meretricious feeling to it.
I
believe this underlying lack of rigor, eventual overexposure and the
judging scandal at the Salt Lake Games in 2002, contributed to figure
skating's decline in popularity over the next decade and a half,
right up to the present.
The new
judging system created in response to the Salt Lake scandal, which
was supposed to create an accountable basis for scoring, actually may
have exacerbated the problems facing figure skating’s integrity as
a sport. First, when the new scoring system made the judging
anonymous, it allowed the problem of bias, and the possibility of
inside deal-making between judges, to go underground, but it also
created a component score that was as nebulous as the former
'artistic impression' and later named 'composition and style' score,
but was equally used as the subjective element where favored skaters
could be elevated by reputation if their technical skating faltered.
More irksome yet, while there are very specific point totals for
jumps, spins and footwork with levels of difficulty and grade of
execution enhancing scores and specific deductions for falls and
incomplete elements (and you can watch them tallied now right before
your eyes after each element), there has never been a single
explanation or demonstration of how the component score is derived
from a skating performance. Or on what basis judges could project a
component score pre-performance, as was done in comparing the
programs of Medvedeva and Zagitova in Pyeongchang. Loosely it is
based on the program's overall composition and balance, and within
that the choreographic intent as it relates both to style and quality
of technical and field moves in the service of a musical
interpretation, and some important “intangibles” like the overall
speed and energy of a performance and the impact it makes as a whole.
But, with all the emphasis on picking up technical points there is a
hectic and rushed, or crammed, feeling to today's programs, a busy
and flailing quality that ignores the impact of holding out a move
like an Ina Bauer, a Spread Eagle or Spiral all the way across the
ice, or even holding a layback spin position with the correct
attitude. A bit like that last sentence. In spins alone, the
awarding of points for position changes has made the high-impact
single position spin go virtually extinct. Interesting and difficult
choreography like Russian Splits, Butterflies and Death Drops have
all but disappeared from the repertoire, as have satisfying finishers
like a good blurred scratch spin. After all, skaters have to
conserve their energy for the big jump passes, and skaters just don't
spend as much time on spinning. They take a tremendous amount of
energy, are quite difficult to do well and don't garner that many
points. But the biggest loser in this race for points is
choreography and musical interpretation, which I'll address in some
detail later on.
Another
major change, allowing amateurs compensation for placing in ISU Grand
Prix events, including the World Championships, has meant the
creation of a rather long season of international events from
September to March. While this has no doubt kept top skaters in the
“amateur” ranks long enough to appear in an Olympics or two, it
has also created program fatigue. By the time the Worlds roll around
in March, you (and don't forget the judges) could possibly have seen
the same skating routine four or five times. Let's just say that in
today's skating world there are few programs that have enough
subtlety in musical selection and depth in choreographic beauty to
maintain interest over four or five viewings. When a performer
should be unveiling a new program at the Olympics, or at least having
done it only once before, say at Europeans or Nationals, many of
today's performers are using two year old programs. You don't want
the judges or the audience taking your performance for granted or
feeling they've already seen it, especially at premiere events like
Worlds or the Olympics. It simply will not have the impact of a new
program. While there is no doubt a cost consideration in having a
new program choreographed every year, the end effect of increased
repetition is boredom for the audience.
On the
subject of musicality, I couldn't help bringing forward the example
of Paul Wylie's excellent La Valse short
program from Albertville. This was a fine program to view the first
time through, but admittedly Ravel's sophisticated waltz parody does
not grab you immediately with it's cool Impressionist harmonic mode.
However, having recorded it and watched it again later and as the
music became more familiar and attractive to me, I began to feel this
performance come alive even more the second time, so much so that I
immediately encored it on my old VCR (this was 1992 after all). I
was out of my seat at home applauding and electrified. It is still
just as thrilling. The excellence of Wylie's movements, his rounded
sweeping gestures and deep edges so perfectly captured the essence of
this piece's fluid elegance that his interpretation had won me over
to the music and the two things are now inseparable in my mind.
Today's performers put the cart before the horse, selecting music
that is supposed to win you over to the performance, as if artistic
merit were settled by the choice of music. Watch Wylie's performance
and see for yourself what makes figure skating an art form:
One of
the other recent rule changes that has transformed the world of ISU
competitions is the ability to use vocal music. This more than
anything has radically altered the look and feeling of figure skating
today, and overall not for the better. While performers and
audiences may find a resonance with programs skated to Cold Play,
Beyonce, or Ed Sheeran, not to mention old standards and show tunes,
no matter what the musical genre, you must consider whether a piece
of music has a suitable rhythm to capture choreography and whether
there is any drama, forward movement or sense of climax, such as
might create a high impact performance. Pop songs, unlike Swan Lake,
are not created with choreography in mind, and so must be chosen with
care lest they fall flat. That is one reason why skaters return to
Swan Lake again and again. It never fails to enhance the drama of a
solid skating effort. I have complained for years about the
continued overuse of the same old classical numbers like Carmen, Swan
Lake, Malaguena and Scheherazade (for good measure throw in Minkus'
Don Quixote, Rossini and Offenbach overtures, and sadly, Nessun Dorma
by Puccini). These have over the years become cliches. Swan Lake
may be the only exception to the rule as from time to time it
transcends cliché and inspires some of skating's freshest and most
exciting moments, especially when some of its lesser known music is
used. Some performances, like the Canadian pair Duhamel and
Radford's skate to Adele's “Hometown Glory” mined true emotion
from a contemporary song, but then it has a driving piano rhythm and
builds to a soaring, melancholy climax. If you are going to feature
pop music you have to be as selective and wise as when choosing from
the classical repertoire. Unfortunately, there was little wisdom, or
foresight on display in the musical selections at Pyeonchang. It was
simply the most stultifying display of unskatable, uninspired mood
music I have ever seen. Pop ballads with no pulse and new age
instrumental numbers with no dynamic contrast, climax or
choreographically friendly episodes made for a busy wallpaper pattern
of jumps, spins and field moves pasted randomly over background
music. And in the absence of music capable of supporting intricate
choreographic patterns and sharp rhythmic movements, melodramatic
facial expressions and sentimental gestures, as well as an endless,
almost frantic, migration of meaningless flapping arms across the ice
was offered in its place. Yet, while audiences may love these so
called adventurous musical shift away from the classical tradition,
as extolled in a well-meaning, but not-so-musically-informed Sports
Illustrated article,
https://www.si.com/olympics/2018/02/13/winter-olympics-figure-skating-songs-pyeongchang-2018
, why is it that skating's popularity continues to decline and the
programs in the main are so unsatisfying? The problem is as much
theoretical as it is a matter of musical taste and artistic judgment.
One
question that hovers over the past and future of figure skating is
whether its art is better achieved as a form of dance or as a form of
theater. As dance, its emotion should come from the conjunction of
music and movement. The performer creates a presence, through a
distinctive style of movement, posture and technique, representing
the character or sound world of the music and absorbing the audience
in that world in an unselfconscious way. As theater, emotion might
well be transmitted by broad gestures and facial expression that
corresponds more literally with the words of a pop song or a
situation related to the theme of the music (as you saw in
Medvedeva's emotive Anna Karenina program at Pyeongchang, complete
with train whistle), and the choreographic connection to these
theatrical elements tends to be more closely related to upper body
gesture and facial expression than a pure synthesis of music and
technique. The performer projects a personality (their own in the
case of the late, Christopher Bowman) or character and attempts
through a highly stylized choreography to express this character
throughout the program. There are performances that combine elements
of both (a degree of mixing is actually pretty common), but by and
large, every figure skating performance falls into one or the other
of these general modes of expression: dance or theater.
The
effect of what we will call the introverted, or what could be called
the objective interpretation, is that when all goes well and there
are no distracting mistakes and breaks in form the audience may well
become transported deeply into the world of the music, riding along
on the momentum as if they'd hitched a ride on a skate blade and they
themselves are now part of the performance. This happens because the
performer rather than drawing attention to themselves, draws the
audience into the interior world of the music. Great examples of this
introverted style at it's best are the great Paul Wylie (see La Valse
above), Janet Lynn, Torville and Dean, avant garde Klimova and Ponomarenko, late
amateur Angela Nikodinov (when she wasn't overcome by nerves),
Rosalyn Sumners, Michelle Kwan, Brian Boitano, increasingly in his
professional career, Jeffrey Buttle, and Mishkutenok and Dmitriev.
The latter's moving Liebestraum
at the 1991 Worlds was in my opinion the greatest pairs program ever
skated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9j0jrUADG0
There
is a cool unsentimental calm in Mishkutenok and a very romantic
passion in Dmitriev, the effect of which creates a compelling tension
that belies their tight unison and the close contact they maintain
throughout the performance. They do something in that program that is
seldom seen in skating. After all of their difficult moves are
completed and the music has already reached it's climax, they hold
the audience spellbound in the quiet moments of the Liebestraum's
coda. The poignancy of the final 30 seconds almost knocks you over,
beginning with two held poses-- one with Natalia in a cantilevered
full back bend, and Artur behind her in an outside spread eagle, which then transitions to a forward cantilever, with Natalia bent over
like a rag doll and Artur in a spiral guiding her. At the end of the
spiral he releases her with a gentle push at the moment of a chilling chord change, as if surrendering his
dream of love. The movement is so subtle the wrong camera angle
misses it, but this sublime moment of surrender still produces
shivers almost 30 years later. In the final moments of consolation,
she returns to him and they complete the most beautiful death spiral
sequence ever choreographed. There is such awareness of the
potential for choreographic impact, meaningful movement and emotional
nuance in every moment of this performance that it rises so far above
the level of the other competitors as to defy comparison. There is
the 1991 Liebestraum
and then there is everything else that is merely pretty, clean and
technically impressive in pairs skating.
This
introverted or objective style is in sympathy with the mode of the
best in the arts, because it takes a body of good skating technique
(essentially athletic skill) and a host of appropriate field moves
and sensitive choreography and connects them in a unified musical
vision that's sum is essentially artistic. That is, it has something
to say about the human spirit, which fittingly for a non-verbal
performing art, is often a sublime aesthetic feeling that defies
words altogether. But it does so without self-conscious plea to the
audience, or without recourse to forced or faked emotion (that is to
say, without sentimentality).
This
brings us to the extroverted, or, what we might also call, the
subjective style. In using theatrics like illustrative (rather than
abstract) gestures, stylized choreography and facial expressions, it
takes on the subjective viewpoint of a personality or character and
projects that to the audience. In the most overt examples, this
projection of emotion may not be related to skating technique and how
it is integrated into a unified musical interpretation. This seems
inferior on its face for a couple of reasons. For one, facial
expression is a form of acting, not skating. Second, the projected
emotion is in a sense forced on the audience, because it is made
explicit what the performer wants the audience to feel, and because
moreover it has not been earned through the hard work of matching
technical and field moves to their best musical advantage, and doing
so in a style that creates a convincing and organic connection to
that music. Neither choosing an emotional piece of music, nor making
emotional faces means you have made that connection with the music or
the audience. There is nothing easier than that. To rely on this is
a form of artistic cheating. So while the extroverted style that
relies heavily on facial expression and broad illustrative gestures
(Chaplinesque shrugs, hands on the heart to express love, stylistic
motifs that are a little too on the nose, like matador bull-fighting
moves with Spanish flavored music), while it goes for a meaning and connection
to the music that is easily understood by the audience, it is
essentially sentimental. That is to say, it is formulaic and tries
to call from the audience an expected emotion or recognition, usually
one that is quite obvious or trite.
A prime example of this sentimentality was in the
opening moments of the Canadian pair, Kirsten Moore Tower and Michael
Marinaro's long program at Pyeongchang. Moore Tower dramatically
clutched her chest and heaved in a way that made me wonder if she had
indigestion, was having a heart attack or was about to vomit on ice
from a case of nerves. This is one of the problems with overacting
or really bad acting; it tends to be misread or be seen as
unintentionally comical. Worse yet was the attempt to claim some
emotional power before they'd even cut an edge in the ice. (Their
Olympic performance is viewable at Olympics.com; as the first of the
final 16 pairs in the long program; this is the same program skated
at Canadian Nationals with most of the overacting cut out by the
close-up views)
The
program itself was unpretentious and well-done (the bit of bad acting
a superfluous distraction after all), except that it was set to
exactly the kind of warm and pulseless instrumental music that was so
commonplace in these skating competitions. There was one little step
sequence near the end that was amenable to choreography, but it only
served as contrast to what was missing from the rest of the program
and an example of how music in figure skating is becoming merely
ambient, rather than dramatic. The fluid, legato strains of the
music held so few dynamic cues that any one of their jumps, throws
and lifts could have come anywhere in the program and it would have
made absolutely no difference. What then do component elements mean,
that is, the idea of structure and balance, when there is no apparent
design, musical or otherwise, behind the presentation of elements?
What then does musical interpretation mean?
I
mentioned Medvedeva's Anna Karenina performance before. It fit into
the category of acted emotion, rather than skated emotion. It's not
that she doesn't have style and elegance, but she belongs to that ilk
of point grabbers who have sacrificed choreographic impact and the
power of simplicity, for hectic constant motion and change of
position. She and Zagitova both cluster their jumps at the end of
the program for maximum points (Zagitova is far worse), but in doing
so create artistically and technically unbalanced programs where
nothing much happens for the first one or two minutes. Then a
barrage of jumps is clustered in a way that does not maximize their
musical/choreographic impact, and feels crammed. There is no
adequate space around them to given them impact or make the program
structurally comprehensible. It amounts to a gaming of the scoring
system as well. What does it prove if you do difficult jumps at the
end of your program when your legs are still fresh from conserving
energy for the first two minutes. It would show more stamina if she had
done three or four difficult jump combos in the first half of the
program and then done an equal number at the end. But, because of
the rules the judges have to award bonus points. Both of these
programs were over-marked in the component scores and left me dissatisfied, though at least
Zagitova's artistry was skated rather than acted and took advantage
of the dramatic elements in the music, albeit in the predictable mode
of Minkus-speak. Medvedeva's attempt at psychological drama only
succeeded at melodrama. And the ending felt abrupt and anticlimactic.
Having said that, I will also say that I have never seen a 15 year
old skate with the kind of maturity of technique or polish that I saw
in Zagitova. She could truly be the best ever if she would take more
time to let her field moves and technique breathe, balance her
programs, choose more weighty music than Minkus' Don Quixote and then
really feel that music down in the soul of her skate blades. In all
of the best performances, the skaters seem rooted in the ice. Her
performances still feel too much like flitting about on the surface.
That's perfectly normal for fifteen, but let's not exaggerate its
quality or artistic merit.
The
problem is that many times, figure skating's judges have come down on
the side of the theatrical performer over the dance interpreter, the
extrovert over the introvert. The subjective style over the
objective. They have chosen to elevate too often a shallow, inferior method
or art making. Anett Potzsch over Linda Fratiani in Lake Placid
1980, Katarina Witt's meretricious Carmen in Calgary1988, Petrenko
over Wylie in Albertville 1992, Oksana Baiul over Nancy Kerrigan
Lillehammer 1994, and Tara Lipinski over Michelle Kwan Nagano 1998.
Judges have at the same time, especially with the new scoring system,
given preeminence to triple-triple combinations and quadruple jumps.
Essentially they have guaranteed that increasingly, technique in the
very narrow sense of jumping, will win out over complete skating.
And a cheap theatricality, or even pure sentimentality (Medvedeva),
is placed on par with an integrated musicality in the component
score. This is a mistake that does not serve skating well and could
be another reason for the sport's continued decline. You will not
get many Boleros,
Liebestraums or La
Valses unless you encourage them. If you
cannot win with a program that excites and moves people through a
balance of truly excellent technique and artistry, be it not completely
jammed with the visual confusion of bonus point clutter, then nobody
is going to try to create one. It doesn't pay. You also will not
get Boleros,
Liebestraums and La
Valses if they are skating to
La Bamba, Love Story
and The Blue Danube.
If you were to look at what are widely considered the top ten
skating performances of all time, or even just ten classic programs
of the past fifty years, you would find that almost all of them were
skated to serious music, often classical, instrumental music. That
is not to say, skating must be wed to the music of the past. Indeed
there are many great film scores, an entire 20th
and 21st century
classical corpus that remains untapped, plus jazz and much world
music that is being composed today that has to be better than a
static, love sick pop ballad without a pulse, or some saccharin new
age music that's not fit for anything but annoying people whose calls
have been put on hold.
Russian
skaters since the mid-1980's have risen in the ranks of singles
skating (the men most notably in 80's and 90's) and more recently the
women (mainly since Sochi). I mention the Russians because they
include some of the most technically proficient skaters in the sport,
but also in my opinion the most artistically overrated performers as
well. Beginning with Viktor Petrenko and Alexei Urmanov, then Ilia
Kulik, Alexei Yagudin and Yvgeni Plushenko you had five consecutive
Olympic champions and not one of them contributed much stylistically
to the sport. Perhaps early Petrenko's courtly elegance before he became overly mannered. Urmanov was also mannered, stiff-jointed beside, and a weak spinner too. Kulik never matured and was more of a
big jumping puppy dog on the ice with poor stretch and mediocre
posture. Yagudin was the most honest skater of the bunch, with good
flow out of his big jump combinations and very fast footwork, but
stylistically he was more of a ham than an artist. Clearly relishing
the teen idol relationship with his audience, the way Petrenko did
before him to his own detriment. Plushenko had a wild slash and burn
style that was sort of the progenitor of today's crammed, arm waving
perpetual motion programs. His fast footwork was so frantically
embellished by arm movements it distracted from what was happening
with his feet. His Najinski tribute program was presumptuous (and
more pretentious than Stojko's Bruce Lee tribute) because he never
really moved like a dancer or incorporated dance style successfully
into his skating, the way Paul Wylie did with ballet and Rudy Galindo
did with jazz dance.
Their
elevation in the sport was in part a continuation of a kind of
Pro-Russian skating fundamentalism (read as long-standing favoritism
if you will) and the complete capitulation of the sport to the
preeminence of jumps over all other technique, first triple jumps in
the late 80's and early 90's and then the quad jump more or less for
the last 20 years in the men's field, with a definite acceleration
since Evan Lysacek won gold at Vancouver in 2010 without one. It
will invade the women's senior competitions by the fall of 2018.
Which
brings us again to where the sport is today and these most recent
games in Pyeonchang. Having viewed NBC's coverage of figure skating
here in the US I have to comment on the Tara and Johnny show.
Clearly the eccentric qualities of the pair--former U.S. Men's
champion, Johnny Weir, and 1998 Olympic Champion, Tara Lipinski, with
daily fashion coordination and poodle fop hair-pieces to boot--were a
whimsical bit of pop-cultural confection aimed at capturing
meme-gobbling millennials and pitching figure skating (a sport bound
up in convention) as something sassy and cool. I don't know if it's
working, but the execs at NBC figure it's worth a try. They have
strong skating credentials and there is something refreshing after
all about skating commentators who don't take themselves so
seriously. They were both praised and criticized for not mincing
words about some of the performances in the team competition, but I
think the criticism got to them somewhat, as I noticed a bit more
cheer-leading as the competitions wore on. Maybe it was the Olympic
spirit. There were times when I wished they'd risen above catty
aesthetics to address more substantive matters, like noticing how
unskatable the musical selections were rather than approving of
anything by Beyonce (Lipinski) or shallowly pronouncing that a piece
of music was too dark for a particular skater, as if it were eyeshadow (Weir), rather than
pointing out that a skater can pull off any kind of music if the
choreography is right for it and delivered with conviction. On the
other hand, Johnny Weir can be surprisingly deft with a simile, such
as when he said that seeing a cleanly landed jump was as beautiful as
looking at freshly mowed grass. Overall it was working for me until
the men's competition. Then the two of them began to obsess about
quad (four revolution) jumps with a kind of reverence reserved for
Jesus' miracles. “Look at that quad,” was exclaimed more times
than I'd care to repeat. It would have been more interesting to
learn Weir was talking about a skater's muscular thigh. There were
graphics about how many quad jumps might be landed in this
competition compared with the past and how steeply the trajectory had
risen in the last four years since the Sochi games. And they kept
referring to it as the Quad Revolution.
Of
course, Tara and Johnny would have been too young to remember it, but
I'm sure they can find the video on You Tube of Kurt Browning
completing the first quadruple jump in competition 30 years ago in
1988. By rights, Browning is the real revolutionary and it's hard to
see something that has been in figure skating for three decades as a
revolution. As a matter of fact, by 1998, just 10 years after
Browning landed the first quadruple jump, Timothy Goebel had landed
three quads in a single program and was nicknamed 'The Quad King'.
Nathan Chen, the new 'Quad King' landed five quads at the 2018 U.S.
Nationals. So it's taken 20 years to go from 3 to 5 landed quads in
a program. That's no revolution, that's incremental progress. Since
then, for the record, Chen performed six at the Olympics and again at
Worlds, and it's true now that every quad has been landed except a
quad axel. Back in Goebel's day it was only quad Salchows and Toe
Loops. But the point remains.
Figure
Skating is an athletic competition and it is important that athletes
break boundaries in their sport. In figure skating this only seems
to apply to jumps however. Why is it nobody is pushing the
boundaries of spinning the way Lucinda Ruh did and footwork the way Scott Hamilton, Paul Wylie and
Kurt Browning did in the 80's and 90's? Or the way Yagudin and Plushenko pushed each other with their internal footwork competitions in the early 2000's. Footwork and spins have actually regressed in the last decade. Did you notice that just about
every skater had virtually identical spin combinations (all inferior
imitations of the spins Ruh executed incomparably in the late 90's).
Everybody, men and women, had some kind of pancake spin, doughnut
spin (usually with the hip dropped unatractively when the blade was
grasped), catchfoot Layback, Biellmann spin, A spin, or I spin. The
Biellmann epidemic is related to the catchfoot layback epidemic
because the catchfoot layback with the bent (rather than turned out)
knee is so predominant now and usually is used as a transition to a
one or two handed Biellmann. It used to be the Biellmann spin was
dramatic and unusual, but now that everyone is doing it (and I assume
being flexible enough to do one is a prerequisite)...it's quickly
becoming a cliche. And with the lack of musical choreography the
spins are not always positioned for optimal effect and you end up
saying, 'Another Biellman? Ho Hum.'
How
every skater came to adopt this basic combination of spins is most
likely related to scoring. Everybody is doing the same difficulty
level positions in combination to ensure point parody in spins. If
everybody does the same combination, nobody can get an advantage
(except in degree of execution) in the relatively modest point haul
allotted to spins. So Spins are never going to decide a competition.
What I
saw at the revolution were many mediocre, slow and often poorly
centered spins and almost no perfect unison in side by side pairs
spins (the worst I've ever seen, even among the top five or six pair
teams). I did not see a single blurred scratch spin at the
revolution either. Not really. And only about two or three skaters
who performed the layback with the free leg in attitude. And it is
extraordinary when two men, Adam Rippon of the U.S. and Shoma Uno of
Japan, had better laybacks than anyone in the women's competition. I
didn't see a footwork sequence that really took my breath away with
speed, difficulty and musical moment. It was mostly softer turns
executed at moderate or slow speed.
What
seems like the real revolution (or palace coup as the case may be) is
the absolute elevation of the quad in terms of points awarded just
for attempting one--in the form of a high base mark. So even when
you miss you might get a decent number of points if you had four full
revolutions, despite a step out or a two-footed landing. What I saw
at the revolution was the worst and most aesthetically unwatchable
men's competition in figure skating history. A veritable splatfest.
There were so many falls on quads from skaters who clearly had not
mastered them but felt compelled to add two or more of them in their
programs that you only saw three or four clean programs in the entire
competition, and I saw them all. Thirty short programs and
twenty-four longs. It was an embarrassment to the sport. But, there
was not much sharp commentary from Weir and Lipinski about this fact.
Only a kind of awe about the quads that were landed.
Revolutions
seldom succeed, and some of those that do succeed get off the track,
have mixed results, or are poorly founded and eventually lead to
another undesirable state. Even the ice dancing revolution started
by Torville and Dean in 1984 ultimately failed, because the end
result no longer looked like dance. It wasn't. It wasn't about fast
difficult technical footwork anymore but eye catching lifts and
tricks, and, at it's worst, overt political statements. When you
take a look at Bolero now, for all its mesmerizing power and
originality back then, it was technically inferior to their Barnum
program from the year before. That was their real masterpiece.
Bolero had a striking look and emotional power at the time, but it
does not hold up as well to skating scrutiny. I was a little
surprised when I watched it again to find that Dick Button had said
as much, very tactfully, in ABC's 1984 Olympic broadcast. One of the
things that has made figure skating such a draw is that it is capable
of supporting revolutions, factions and controversy. In the past
that was enough. But a looming sense of something incomprehensible
and wrong in the way the sport has evolved seems to have eroded some
of the old thrill.
Compare videos of the skaters of the 1970's with those of today, however, and you
would have to admit that speed and jumping have improved, but other aspects of skating (holding edges and creating line) have deteriorated. The spins may be more unusual, but not necessarily better centered or faster. Overall the standard of athleticism and overall flexibility is better today than ever before. On the other hand, more difficult jumps are not always well-executed. The Lutz jump, for instance, is being done
incorrectly by many skaters. They don't hold the back outside edge until takeoff but change to inside before takeoff. What is sometimes referred to as a flutz. Having said that, I watched John Curry's gold medal performance at
Innsbruck again and was amazed at how slow, simple and lacking in
thrills it is. It has a perfection of style about it, but it is
achieved by the exclusion of technical risk and by a very simple choreography. It's a very sedate and safe kind of skating. It doesn't bristle with
the athletic energy, dangerous speed and drum-tight stretch you see from start to
finish in Paul Wylie. There's no comparison.
It is
important to remember that school figures (the tracing of figures on the ice--once as many as 12--while changing feet, and performing turns) were once central to the sport, thus the name Figure Skating, and that the move away from figures occurred for two basic reasons: one they took too much time to perform and judge as the number of competitors increased, and when Figure Skating events were finally televised, they were not what audiences wanted to see. Furthermore, there was a major disconnect between the results of the competition and what the audience saw in the televised free skating program. Competitions weighted toward compulsories meant that specialists in figures often won the competitions at the expense of superior free skaters. But the evolution away from this was gradual, significantly from 1968 until late 1990 when compulsory figures were eliminated from international competitions altogether. The striking case of Janet Lynn was a flashpoint in the transition, because now, after the emergence of the balletic Peggy Fleming and the musically expressive Lynn herself, the potential for Figure Skating to emerge as an artistic form was being fully grasped. Figure skating had found
it's medium and an audience. This was Figure Skating's great revolution and evolution, but has it ultimately failed the sport?
The
golden era of this revolution in skating was roughly between1980
through Albertville in 1992, where skating had achieved a relative
balance between speed, strong fundamentals, challenging technique and a high level of
artistry. But remember all of the skaters of that era were trained in compulsory figures. Post Lillehammer you have the first generation of skaters that had never learned to do figures. In this new milieu, the size and difficulty of jumps became paramount with the judges. It wasn't just that jumps were
esteemed over all other technique. Some skaters of high reputation
landed a lot of difficult triple triple combinations and some quads,
but often they hadn't really mastered the edges or good landing
positions. It was as if the height and distance of jumps were the measures of superior
technique. Elvis Stojko and Todd Eldredge were guilty of landing
some big ugly jumps. Oksana Baiul could not perform a triple Lutz
and yet won a gold medal. It is one of the maddening things about
figure skating.
Figure
skating may not need a revolution, but does it need compulsory figures again to return to the quality of it's best days? Has the loss of these fundamentals contributed to the loss of many treasured qualities in skating and a decline in the sport's popularity? Or is it a circumstantial case and is the real culprit the overemphasis on jumps? After all, is it not possible to teach the fundamentals of edge control and stroking without including compulsories in competitions? If it is really indispensable in developing sound technique, why isn't it being taught? There are many elements of other athletes training regimes that are essential in developing hand/eye coordination, quickness, stamina, strength, etc. that are not part of the competition itself. That is we don't keep score during practice, and furthermore we don't want to watch it as an audience. Athletes need repetitive training to progress, and coaches want to observe it to measure progress.
I think it was correct to remove compulsories from the competition. From the perspective of an audience they are meaningless. That is to say unless you could stand right over the marks, it would be pointless and dull to watch 30 skaters trace the same figure 8 from rinkside. The minute differences in tracings would not make a bit of visual difference from afar. I think it's clear that as figure skating entered the television age, that audiences would have scratched their heads and walked away if they kept awarding gold medals to the Trixi Schubas over the Janet Lynns. When it came down to it, compulsory figures did not make Schuba a better free skater than Lynn. For it is one thing to control an edge and trace a line at slow speed in a quiet rink; it is another thing to control that edge after 3 airborne revolutions at high speed before an audience and a panel of judges on national t.v. School figures may demand technique and concentration, but they are not athletically demanding. So then, it could be fair to say that training in school figures helped Janet Lynn become a better skater, but the fact that she didn't excel at them in competitions ended up being a really inadequate way of judging her skill as a skater. Unless the figures themselves were going to remain the point, why were we using them to judge skaters? They had a place as a form of discipline, but skaters like Lynn and Fleming showed that there was a beautiful art form to be explored in free skating. That was the point. That was the revolution.
I don't want to see compulsories make a comeback in competition, but if a coach like Brian Orser, who grew up with school figures, thinks they are so valuable, then he should be teaching them on the practice ice to his growing list of Olympic champions. Just consider that Paul Wylie, perhaps the most complete skater in the history of the sport, would not have won an Olympic medal had not the compulsories been eliminated by the time of the Albertville games.
There has always been this tension between figure skating the sport and figure skating the art. The traditional origins of the sport as a pure technical display has always been in conflict and a little suspicious of the artistic side. When the emphasis switched, I think judging became fixated on the jumps as the new school figures. The thing that keeps figure skating a sport, the most inarguably athletic element in it, that keeps it from slipping into pure subjectivity (which is part of the nature of art itself). It is not an unfounded fear. All the more reason to develop a more complete respect for all the technical elements of the sport and to place a more objective standard on the artistic element by not disconnecting it from technique (the way subjective interpreters have with facial expressions and obvious gestures).
What figure skating does need is a much more balanced and
honest scoring system with more emphasis on spins and footwork, edge and line, and
high value in the component score for difficult field moves that do
not receive a technical score. There should be no anonymous judging.
Skaters should get credit for what they complete and not for what
they plan or attempt. There should be higher component scores for
actual choreographed programs and deductions for not making any real
effort to match moves to music. There is a technical aspect to this called timing, and there is high risk in creating a
program that demands you be in perfect sync with the music from start
to finish. Today's ambient music style denies skaters the impact and excitement, while absolving them of the discipline, that comes with precision timing. Finally, figure
skating must decide once and for all (how impossible is that in a
subjective sport) that it should elevate the objective interpretation
of music over the subjective presentation of character. This will
reward musical interpreters over mere personalities, give us the thrill of feeling the emotion of
music come to life through that hard won synthesis of athleticism and
genuine musicality, and it will bring fans back to this most
distinctive of sports—one that dares also to be an art.
