Show must go on in figure skating
How to figure skating:
There are ongoing themes. Youth, sequins, Russian pairs domination, show biz, arcane scoring.
At every competition, there always is at least one women's long-program routine performed to the music from "Carmen." The men dress in a manner that calls to mind waiters or bullfighters. One 2010 Olympian, Belgium's Kevin van der Perren, has skated in what typically is employed for a night of trick-or-treating - a skeleton suit.
Ice dance teams, too, try to tell a story with clothes: Russia's Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin recently have donned aboriginal get-up - not without stirring controversy. Americans Meryl Davis and Charlie White have gone with Indian attire, complete with a red dot on Davis' forehead.
So an old argument lives on: Art or sport?
Undeniably athletic components, taxing leaps and the anaerobic demands of four-minute programs - as well as unscripted endings - combine with elements of ballet wrapped in layers of make-up and costuming to form a hybrid show that appeals to a varied audience and makes figure skating the showpiece of every Winter Olympics.
In Vancouver this time, there are fewer familiar faces than in recent Games, mostly because enduring star Michelle Kwan and a pair of her longtime pursuers, Irina Slutskaya and Sasha Cohen, have retired. No single U.S. female has emerged as a gold-medal contender while conventional wisdom has conceded headliner status to South Korea's Kim Yu-Na and Japan's Mao Asada.
Most likely, NBC will give favored attention to the Americans' unusual strength in ice dance - Davis and White appear to have surpassed 2006 silver medalists Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto and both teams are medal contenders - and even to the U.S. men, none of them strong candidates for gold, but each a story.
Evan Lysacek, the reigning world champion, is the most consistent Yank and showed his flair for the dramatic four years ago in Turin, when he soared from 10th place to fourth in his long program in spite of the stomach flu. Jeremy Abbott is two-time U.S. champion but not yet a proven commodity under pressure, while Johnny Weir's decided slip in performance - his string of three national titles ended in 2007 - is offset by his ongoing outrageousness.
It is Weir who recently reminded that, in figure skating, "You never know who wants you to do well, who pretends they want you to do well and who hates you. In other sports, it's just who gets the most points or who's the fastest. But you don't know whose love you have in figure skating, whether they care what country you come from or what background you come from, so you just have to please yourself because you can't please everyone."
Weir has a point. Even with the sport's new scoring system, installed after the judging scandal in the 2002 Olympics, there are no guarantees against scoreboard hijinks. Though the current system does assign a base value to elements such as jumps and spins, judges still have leeway to add or subtract for "performance/execution, choreography and interpretation" - and each judge's score, unlike with the old 6.0 system, is posted anonymously.
In a sense, then, even that old figure-skating theme is being upheld; watch out for "the French judge." That goes along with the leitmotif of having had 12 consecutive Olympic gold-medal pairs winners from Russia (though China's Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo finally could end that this month). And with esteemed coach Frank Carroll's long run of close-but-no-cigar experiences.
Carroll repeatedly has coached gold-medal favorites (Linda Fratianne, Christopher Bowman, Kwan) yet never saw any win gold, and this time he is working with non-favorites Lysacek and fellow American Mirai Nagasu.
Nagasu is 16, and her given name means "future" in the native language of her Japanese-born parents. Another embodiment of figure-skating youth. Of course, she wears sequins.
