The Skater's Schmaltz, page 2
You know that media canard about Tonya and Nancy's tawdry saga being responsible for America's current obsession with figure skating? Forget it. Americans have had a major thing for skating since Peggy Fleming (Grace Kelly on blades) became an overnight TV sensation during the 1968 Winter Olympics. It just took TV a while to notice.
The skating specials that have become big weekend ratings draws for the networks (skating is now the number-two-rated TV sport, behind football) often seem like one long ABC Sports "Up Close and Personal" feature, with the skating sandwiched between dewy video bios of the stars, who always seem to be staring pensively at snow-covered trees or gliding in slow-mo to something by John Tesh.
TV's approach to skating is all melodrama and fan-magazine adoration. And, in many ways, it's just what the sport deserves. The arcane, subjective judging criteria, which seem to heavily favor attractiveness (the babes on blades factor) and good manners, are a throwback to the days of Hollywood's studio system, where stars had to be on their best behavior or they'd be back ushering at the Bijou.
Serious skating also requires huge sacrifices (time, relationships, money) on the part of skaters and their families, which provides heart- tugging backstories that play well in prime-time. Skaters wear costumes, rather than uniforms; they use taped musical accompaniment that's more lyrical and swoony than your basic ballpark "We Will Rock You." In pairs skating and ice dancing, scantily clad couples win medals for pantomiming the forbidden dance. Figure skating is as close to entertainment as sport gets. And it was inevitable that TV and skating would one day realize that there was a vast audience for skating, anytime, any season, and it didn't seem to matter if there were no titles at stake or if the program tilted more toward entertainment than sport.
(Not all skating enthusiasts feel this way, judging from the colorful put-downs of such made-for-TV ice shows as Oksana's "Wizard of Oz on Ice" circulating on the skating newsgroups. For links to these as well as a wealth of skating information, Sandra Loosemore's Figure Skating Page is unbeatable ).
Oddly enough, it was PBS that first picked up on skating's TV appeal as regular programming, albeit with a typically Anglophilic slant; there are at least three specials about British ice dancing legends Torvill and Dean in heavy pledge rotation. Eventually, the networks and cable joined the parade of blades. During the past two months, for instance, viewers had their pick of specials ranging from legitimate competitions like the U.S. Championships (ABC airs the World Championships in prime-time March 23) to staged pro showdowns like Fox's "Rock and Skating Championships" to ice-stravaganzas like Katarina's HBO special "The Ice Princess."
Clearly, it isn't just skating nuts who are tuning in. Many of us who have never even laced on a pair of skates have developed a strange fascination with the sport. Televised figure skating may be the ultimate guilty pleasure viewing experience, because it calls up a variety of politically iffy or downright unhip entertainment forms that somehow still hold an odd primal attraction. Beauty pageants, the Ice Capades, ballroom dancing, Hollywood musicals, arena rock, disco, rock operas, Andrew Lloyd Webber spectacles, Michael Jackson videos -- figure skating is all of this and more.
It's France's Philippe Candeloro skating barechested to Springsteen. And Elvis, in leather pants, kissing women in the front row. And Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko performing a sort of Joe Eszterhas version of "Romeo and Juliet" on the USA cable network special "A Skating Romance." And Fox's inimitable "Rock and Skating Championship" specials (think MTV on ice), the most recent of which had Oksana forsaking her weeping swan feathers for a slinky black costume and doing her trademark doughnut-on-a-stick move to Aerosmith's "Crazy."
Not that all figure skating exhibitions are so delectably tacky. When athleticism and artistic vision mesh, as in Paul Wylie's "Apollo 13" routine from CBS's recent Sergei Grinkov tribute special, you can see skating's link to the Hollywood geniuses (Gene Kelly, Gower Champion, Fred Astaire) who brought dance to the masses.
But the explosion in made-for-TV skating is diluting both the artistry and the athleticism. The line between pro and amateur is gone. Skaters like Nicole Bobek perform in lucrative touring ice shows when they ought to be practicing for the championships. Others can't afford to be sidelined from the tour, so they often lose the risky moves and emphasize glitz over guts (Katarina's feet never leave the ice).
The touring circuit has also brought competitors together as one big happy family united in the quest for a payday. In jokey pro "competitions" like CBS's "Too Hot to Skate," are Scott and Kurt really going all out to "win"? You can't tell if you're being put on. Figure skating is in danger of becoming the pro wrestling of the '90s.
Most of all, Oksana's Tammy Bakker tears and all those Up Close and Personal sob stories have coated the sport with such a layer of schmaltz that a truly tragic event like the premature heart-attack death of pairs champion Grinkov can only look like just another chapter in the soap opera. On CBS's February tribute, his widow and partner Ekaterina Gordeeva skated a cathartic solo honoring their life together. Not content to let her grief speak for itself, the producers used some tricky editing to ghoulishly insert Grinkov into a replay of part of her routine.
The schlock impulse, shared by TV and skating, can only cheapen the sport's emotionalism. And that would be a shame because emotionalism is what makes skating so popular. This isn't the chest-thumping, trash-talking stuff of jock sports, but a warm, vulnerable openness -- ironic, in a sport noted for its many stoically closeted male competitors (and wasn't proudly gay Rudy's screaming, crying, bouncing joy at winning the 1996 title a refreshing alternative to all that ?).Other sports stars hide from fans, but skaters thrive on the spontaneous, intimate give-and take between athlete and audience. Smiling and ackowledging the cheers after completing a jump is not frowned upon here.
You've heard horse racing called the sport of kings? Well, figure skating is -- triumphantly -- the sport of drama queens.
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