King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Cohen takes lead, but Slutskaya's pants lead way to bold future. Plus: MSNBC predicts the past.
Read more: Sports, Olympics, NBC, MSNBC, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, 2006 Olympics
Feb. 22, 2006 | Sasha Cohen was the star of the figure-skating show Tuesday and the leader after the short program, but it was Irina Slutskaya, the Russian favorite, three hundredths of a point behind the American and six years older, who looked like the future of a sport that might actually be worth watching.
Slutskaya, more athlete than artiste, charged through her program as usual with a minimum of jazz hands and a maximum of powerful jumps and spins. She didn't skate her best, leaving the door open for Cohen, a sprite of a thing who's a traditionally dazzling skater.
Four years ago, when the figure-skating slimeballs were scuttling around, their sheltering rocks having been lifted by the pairs-skate judging controversy that's responsible for Canadian cuties David Pelletier and Jamie Sale having gainful employment with NBC in Turin, fellow Salonista Kerry Lauerman and I debated the future of figure skating in these pages.
Lauerman wrote that figure skating had to make its judges accountable or it would never be taken seriously as a sport. I countered that fixing figure skating would kill it.
"Without the judging controversies to argue about and the costumes to laugh at," I wrote, "figure skating's just another not-very-interesting competition, like ballroom dancing or a chili cookoff. You don't see NBC bidding billions to televise that sort of thing."
But the figure-skating honchos did fix the judging, and I have to say they did a good job. They've replaced a system that was poorly designed, patently unfair and ripe for corruption with one that's complicated and unwieldy, but at least theoretically sensible.
Apparently vexed for the better part of a century by the problem of making a scoring system that didn't anoint a handful of potential winners before the competition started, the honchos figured it out in about three days once the heat was on. I love those goofy honchos.
But what's important about the new judging scheme is that it puts a premium on the damnedest thing for this damnedest of all sports: athleticism.
The new system gives a set number of points for various elements, though there are still qualitative judgments. This encourages harder, more athletic jumps and spins. Even trying and failing a difficult trick will get a skater more points than looking pretty and interpreting the music in a way that pleases the judges, both trump cards in the old regime.
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