The excitement surrounding these athletes is spurred by more than the prospect of Olympic success. Figure skating has become one of America’s most popular spectator sports, commanding huge television audiences, lucrative endorsements and fame for its star performers. It also engenders personal rivalries whose ferocity can stand in sharp contrast to the fluid beauty of the sport. Some 45 million households — the sixth largest TV audience ever — tuned in to watch Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan battle each other at the 1994 Winter Olympics after the latter was clubbed on the knee by associates of Harding. This year, according to the media, the rivalry to watch is between Kwan and Lipinski — a contest that is expected to make the women’s figure skating competition the most watched event of the entire games.

Christine Brennan, a former sports writer for the Washington Post, takes a close look at the competitive world of Kwan and Lipinski in her forthcoming “Edge of Glory: The Quest for Figure Skating’s Olympic Gold Medals” (Scribner). Brennan also wrote the bestselling “Inside Edge: A Revealing Journey into the Secret World of Figure Skating,” and will be talking with Salon during the Nagano games.

Just how popular is figure skating today?

In terms of TV ratings, figure skating is No. 2, behind NFL football. Just to give you an example of how popular it is — in the women’s finals at the U.S. National Championships in 1995, when Nicole Bobek beat Michelle Kwan, more people watched that on television than the NBA All-Star Game, which was played the next day.

How do you account for this enormous appeal?

There’s a couple of reasons. One is the sheer beauty and grace of the sport. It goes right to the core of the dreams of women and girls. It carries them to a place far, far away. It’s the music, the gorgeous costumes that appeal so much; it’s a little bit of dress-up on the ice. And that’s 51 percent of the population right there.

And for the guys?

For the men who watch — and there are many — figure skating is raw, pure sport. There is no sport that has a more non-negotiable moment of decision than figure skating. Football has a fourth down. In basketball, you get a second free throw. In tennis, you get a second serve. In baseball you get a third strike. In figure skating, when Brian Boitano took off from the ice in Norway in 1994 to go into his triple axel combination jump, he was the gold medal favorite. One second later, when he came crashing down to the ice, falling and stumbling, it was over. Gone. There’s no other sport where an entire career can be wrapped up in just one second on the ice. That’s what keeps you on the edge of your seat and that’s what helps explain the ratings. Dramatically, it’s good stuff.

Now everyone is looking to Michelle Kwan, Tara Lipinski and Nicole Bobek for the drama in Nagano. How do you think they’ll do?

Let’s be clear on something. On the U.S. women’s team, there’s one legend, and that is Michelle Kwan. Then there are two other good skaters. It’s very, very, important to make that distinction. The media has built up this rivalry between Michelle and Tara Lipinski. There is no such rivalry. The rivalry is Michelle vs. Michelle. She may be the greatest skater who has ever lived. Last weekend in Philadelphia, she performed a set of programs greater than anyone in the history of the sport in the United States, male or female. No one has ever had two performances like that back-to-back. Ever. Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Dick Button, Brian Boitano, Scott Hamilton — no one. If Michelle Kwan skates at the Olympics the way she did in Philadelphia, her name will never be forgotten by sports fans. She will join the legends of the sport.

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What made her programs so exceptional?

First of all, they were skated to very difficult music. She chose two piano pieces by Rachmaninov for her short program, and “Lyra Angelica” by William Allwin performed by the London Philharmonic for her long program. No one has ever skated to these pieces before. The music was much more intricate than, say, a movie soundtrack or a Broadway show tune, and therefore much more difficult to skate to. Second, she was perfect in her jumps and her spins. And she did all that with a fractured toe! She’s like Michael Jordan on skates. One of the Philadelphia judges, who’s never given a perfect 6.0 score in his life — and he’s been judging for 25 years — gave Michelle Kwan two. He told me it was the greatest thing he had ever seen, that she brought tears to his eyes.

Yet last year, it was Lipinski who grabbed the glory at the World Championships and Kwan who fell.

Last year, Michelle’s body was changing — we’re watching girls go through puberty on national television — and she had some trouble dealing with that. Those mistakes created Tara. Tara walked through the door, but it was Michelle who opened the door. This year, Tara doesn’t seem to have the pizazz and the spark. She’s grown a little bit, but she’s still tiny. She doesn’t have the presence. That’s not her fault, but it makes you wonder whether last year should have happened for her. If it hadn’t happened, maybe she’d just be moving up nicely. But now she’s being scrutinized so much, and Michelle has come roaring back.

You think Lipinski is in over her head?

She’s still a very good skater. And given the volatile nature of this sport, if Michelle falls in the short program in Nagano, then Tara could win the gold medal. But only if Michelle makes a mistake. If she skates clean in the short and long programs, she’s the gold medalist. You can take that to the bank. In a way her loss last year was the best thing that ever could have happened to her. It fired her up incredibly. It forced her to think, to change things, to look at herself in a different way, and clearly she’s come back stronger than ever.

How does the third woman on the U.S. team, Nicole Bobek, rate?

She’s the ultimate showgirl on ice, the All-American blond bombshell. In Philadelphia, she looked great. Artistically, I believe she’s better than Lipinski. If she had trained properly and not moved from coach to coach — she’s had 10 so far — she could have been the greatest figure skater in the world. She’s got the looks, the ability. But she didn’t train. She’s the opposite of Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski, both of whom are dedicated workhorses. Nicole Bobek? Hey, a couple of cigarettes, hang out with the guys. This is her life. So the training isn’t there, and now she runs out of gas in the last half of her long program. Also the technical difficulty of her jumps is nowhere near those of Michelle and Tara, and I don’t think she can get them at this point. Still, if Nicole gets her act together between now and the Olympics, she could take a silver. With Bobek, you just don’t know. She could be great, or she could finish 10th.

There’s talk of a U.S. sweep of the women’s figure skating medals. How likely is that?

There’s always a chance, but I think in general international judges would prefer not to see three U.S. flags hoisted up in the international arena in Nagano. All things being equal, I think they’d like to see someone else get in there. The most likely person who could sneak in is Tanya Sheshenko of Germany, who is very good. But I can’t see her winning the gold, and if Tara is on, Tara should win the silver. So at this point I would say it’s Sheshenko and Bobek fighting it out for the bronze.

How much personal rivalry exists between Kwan and Lipinski, and how much is media hype?

The rivalry — if there is one at all — is purely a one-way affair. Michelle doesn’t even think about Tara. She’s on another wavelength. She’s thinking about her place in history. Tara, however, is obsessed by Michelle.

Speaking of rivalry, whatever happened to Tonya Harding?

The last I heard of her, she was living with some family, unemployed, no money. She had her truck repossessed. She got kidnapped a year ago by some bushy-haired man, although we’re not quite sure whether that was real or not. She got away, but of course the police never found him. And the kidnapping just happened to occur the same week as the U.S. National Figure Skating Championships. What a coincidence. This is why I love this sport so. It just doesn’t get any better — from the ridiculous Tonya to the sublime Michelle Kwan. There’s nothing like this sport. Nothing like it at all.

The Head Pull is pretty much what it sounds like: big strong men pulling on each other’s heads. Two Inuit lie face-to-face on their bellies, heads linked by a loop of canvas cargo webbing. At the signal, they attempt to pull one another, by the head, over the line between them.

The Inuit Games guidelines list 12 pulls. Not all of them will be part of the week’s events. The Ear Pull, for example, has been omitted owing to health and safety concerns. Ditto the Mouth Pull (“Competitor grabs mouth of opponent …”) and the Ear Lift (“The weight is looped around any ear and the competitor … walks forward, carrying it with his ear for as far a distance as his ear will allow”).

Aside from an occasional tendency toward the gruesome, the main identifying feature of Inuit sport is its compactness. Games are divided as follows: Pulls, pushes, reaches, kicks, twists and rotations. The entire Olympiad could be staged in a large walk-in closet.

It’s not for want of space. North of the tree line, space is the prevailing — one might almost say the only — geographical feature. Baffin is tundra, a scrabbly blanket of moss and shale laid out without a wrinkle. Up here, minute changes of elevation are optimistically dubbed hills. Caribou antlers are nailed up on posts, as though to compensate for the missing trees. (Lest you think it an unalluring locale, imagine a four-hour, 360-degree sunset at midnight.)

Inuit Games are compact for the simple reason that they are indoor sports. The Inuit practiced plenty of outdoor athletics — hunting, sledding, marathon walking — but this wasn’t sport, it was life. The Games were what you did to pass the time when the blizzards hit and you couldn’t see to hunt. And igloos were small — not much larger than the jump circle on a basketball court.

That is, in fact, where this week’s games are being staged: center court in the Ataguttaaluk School gymnasium. Igloolik has no sports arena or landscaped playing fields. This is less a matter of funding than of geology. North of 60 degrees latitude, the ground is permafrost: rock-hard most of the year, muck the rest of it. Grass won’t grow. Buildings have to be set on posts to keep from sinking in the thaw. Architectural diversity is more trouble than it’s worth; the town is basically boxes on a flat surface. I saw a picture of it in winter. It looked like inside my freezer.

The official motions for quiet. As the crowd numbers fewer than 100, this is not hard to achieve. However, as many are children, it is somewhat hard to maintain. A pair of toddlers are carrying out a competition of their own, the winner being the one who can shriek the loudest while running wind sprints across the gym floor. The athletes barely pay it mind. I remark on this to one of the coaches. “Why would they get mad?” he says. “If something messes you up, oh well. There’s other events.”

Competition runs somewhat counter to the Inuit character. To survive an Arctic winter, communities worked together and everything was shared. A great hunter had no more food than the next guy; he just threw more dinner parties. Why, then, have the games been turned into a competition? Because otherwise there would be no Inuit Games. Left to their own devices, modern Inuit teens prefer to spend their time playing basketball and watching Much TV (Canada’s answer to MTV). An impromptu survey of T-shirts and baseball caps in the gym today reveals 17 sports logos and 11 heavy metal bands.

This is not to say that the athletes don’t care whether they win. The winning team has a chance to compete in the international Arctic Winter Games. Depending on which country is hosting them, this could mean a trip to Russia, Finland, Greenland or Alaska.

Down in the ring, the winning head is nodding and grinning. It belongs to a local heart-breaker named Bobby. Someone has written “I love you, Bobby” in ball-point on his arm. Bobby wears a cigarette lighter in a fringed leather pouch around his neck, as though it were an ornament. Given that a pack of Rothmann’s costs more than $10, it may well be.

The irony of 24-hour daylight is that it happens where you need it least. Polar
towns provide the longest days in the world and very little to fill them with. Igloolik has
no restaurants, bars, movie theaters or museums. (Graffiti on the town water tank:
“What to do?”)

Games week is an exception. Every night there’s a community event: harpoon
throwing, drum dancing, a whipping contest (empty pop cans standing in for sled dogs).
Tonight it’s bannock-making. Bannock is a Scottish quickbread, introduced, along with
jigs, tea and tuberculosis, by whalers in the 19th century.

Bannock-making is part of the Good Woman contest. Before Inuit women won the
right to pull heads and twist fingers, their participation in the Northern Games was largely
limited to Good Woman competitions. “The Good Woman,” to quote official Games
literature, “is chosen for her skills and talent (seal-skinning, bannock-making, caribou-cutting, etc.) rather than her looks.”

The schedule says 7 p.m., but it doesn’t say where. Someone suggests the baseball
diamond. People up here are laboring under the delusion that it’s warm outside (it’s 40
degrees) and have scheduled most of the evening activities outdoors.

People are on the baseball diamond, but they’re not making bannock. I’m not altogether
sure what they’re doing. A batter has hit a fly ball, and a catcher has caught it. Rather than
return the ball to the pitcher, the catcher chases the batter and throws the ball at him. The
batter returns to the sidelines. He is apparently out, or perhaps just sore.

The man standing beside me says it’s a combination of “Northern” and regular baseball.

“How many strikes?” I ask him.

“They’re still trying to decide that.”

The Inuit are not big on rules. Earlier, I asked a Games official how many people there
are on a Northern baseball team. He replied that it didn’t matter, so long as “there’s lots of
people.” One of this evening’s teams appears to be a bit short. “Where are the
outfielders?” I ask the man next to me. He ponders this quietly. “They’re not out there. I
don’t know why.”

The bannock contest, it turns out, is over at the outdoor skating rink. As it’s summer,
there is no ice in the rink, only gravel and dirt. Igloolik’s skating rink looks very much like
its baseball diamond, which both look very much like the lawns, the hotel grounds and the
beach.

Women are hunkered down in front of portable Coleman stoves and great hulking
icebergs of Crisco. The winning sample is passed around. It’s sort of a round, oily biscuit,
or round, biscuity oil. I seek out the judge to ask how the winning entry tastes different
from the others.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t had any.”

“So how do you know hers is the best?”

“She finished first.” In a land with no timber and $1-an-ounce propane, a Good Woman is
one who can make four batches before the fire goes out.

Julie Oolayou is the Flo-Jo of the Inuit Games. She’s broken three records and is about to
break another, the One-Foot High Kick. Clarification: “One foot” refers to the number of
feet with which you kick, not the height of the kick (unless you are a visiting spastic
journalist, in which case it refers to both).

The high kick is one of the few Inuit games that require equipment. As a rule, Arctic
nomads tended to shun athletic endeavors that necessitated hauling racquets and shoulder
pads across the tundra. What little equipment is used tends to be things you’d find lying
around the igloo. Under the equipment heading for Parka Rotation, for example, the text
reads simply, “big parka.” Traditionally, the high kick target was hung from the ceiling
of the igloo. Here, it hangs from a wooden high kick stand, a simple, spindly gallows,
like what you draw to play Hangman.

Oolayou removes one shoe and one sock, revealing an ankle bracelet and an Edmonton
Oilers rub-on tattoo. She takes three easy strides, crouches and springs, clearing seven
feet the way other people hop a curb.

Next up is Oolayou’s rival, Leona Nakashuk. She spits on her sneaker soles. She eyes
the target, a small sealskin seal hanging at eye level. In the stands, an old man begins
chanting songs of the elders. Rattled, Nakashuk breaks her advance. “Anaq!” (This is a
word in Inuktitut, the Inuit native tongue. It means, “Shit.”)

Six minutes and as many false starts go by. There seems to be no time limit. This
doesn’t surprise me. Where day goes on all night and night is six months long, time is a
fuzzy concept. Ask someone how long it takes to cross the bay by motorboat, and he’ll
answer you in gallons, not minutes. I ask games coordinator Angie Luciani if the lack of
time limit has to do with the Inuit concept of time. Actually, it has more to do with the
Inuit concept of planning. “There’s supposed to be a three-minute limit,” Luciani says.
“But nobody brought a stopwatch.”

To understand the Knuckle Hop, it helps to have played Bloody Knuckles. To be sure,
strength and skill are required — you are hopping on toes and fists with your body flat-out
rigid in between. But what is key here is that you are landing on your knuckles. With no
gloves. On a wood floor. The Knuckle Hop, says acting official Gabriel Nirlungayuk, “is
about how much pain you can endure.”

The most coveted seats, therefore, are the ones with a view of the nurses’ station. I
watch as a succession of grimacing men run up and plunge their fists into bowls of ice
water. Their knuckles are dotted with round raw nicks, as though someone went after
them with a potato peeler.

There is no Women’s Knuckle Hop. This is either outrageous sexism on the part of the
men, or outrageous good sense on the part of the women.

I can’t tell you much about the closing ceremonies, as they’re being held in Inuktitut. The
mayor is giving a speech, and the audience has taken the opportunity to chat with their
friends about the polar bear spotted outside town and the rumor that star athlete Kristine
Ootova has a hickey beneath her scarf. It is unclear whether this has to do with the
popularity of the mayor (low) or the popularity of speeches (very low). (Earlier this week, a
visiting politician stopped his speech to reassure his straying audience that he was “almost
finished, OK?”)

The mayor passes the ceremonial blubber lamp (Baffin’s answer to the Olympic torch) to
the mayor of Hall Beach, site of next year’s games. The Inuit Games are officially closed.
A group of athletes pushes aside the folding chairs and the High Kick seal and breaks out
a box of basketballs.

Let’s look at the case, which rests entirely on circumstantial, often unspeakably tendentious, evidence that the cops have fed to the press.

1. The Ramseys did not act normally after JonBenet’s death.
As Vanity Fair recounts it, as John Ramsey laid his daughter’s body on the floor after discovering it in his cellar, “he started to moan, while peering around to see who was looking at him.” Hmmm. Suspicious. Left unspecified is what constitutes normal behavior when your child has been murdered in your home. Vanity Fair goes to great lengths to portray John Ramsey as a man lacking the ability to express emotions, and it might very well be normal for such a man to moan and look around for help at such a moment.

It might also be normal for this man, in particular, to feel overwhelmed by sick destiny, inasmuch as his wife had been stricken with breast cancer and he had already lived through the death of another child. — reported by the Globe with the following headline: “DADDY ABUSED JONBENET’S SISTER!: Ramsey girl was killed before she could tell.” Actually, the sister died in a car crash, and there is so far no proof that Ramsey “abused” her, however that word is meant.

2. John Ramsey found the body without even looking for it.
According to Vanity Fair, John Ramsey, after being told by a Boulder cop to search for the missing JonBenet, “bolted from the kitchen and headed down to the basement. Fleet White [Ramsey's former friend] told us that Ramsey went directly to a small broken window on the north side of the house and paused … John said, ‘Yeah, I broke it last summer.’” From this, an investigator talking to Vanity Fair concludes, Ramsey “wanted Fleet to see the window to set up an intruder theory, but no one but a small child or a midget could have crawled through that space. While Fleet is looking at the window, John disappears down the hall directly to the little room where the body is.”

Of course, there are other uses for a broken window other than crawling through it. Like reaching through the hole in the glass from the outside and opening the lock. But why did Ramsey go directly to that little room? Perhaps because he had a dreadful intuition of what he might find there, or because of some small sign that only a man who lived in that house would notice.

3. The Ramseys refused to cooperate with police, hired attorneys and went on CNN to cry their innocence.

This is the Ramseys-protest-too-much theory. But since when was calling an attorney evidence of guilt? Any competent attorney would have advised the Ramseys that they would be the immediate prime suspects, because most child murders are committed by parents or relatives. Being told to be wary of the police would seem to be quite sound legal advice. Going on CNN was bizarre, not to mention a ghastly PR failure. But, despite the National Enquirer “experts’” supposed detection of falsehoods in John Ramsey’s voice, it proves absolutely nothing. Vanity Fair found it shockingly significant that Ramsey told CNN, “I don’t know if it was an attack on me, on my company …” Well, Ramsey is in the software business, which may politely be described as cutthroat. He may suffer from the egocentric delusions that are fairly common among self-made men. But that is hardly proof he murdered his daughter.

4. Crucial forensic evidence was apparently removed or erased from the crime scene, or was compromised when Ramsey picked up JonBenet’s body.

Cops have been known to bungle evidence — anyone remember the O.J. trial? — in the most extraordinary ways. And if it was the killer’s work, how does that point ineluctably to John Ramsey? Is he the only one in the state of Colorado who might have read any number of detective novels and police procedurals that provide advanced courses in forensic cover-ups? As for picking up his daughter’s body, with no police officer around to tell him not to, maybe it was the action of a shocked, grieving father. Unless of course, as Vanity Fair insists, the man has no heart.

5. The handwriting on the note.

The only suspect, according to a handwriting analyst, whose writing was in any way similar to the ransom note was Patsy Ramsey. And the note contained a phrase she had been heard to speak: “Use that good, Southern common sense of yours.” First of all, the comparisons are inconclusive, at best. Second of all, handwriting analysis (as Seymour Hersh will mournfully tell you about the fake Marilyn Monroe-JFK letters) is often about as accurate as farting at the moon. But if it was Patsy Ramsey spending hours at the crime scene after the murder painfully composing the “ransom note,” then what was John Ramsey doing? Covering for his wife, as presumably he has been ever since?
Or is it the other way around? Why one would cover for the other, however, is not clear. These are not poor people without means of their own. And if anything, obtaining sole possession of their joint means might be ample reason to turn the other over to the cops.

6. Sick parents exploited, abused and psychologically destroyed their too-beautiful child.

Even before she was murdered, goes the media wisdom,
JonBenet was figuratively dead, her childhood sacrificed on the altar of her parents’ deviant desires. Specifically, the tabloids have suggested that JonBenet was murdered either by accident, in the course of a sex game gone awry or in a panic, brought on by fear she would expose her parent-abuser. The current issue of Globe says that Patsy killed JonBenet in a rage over her bed-wetting (there were urine stains on the
underwear of the victim) and that John is merely covering up for her.

In the classic study of such killings, Philip J. Resnick’s “Child Murder by Parents: A Psychiatric Review of Filicide,” such “accidents” accounted for 12 percent of Resnick’s 131 cases. But most of them happened when the killer was in a sudden rage over something the child did (or was seen as having done). JonBenet was garroted — the autopsy report notes the “deep furrow” on her neck — which does not suggest a spontaneous assault. While it doesn’t rule out a deliberate murder, it is very rare for a husband and wife to collude in such a crime. Resnick notes “scattered reports where both husband and wife planned the murder … usually because they could see no way out of their poverty.” Does that sound like the Ramseys?

What it comes down to is this: The Ramseys are being accused of an abomination less on the basis of evidence than on our censorious expectations about what parents should be. The Ramseys do not weep enough. They dressed up their little girl like a grown-up — like a whore. They made her perform for strangers. They wanted her to be a paperback version of themselves. By destroying what is left of the Ramsey family, we can persuade ourselves that they inhabit another world, one that the rest of us of course renounce.

But that doesn’t make the Ramseys killers. Sure, there are troubling aspects to the case. If it was an outsider, where are the footprints? What are we to make of Patsy Ramsey’s broken paintbrush? Still, I would rather be wrong about their guilt later than wrong about their presumption of innocence now. And I won’t believe they are guilty until I see much better evidence than the unexamined bits and pieces and groundless suppositions thrown at us by a blitheringly incompetent police department and a sensation-seeking press corps.

The king of Tonga, a man so massively heavy that his hotel has to give him a bed reinforced with iron, has arrived. Tony Blair is going to look in briefly, as is, from Washington, Madeleine Albright and a junior bureaucrat named Richard Boucher, who will attend the Communists’ swearing-in that the White House had earlier said it would rather boycott.

But all the photographers — and there are thousands here already — are busy looking out for a glamorous British society woman and professional party animal named Tara Palmer-Tompkinson, whose only declared interest in finding a marriageable partner is to ensure, as she puts it, “that she never has to turn right when entering a plane.” And David Tang, a tycoon and playboy who is set to open a Chinese clothing store in New York next November, is being interviewed by everyone — Brokaw included — trying to make the case for the new China being now seriously chic.

The Hong Kong handover, in short, seems in sudden danger of becoming a frivolous and bubbly affair, attracting mainly the international society set, and of being commercialized to the hilt. Never before has a moment of international history seemed so tinted by the spirit of Disneyland. It is rather like the Treaty of Paris being sponsored by Gucci, or having Metternich perform synchronized swimming while carving up the Hapsburg empire, or giving up V-E day to the sale of Kodak film.

The whole business is rapidly shifting from being a grave affair of state, a truly historic, end-of-era moment, and becoming instead as tawdry as the Atlanta Olympics. The simile is apt: Next Tuesday’s celebratory fireworks, supposedly the biggest and gaudiest in world history, are being organized by one of last year’s Atlanta team, prompting one to wonder, among other considerations, just how tasteful an event we are in for.

(One’s curiosity on this score may well be satisfied by yesterday’s announcement that the handover is going to be followed by an hour of something called “mass karaoke,” doubtless every bit as dire as it sounds, and which probably hints at the general tone of the evening.)

For the moment, though, everything looks and feels more or less as usual. The Star ferries chuckle back and forth across the harbor, dodging the frequent squalls. The Peak Tram hitches itself up the alarming slope, taking commuting lawyers and bankers from home to office. The jets bank steeply on their approach into Kai Tak airport.

The courts preside, the legislators argue, the police patrol — and supreme above it all, the governor sits calmly in Government House, saying his farewells to his retinue. He is getting a year’s paycheck by way of golden parachute: half a million dollars, tax-free. The soldiers of the Black Watch are sitting around in their barracks, waiting to skirl their way into the history books with bagpipe laments composed by their own pipe-major, in a ceremony due in what is now just a few dozen hours.

The contrast between the rank vulgarity of what seems about to happen next week and the serenely old-fashioned realities of the end of British rule is going to be quite stunning. One sign on Connaught Road, suspended from an awning, seemed to catch the spirit: “Handover Sale, all goods off 40%, this day only.” The Chinese, who have a formidable aptitude for making money out of any given situation, are cashing in on this one too: reunification with the motherland, hotel rooms going cheap, ticket touts on hand and mass karaoke, 50 bucks a song.