So now we have a brand new face on the Salt Lake figure-skating scandal, one to replace that of the pretty and befuddled French judge. And it’s a far, far uglier one-the face of the Russian mob. Well, we already knew the fix was in. What, because figure skating is such a lovely sport to watch, we figured it was someone sort of nice who fixed it? Someone a little dainty, with very good manners? Someone pure of heart but just a wee bit misguided?
I have been a figure-skating fan ever since 1956 when my hometown hero, Tenley Albright, won Olympic gold. And the sport never lost its luster for me, through the Peggys and Dorothys and Scotts and Brians and Katarinas. Then a decade ago, I was introduced to figure skating as a journalist. At my first national championships, the U.S. Figure Skating Association provided a veteran judge to explain all the intricacies-behind the scenes and decidedly off the record-to me and my then NEWSWEEK colleague Frank Deford. It proved an eye-opener indeed.
Beyond a scoring system that required an advanced degree in mathematics to decipher, figure skating was revealed to us as anything but a level sheet of ice. We discovered that the competition began with the judges clinging to a litany of grievances. Given the chance they would punish this one female skater because she was such a bitch. And this other guy wouldn’t make the top three because he was too gay and sexually promiscuous to be allowed to represent the United States in international competition. And this brother-sister pair would get buried because the judges were sick of their act (and, I got the impression, their parents, too). All disclosed matter-of-factly, business as usual, well, what would you expect.
Frankly, I didn’t expect that. But once you accept that prejudice, pique, geography and politics are all major factors in figure-skating scores, it isn’t exactly difficult to imagine that money, coercion or far more substantial menaces could go a long way toward deciding these competitions at any level. I don’t know whether a Russian mobster actually fixed two skating events in Salt Lake City or if he was just a loudmouth who wanted to convince those pretty French gals in tights that he was one big macher.
What I do know is that I have now covered figure skating at four Winter Olympics-Albertville, Lillehamer, Nagano and Salt Lake-and have, in my amateur fashion, agreed with less than half of the judges’ gold-medal decisions. In Lillehamer, I disagreed four for four: in my mind, Nancy Kerrigan clearly beat Oksana Baiul, Elvis Stojko bested Alexei Urmanov, Torvill and Dean were more dynamic that Gritschuk and Platov and Mishkutienok and Dmitriev drubbed their compatriots Gordeeva and Grinkov. But to the extent that any controversy was acknowledged, it was put down to Eastern bloc preferences, less political than aesthetic. The judges were said to favor those skaters, almost always Russians, whose style revealed classic Bolshoi influences.
Of course, ice dancing has always been in a class by itself when it came to farce. There appeared no rhyme or reason to any of the placements. Only consistency. Some 26 dance pairs would skate four dances. And whatever the pair received in their opening number, that was their slot for the entire competition: 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, adding up to gold; 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, netting a bronze; 11th, 11th, 11th, 11th, out of they money; 26th, 26th, 26th, 26th-don’t come back next time. Indeed the whole thing appeared completely preordained; otherwise how could you explain why performances didn’t vary from dance to dance? How was it possible that someone never finished 10th in one dance and 6th in another?
Then in Nagano, someone dropped a dime on a judge, who had the audacity to reveal the order of finish-correctly it turned out-even before the competition had begun. He was dealt with harshly, suspended just long enough to be back and judging in Salt Lake City. But it’s hard to challenge any ice dancing judgments. With no jumps and, thus, few falls, there aren’t easy distinctions for the average fan to make. All I can say about the French victory in Salt Lake is that they won despite a ponderous and sleep-inducing dance program that I suspect even now the U.S. military is replaying for our Al Qaeda guests in Guantanamo. I would willingly watch the Israeli pair skate a dozen more times to “Yiddishe Mama” before I’d ever sit through that French dirge again.
But there’s good news. Everyone in power-in skating, in the Olympics, in various governments-is shocked and appalled at this latest skating twist and turn. “This is damaging information,” International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge conceded today. “I hate to hear those things.” Rogge promised the IOC would pursue the matter relentlessly and “do what is needed. The IOC will deliver without hesitation.” But whatever reforms skating institutes, the sport will inevitably remain suspect. It will be a long time before its fans will ever associate clean with ice again.
