2014 WINTER GAMES
Judges may have decided it was Americans’ turn to win
Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir compete in the ice dance free dance figure skating finals at the Iceberg Skating Palace on Monday in Sochi, Russia. Virtue and Moir took home the silver medal, although some considered their performance
worthy of a gold medal.
It’s the hard lesson ice dancers learn in the skating womb — that, as the former Sports Illustrated writer E.M. Swift once put it: “Yogi was wrong. Sometimes it is over before it’s over.”
He was quoting Yogi Berra and writing from Calgary in 1988, when the Duchesnays — remember them, the revolutionary brother-and-sister team — Canadians — who skated for France and tried to change ice dance? — knocked them dead at the Saddledome.
Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay finished eighth.
The judges’ message: There’ll be none of that out-of-the-box nonsense here.
As Charlie White, one half of the American Olympic gold-medal team, said: “I think you learn it early on. You get there and you give what feels like to your 11-yearold self the performance of a lifetime and the marks you receive don’t reflect how you felt.
“But it’s a good lesson not just in skating, but in life. And I think it’s helped us as people to learn to overcome obstacles and learn you have to grow and improve if you want to meet your own goals. And for all the young kids coming up, it’s not easy. It’s not easy but that’s what makes it awesome when you can accomplish something.”
Tessa Virtue, one half of Canada’s silver-medal-winning team, said much the same thing.
“It’s a battle (learning to live with the schism of the sport).
“We referenced the judging system earlier (Moir said they wanted to “challenge ice dance in the judging system”). You have to be technically proficient, but you also have to try to be creative within this limiting little box that we’re put in.
“That’s a challenge that we’ve embraced and, hopefully, that continues to evolve, but it’s not an easy lesson to learn and I think it really just comes down to personal preference and really taking care of what you can control.”
The Duchesnays skated under the old judging system, which was thoroughly discredited in 2002, when it was revealed that the fix was in. The new system came in shortly after those Games, and is held out to be much better, much less vulnerable to improprieties.
But how is it then that one judge — and the public will never know who it was, because, for public consumption, it’s anonymous — and one alone, marked Virtue and Moir so harshly on the technical side in their free dance Monday?
Judges decide how well, or not, a skater’s technical elements are executed; it’s called “Grade of Execution,” though perhaps they should simply call it “execution.” The range is from -3 (if the skater falls down) to +3 (if the element is done awfully well).
This judge gave Virtue and Moir GOE marks of only +1, and he or she did it three times — for their
‘You have to be technically proficient, but you also have to try to be creative within this limiting little box that we’re put in. That’s a challenge that we’ve embraced and, hopefully, that continues to evolve.’
TESSA VIRTUE
Canadian figure skater
twizzles, a rotational lift and a footwork sequence. All the other eight judges gave them +2s or +3s. Davis and White, meantime, didn’t get a single GOE mark as low as +1.
All this is why ice dancers, more than any other skaters, and skaters more than any other athletes, talk so incessantly about skating for the moment, or for themselves, or for the pure joy of it: They have to do it to survive years in this completely bizarre game, which is half-art, half-sport with all the unsatisfying elements of both.
In the press box before the free dance, where the judging was all the talk again — had the outcome really been determined in advance or were the Canadians being a pain in the arse again was the theme — a novice asked aloud, what would happen if the best ice dancers on the planet, unknown to the judges, were transported from outer space onto the ice and just wowed everyone? Would they be allowed to win? Would it be no problem?
“Well, it wouldn’t be ‘no problem,’ ” one skating savant replied. “But they’d be able to do quite a lot.” In ice-dancese, that means they’d, well, probably finish eighth.
It’s not, was the fix in again, or did the Russians and Americans trade kindnesses to one another’s skaters? The right question has more to do with pre-ordination: Had the judges merely determined it was Davis and White’s (and America’s) time for Olympic gold in this discipline?
There need be no wide-ranging conspiracy for there to be conspirators, or to put it another way, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not being followed.
None of this has anything to do with Davis and White, and Virtue and Moir, who couldn’t have been more gracious to one another afterwards than they were.
They have trained side by side, with the same coach at the same rink in suburban Detroit, for years. They are respectful of the others’ work ethic and ability, and careful of their feelings. As White put it, they are “linked forever” by their great rivalry and all they have endured.
They are the lively jewels of this moribund sport, which my friend Steve Milton, a longtime skating writer, perhaps quoting someone else, put it the other night: “Speedskating is the sport of the canals, figure skating is the sport of the castles.”
Nothing to look at here, people; move along now.