Hamill: Judges Stifle Younger Skaters

In the eight years since her Olympic gold medal, Dorothy Hamill’s first love has remained ice skating. But she worries that younger skaters may be losing interest in a sport she feels emphasizes flashy jumps and “ridiculous school figures” at the expense of artistry.

“The judging is really stifling the athletes,” she said. “The only thing that’s important is to do triple jumps.

“To watch someone go and nail 50 triple jumps is just not expressive. It’s strictly a trick. I think they really should stress the artistic side of skating. I would rather see fewer jumps and a routine that said something.”

From takeoff to landing, a jump takes less than a second, Hamill said.

“You have a four-minute routine and you do four triple jumps,” she said, “there’s a lot of time left over to be skating around and doing something.”

The restrictive judging discourages innovation so that athletes at the Olympics or the world championships “all look the same,” she said. “They don’t have any certain style the way they did a few years ago.”

The emphasis on athletic skating also causes more falls and leads to injuries that Hamill thinks are unnecessary.

Tiffany Chin, the teen-ager who recently won her first national women’s championship, may be America’s best hope for a figure skating medal in the 1988 Winter Olympics, Hamill said. But, Hamill added, Chin “has a terrible ankle injury from three years ago. Who knows whether it will last? It’s just a shame to see that happen to skating.”

Despite her indictment of judges’ demands that push the athletes to their limits, Hamill said she “was always an athletic skater, not a balletic one like Peggy Fleming.”

She worked on this during a three-month hiatus from the ice last year in which she concentrated on ballet, although she has taken lessons since she started skating.

She was 8-years old when her sister and a neighbor, who were skating on a pond behind the Hamill house in Connecticut, teased the little girl because she could not skate backwards.

“I went home in tears to my mother,” she said. “I wanted to learn how to skate backwards. I didn’t care about going forwards. After about a week of that, she signed me up for group lessons and I fell in love with it--and now, I can skate backwards!”

She turned professional at the age of 19, right after winning the gold medal at the the 1976 Winter Games.

“It was a very difficult time,” she said of her transition from amateur to pro. “I thought, ‘I’ve been skating 11 years and I just won Olympics. Haven’t I had enough?’ About three years later, I got my second wind and now I enjoy it more than ever.”

Last year, she won the World Professional Figure Skating championship and Skater of the Year honors from American Skating World Magazine.

She appeared earlier this year in “Fantasy on Ice,” at Harrah’s Tahoe and Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and is working on a project she hopes will bring “Mary Poppins” on ice to Broadway.

She also is involved in a television movie, “The Sonja Henie Story,” and expects to return to the Metropolitan Opera House next summer with John Curry’s skating company.

Competitive skating remains a question mark.

“I really don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’m getting too old to compete with some of those skaters. And really, I don’t know what else I could possibly do to win it again. It took so much work. I shouldn’t have to do that any more.

“The only reason I started doing it was because we wanted professional skating to grow. Now that that has happened, let someone else do it.”

The 28-year-old veteran is not ready to hang up her skates, though.

“I know that I don’t want to do it forever,” she said. “But . . . you can keep it up if you’ve got the time and the energy and the desire. I still have the desire and there’s still a lot more I’d like to do.

“Besides, how many people can work in Las Vegas and the Metropolitan Opera House?”