Skategate Cast a Cold Spell

I wish I could say I’ll remember the good things I saw at the Winter Games, because there were many performances and people worth remembering.

The power and command of Alexei Yagudin’s free skate in winning the men’s figure skating gold medal. The radiant joy of Sarah Hughes’ gold-medal free skate. The teary eyes of Michelle Kwan as she watched someone else ascend to the top of the medals stand and receive the gold medal she was favored to win, a Nagano nightmare relived.

Like Janet Lynn, a luminous figure skater of three decades ago, Kwan is destined to be known as perhaps the greatest skater who never won a gold medal. Will that haunt her?

Should it?

Her four world championships, six U.S. titles, and Olympic silver and bronze medals will bring her the immortality of living on in fans’ memories and figure skating record books. And she seems intelligent and strong enough to move on to other things outside of skating rinks, in places triple-triple combination jumps don’t matter and that empty line on her resume where it should have said “gold medalist” isn’t so important.

I wish there had been more nights like the dramatic, riveting women’s figure skating finale and fewer nights filled with news conferences to announce the details of some protest or another. More days of hearing athletes’ life stories, and fewer days listening to skating judges change their stories about sordid back-room deals.

One day, staking out a hotel lobby to talk to International Skating Union officials after they met to discuss their investigation into the judging of the pairs figure skating competition, the controversy reached its height. Or was that its depths?

Each time the door to the meeting room opened, dozens of TV minicams massed as if for an attack. It didn’t matter if someone was sneaking out for a bathroom break or a hotel staffer was going in to install a leaf in the table. It was comical and appalling at the same time: As one ISU official walked to the elevator, the army of cameras blocked his path and took over the lobby. Walking backward to get tape of their quarry, cameramen knocked over potted plants and scattered chairs, all for a few seconds of tape of someone they didn’t know saying something they didn’t understand.

I wonder if figure skating will recover from what happened in Salt Lake. All its dirty little secrets were aired on a global stage, which could be a good thing if that leads to the reforms promised by ISU President Ottavio Cinquanta. But I’m not sure judges and officials will be as interested in reform three or four months from now as they are at the moment, after their dirty laundry has been aired so publicly.

Those in power generally don’t like to relinquish it, and I doubt figure skating judges will be willing to give up their power. And in the end, as long as humans are involved in judging, subjectivity simply can’t be eliminated.

I wonder too, about what we have done to figure skating and skaters that David Pelletier would call the time leading up to the Games “the worst six months of my life” and say he found relief from the intense pressure heaped upon him and partner Jamie Sale only when he was on the ice.

These are kids, or young adults, who have lived narrowly focused lives. We expect so much of them. Perhaps too much, if what should have been a time of happy anticipation turned into a trial. The difference between triumph and despair can be the slip of a blade. How many times in practice had Kwan done her triple flip perfectly before she landed it on her hip in the long program? Nothing is sure, in figure skating or in life.

I hope Hughes can enjoy her moment. I hope she takes her gold medal for what it is: the culmination of one dream, but the springboard for others where you’re not over the hill if you’re 21 and fall on a triple flip.