Is Ice Dancing a Shambles? You Be the Judge

If someone has given you a ticket for today’s ice dancing compulsory competition, buy that person an ice cream cone. Put Brussels sprouts in the bottom of the cone. Laugh uproariously. They deserve it.

If you have a ticket for today’s ice dancing compulsory competition and you paid for it, please write in and explain yourself. You have paid to watch a few hours of couples doing the same steps to the same music. Over and over and over. There is no way to understand why some couple gets one score and another couple gets another score.

Welcome to the world of ice dancing. Sport or cult? Sport or pro wrestling? Legitimate questions those are, but without legitimate answers. The hair colors of the dancers, male and female, change as often as a teenager’s nail polish. The results change much less frequently.

The U.S. championship ice dancing competition begins today with those compulsories. The less said the better. It is tedious. It is numbingly boring. There are actual judges who give actual scores and who would tell you that they have an actual point on those pencils they use to mark down scores. Go figure.

The men’s and women’s singles discipline dropped compulsory figures years ago. The hierarchy noticed no one bought tickets to the event, that the fans didn’t care and that certain judges used the arcane standards of the figures to manipulate the judging. So what if a skater completed 10 triple jumps over two days of short and long programs? If a certain coterie of judges preferred to give a medal to a certain country, voila, that skater aced the compulsories!

And that’s still the situation in ice dancing. So insidiously incestuous is the judging that Dick Pound, the Canadian who was the former vice president of the International Olympic Committee, has recently suggested that ice dancing is in danger of being dropped from the Olympic sports program.

It is likely that Pound noticed the time a judge was seen sleeping during a world championship competition and that a Ukrainian judge was actually suspended, briefly, for giving hand signals to fellow judges at the Nagano Olympics four years ago.

The U.S. has won one medal, a bronze in the 1976 Games, the first time ice dancing was an Olympic sport. With the exception of the exquisitely mesmerizing performance of Britain’s Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in 1984, all the gold medals have gone to skaters from Russia or the former Soviet Union. In each Olympics, they have won two of the three medals.

“Sometimes it can be very frustrating,” U.S. ice dancer Naomi Lang says. “As a skater you can’t count on the judges to do the right thing. You learn not to pay attention to everything going on around you and enjoy the skating ... even if the judges put you five places below where you’re supposed to be.”

This is not the attitude an athlete should have. An athlete shouldn’t be resigned to being worked over by a judge.

Amy Webster, a former U.S. ice dancer and a publicist for Lang and her partner, Peter Tchernyshev, blows out a puff of air before she starts talking about ice dance judging.

“It’s completely embarrassing,” Webster says. “I would not let my children get into ice dancing the way it is now.

“Take the Russian federation. All of the Russian skaters give back 30% [of their earnings] to the Russian federation. The federation picks the judges. There are major incentives for those judges to make things happen. It is so corrupt and it is so sad for these poor athletes.”

The Olympic ice dancing panel includes no representative from the U.S. or Canada but five from former Soviet Bloc countries.

At the Nagano Olympics, the Canadian team of Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz spoke early and often about feeling they were poorly judged.

And they were. And they went home not with the gold medal they had hoped for, but with no medal at all. And now no Canadian judge.

Coincidence?

“This has been allowed to go on too long,” Webster says. “It’s a good old boys’ club and part of that is the perverse judging which pervades everything.

“How can you justify having your child in this sport, putting your whole life on hold, maybe postponing an education? You’d better be doing it because you love it. Don’t be ever hopeful things will change. It’s too ludicrous.”

Alexander Zhulin, a former Russian Olympic medalist, and 1993 world champion, coaches Lang and Tchernyshev now. He begs us all not to give up on ice dancing or wish it away from the Olympics.

“If someone is saying this is not sport, there is something wrong with that. The judging, yes, it has always been a little political.

“Honestly, honestly, here is the problem. No one is allowed to speak to U.S. judges. U.S judges, they are very unpredictable. If U.S. judge would just be involved in the system, right away the American couple would jump a couple of places right away.”

Whew, that’s better.

If only our judges would schmooze more, their judges would snooze less.

Then things would be OK.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.