A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

COME DANCING: While I'm watching the NBA All-Star Game, with the most gleefully overdone introductions since the Creed-Drago fight in Rocky IV (and where I'm still processing the fact that ALOTT5MA fave the Master Shaq Daddy Diesel Fu-Shnick is a 13-time All Star), Gretchen is watching the Olympic ice dancing, and files this report:

The original dance is really fun, I think. It’s more organically connected to the ballroom roots of ice dance, but still has more flair and style than the compulsories (which, after twelve rounds of the Ravensburger waltz, could make a girl lose her mind!) Traditionally, in the Latin OD, you see two fast tempos connected by the rumba; it gives skaters a chance to relax and helps to distinguish the fast tempos from each other (the fast ones look a whole lot alike.)

The compulsory dance standings were a really good example of the potential problems with the scoring mechanism, as I talked about a few days ago. The top six skaters were separated by just 1.42 points—and my guess is that if you had different randomly-selected judging panels, any team could have ended up anywhere in the top six.

The twizzle is the side-by-side turns, first in one direction, then on the other foot in the other direction. They talk about them a lot because it’s one of the few consistent elements in all of the programs that the regular viewer can identify. Another important thing to look for in ice dancing is the unison between the two partners, the moving on the lifts---namely, is the male moving or spinning while lifting his partner?-- and the fluidity of their movement (one key indicator is to watch the knees and hips of the skaters. Judges look for “soft knees”, which demonstrates fluidity and makes the entire body look like one smooth line.)

Jamie Silverstein and Ryan O’Meara are so cute. She looks so happy to be skating. In a recent article in the Times, she talked about her struggle with anorexia. Ever since Joan Ryan's book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, figure skating has gotten blamed for a repressive environment that fosters eating disorders. But one of the really interesting things about Jamie is that she clearly still loves skating and loves the sport. She said, in the New York Times, “It was really hard for me for a long time, and it still is," she said. "On a day-to-day basis, I don't feel beautiful, but skating has always made me feel beautiful. It's just that now I've learned you can be beautiful without being perfect.”

Gregory and Petukhov seemed to stumble a little on their twizzles. There’s been gossip for a long time about their relationship; he is a Russian citizen and she was without a partner when they hooked up on the internet, had a try-out, and became partners. Shortly thereafter, they married in Vegas. International love story or mail-order skating-partner-Olympian? Who knows. But given how hard they’ve worked to get to the Olympics, I’m not sure it matters. (See, e.g., this link)

NBC, suffering from low ratings and a drought of Olympic moments, is clearly turning to the ladies’ figure skating competition to fix their problems, with extended early profiles of the skaters and comments from Sandra, Scott, and Dick on the training sessions.

You know, the pairs skating competition in 2002 was the straw that broke the camel’s back on the judging system, but ice dance was just as implicated—and was, if anything, far more
corrupt as a discipline than the others. Ice dance judges notoriously made couples prove themselves for years before granting them a medal. In fact, in 2002, "[w]hen [Peizerat and Anissina] . . . went out to receive their gold medal, Gwendal looked at me and said, 'Did we really win?' " said U.S. ice dance judge Charlie Cyr, who has been instrumental in the development of the new system. "That's pretty sad."

Ice dancing seems fundamentally, somehow, un-judgeable. Without the muscular quads and triples of singles skating, without the throws of the pairs, the ice dancing competition relies on footwork, close lifts, unison, and that beast, musicality. It’s a challenge to understand how it can possibly be fairly judged. And perhaps it can’t.

But there are a few signs of success so far. First, Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto have a lot working against them—namely, they are young and Americans. Yet they’ve skyrocketed to the top of the podium, and have been medal contenders in every international event that they’ve entered for the last two years. Second, at least one ice dance team—Drobiazko and Vanagas, of Lithuania, have come out of retirement to compete in Torino, in part because the new system gave them hope that they could be judged fairly. (At the Nagano world championships, the Israeli team of Chait and Sakhnovsky won the bronze, despite the superior performance of the Lithuanians; most of the skaters, some coaches, and some judges signed a letter demanding an explanation. It was widely understood to be yet another corrupt ice dancing scandal.)

Both of these developments are good indicators that something is going right in ice dancing. If we see an upset tomorrow night—if Belbin and Agosto make it onto the podium, and particularly if Navka and Kostamarov lose the gold—then we may be able to say with some confidence that the new points system is really working.

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It’s always curious to me when skate teams are siblings, like Kerr and Kerr from Great Britain. So much of ice dancing is about sex; much of the drama and narrative of the ice dancing comes from the sexual tension and romantic engagement between the partners. How do you redirect that obvious source of energy when you’re siblings? Or do you just pretend to be in love? And does anyone else find that sort of icky?

So far the costumes have been appropriately ugly, but we haven’t approached the true heights of fabulous garishness that I associate with ice dancing. I wait with bated breath.

Oh, thank goodness—Chait and Sakhnovsky are finally stepping up to the costume challenge. She’s wearing a feathered tutu and a white leotard bodice that opens in the back and exposes her sides. There’s a collar on her dress that reminds me of Malificent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. He’s one of the best partners in the world—he’s really expressive and so fun to watch. They are so much better than their predecessors (a Japanese team)—despite what I said earlier about the unjudgeability of ice dance, they’re obviously superior to the teams we’ve seen so far. Dick and Tracy suggest that the dance is frantic, rather than romantic, but I think that the energy and speed are a refreshing change. Though I do agree with Dick that her dress is perhaps the biggest powder puff in the sport.

Drobiazko and Vanagas: He’s a great skater, she’s very very pretty. I love her hair and the costume is pretty, even though it’s mostly a red ace bandage swathed around her chest. Oh my god, they fell! That hardly ever happens in ice dancing! Wow. That was amazing. And it’s really sad for them, because they are really fun to watch. Her lines are so elegant and that split lift at the end is beautiful. Their free skate is fantastic (and it’s to an awful mix of Phantom of the Opera, which may be part of why I love it so.) This is really unusual. In the replay, you can see that she basically let her foot splay out and run into his skate; he tumbled into her and they both hit the ground. They looked absolutely stunned. Compare their reaction to a fall to, say, the men singles skaters, who look freaked out UNLESS they fall at least once.

The commentators are fabulously discussing the importance of the toe pick. Having just watched the Greatest Olympic Movie Ever, The Cutting Edge, all I can hear is Moira Kelly looking at D.B. Sweeney as he falls on the ice, chanting, “toe pick!”

Despite their fall, they still move ahead of Chait and Sahknovsky.

Grushina and Goncharov. Another Ace Bandage dress. I’m not a big fan of this program. Too much flailing around. Not enough of an actual dance pattern.

Delobel and Schoenfelder. I really can’t stand his yellow headband. It’s so ugly! Their performance was nice; they had a great set of lifts. For those of you who watched the episode of Project Runway where the designers created a figure skating costume for Sasha Cohen, you may recall the judges slamming Kara for her use of fringe on the costumes. Well, Delobel used fringe and I thought it looked great. Alas, poor Kara Janx!

Denkova and Staviski are gorgeous, athletic skaters, with great edges and lots of force. Their music choices were really accessible this year, which was smart (in case you didn’t get that their footwork was a cha-cha, the lyrics in their music yelled out “One, two, cha cha cha!”). Their rumba was great until they just kind of fell out of a spin. It was strange—no one hit the ice, but as she kicked her leg towards him, he didn’t make the catch and it fizzled out.

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Dubreuil and Lauzon: These Canadians are charming, but I’m mostly intrigued by the straps on her skating costume. At one point during the dance, she thrust her hands through the straps, converting them from a halter to two straps on her back.

Oh my god, he just DROPPED her in the rotational lift. She literally slammed into the ice onto her side. That looked like it hurt and she’s not standing up and bowing, instead crouching in pain. There are tears in her eyes and he’s carrying her to the kiss and cry.

Faiella and Scali: They have wonderful music opening their program. However, their opening footwork looks a little sloppy to me. They had lots of expression but it was mostly in their arms, not in their feet. And that sloppiness just resulted in a pretty nasty tumble, where they both landed on their butts on the ice. This couple is interesting because they’re so similar in size—she’s almost as big as he is, and may be taller than him, too.

When they fell, Tracy Wilson said “That is the difficulty of ice dance.” Translation: “Okay, all you people who say that ice dance isn’t a sport, watch these injuries! Watch this! We can fall just as well as the pairs skaters!”

Navka and Kostomarov are the favorites. Navka is dressed like an exotic bird, with a turquoise blue tail. It’s great to see a program without one of those nasty falls (I can’t believe I just wrote this about ICE DANCING!). They did a nice job.

Fusar-Poli and Margaglio, the Italians who are in the lead after the compulsory dance, notoriously HATE each other. They have gone to see at least two psychologists to help them get along. They came out of retirement to skate for the Italians in Italy, and the judges certainly rewarded them for that on Friday night in the compulsories. Their twizzles seemed a little slow. And my god, they also fell! She just fell out of a rotational lift and her smile, which had lit up the arena before, instantly went dark. They look incredibly angry with each other, glaring at each other in the center of the ice before moving to the center to take their bows. It’s really surprising to see them fall; their program is not one of the most difficult in the competition and they should have been able to do that without a problem. It’s not like they can blame the system for forcing them to do a more technically rigorous program.

Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto: They are absolutely darling. Keep an eye on her knees, though—they’re notoriously not “soft” enough. Ben is a great skater and is really brilliant with rhythms. Tanith is gorgeous, especially in that dress—check out the red clamshells and the fake thong straps. By the way, that dress doesn’t use any illusion fabric. That’s all Tanith, baby. And she has fabulous expression. Ben loves the Latin rhythms and really throws himself into the dance. This program is perfectly timed to their music. Their rumba depicts a certain level of ardor that I don’t think we’ve seen in the earlier teams. And the last rhythm, to “Let’s Get Loud,” is a joy to watch. And oh my god, their last twizzle-footwork-lift sequence was amazing. It was fast, energetic, and beautiful. Well done, Tanith and Ben. I’d put them in first. (But as I pointed out, I’m totally biased.) They’re only 1.38 points behind the leaders, so they can definitely make a play for gold.

Tomorrow night is the free dance, where costumes run wild, skin gets shown, and teams virtually have sex on the ice. Will Tanith and Ben take gold? Will Fusar-Poli and Margaglio kill each other on ice? I can’t wait!