• U.S.

Sport: A Little Touch of Heaven

16 minute read
B.J. Phillips

In figure skating, there were moments of sheer perfection

Zetra, the skating arena in Sarajevo, is a pleasant enough place. Set in a valley just below the stadium where the Olympic flame burns, it spreads like the curved wing of a dove …. stretched out over the snow. Inside, there are comfortable wooden seats,polite ushers and concession stands that sell chocolate and local brandy, a better fix against a winter night than popcorn and beer. Yet to hear of the doings in the figure-skating competition that took place in this outwardly cheerful spot last week was to confuse sport with war dispatches. There were hints of dark intrigue ind geopolitical vote swapping. East met West, West met West, East met East, and almost all shot themselves in the foot.

The top American, Scott Hamilton, went into battle at Zetra and, feeling that he “wasn’t into the ice,” decided to retrench, withdrawing two triple jumps from his free-skating program. He still won the gold medal, but it was not with the dominating performance with which he wanted to cap his career. The English ice-dancing couple, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, gave the Winter Olympics its first utterly flawless exhibition: nine perfect marks of 6.0 from nine judges. But Gary Beacom, a Canadian skater, became so enraged over his marks from the judges that he kicked the rinkside barrier. American Ice Dancers Judy Blumberg and Michael Seibert likewise lashed out in frustration, though in words only, after seeing their hopes for a medal disappear at the whim of a single judge and her totally bewildering scores. Meanwhile, America’s ice princess, Rosalynn Sumners, the reigning world champion, overplayed her penchant for femininity and had to settle for a silver medal. In pair skating, the East Germans and Soviets blasted away at each other with programs too difficult to perform without mistakes, and a blithe brother-and-sister act from the U.S. slipped in amid the carnage for a silver medal. Kitty and Peter Carruthers’ second-place finish was the best by any American pair since 1952, and broke the East bloc’s lock on the event. Before it was all over, no nation could claim to have judged without favor; skewed patriotism is more like it.

The clamor at Zetra follows figure skating like a pack of sequin salesmen, for of all Olympic sports, none is as intensively handicapped—some might say predetermined. The four-year cycle between the Winter Games is spent shaking down a new generation of skaters in annual world championships. By the time the Olympic flame is lit again, a pecking order has been created that places ruthless demands on contenders and newcomers alike. For the favorites, there is the safety of incumbency. Like heavyweight champions, they cannot lose their titles on a draw: they must be beaten. But with that status come expectations that are perhaps impossible to fulfill. Thus, after a performance that was lackluster by his exacting standards, Hamilton could finger his gold medal and say, “I look at this, and I see 16 years of my life. I’ve waited a long time. I didn’t want it to be like this.”

Newcomers, on the other hand, must wait their turn with a patience that tries both talent and dreams. The top rank is tough to crack, for the edge always goes to the headliners. Tiffany Chin, who at 16 was competing brilliantly in her first Olympics, could bask in a strong showing while cheerfully accepting the virtual impossibility of a medal. She had finished twelfth in the compulsory figures, and even with a runaway victory in the free skating while others faltered badly, a silver medal was the best she could have won. Said Chin: “I skated good figures, but the other skaters ahead of me were all established with the judges. This is the first time they’ve seen me skate, and it takes a while to show them what you can do.”

From all this came one performance above the fray, almost beyond belief.

Torvill, 26, and Dean, 25, have carried ice dancing singlehanded from the amiable charms of the ballroom to the aesthetic splendor of ballet. Never was their vision of the sport’s potential as clear as it was in this Olympian performance. Twice before in competition they had received nine 6.0 scores on their second marks for artistic impression, but at Sarajevo they added three 6.0s in the scores for composition or technical merit. They did it despite choosing music, Ravel’s Bolero, that does not contain a change of tempo, supposedly a requirement. But to Torvill and Dean, ice dancing is much more than a Roseland medley of a dash of tango, a pinch of waltz, then up and out with some fancy polka footwork. In place of the rules, they offered an idea: music as movement, not scaffolding; skating as expression, not simply virtuosic display.

Not since the great Soviet pair of the ’60s, Ludmila and Oleg Protopopov, has anyone in skating so melded music, blades and bodies into a unified whole. Torvill and Dean performed an extended pas de deux in which difficult athletic feats are made to appear effortless, though the beat is so slow that the skaters can never build momentum. Like the music, the movements are eerily erotic and mesmerizing, and even for favorites, the program was a gamble. In winning, Torvill and Dean elevated an entire sport. Afterward, Dean brushed aside the mutters about single-tempo selection: “Maybe it’s something that hasn’t been done before,” he said, “but that’s what we’re all about, trying to be inventive and to do different things. We didn’t know how the music would be received, but we felt very strongly about it, and we stayed with that commitment.” As the principal choreographer in the partnership, Dean was asked the source of his inspiration. With that glorious moment still glistening in the mind’s eye, his reply was as simple as it was self-evident: “I’m inspired by the music. We spend a lot of time on the ice listening to the music. Simply listening.”

Balanchine himself could not have said it better.

The only other couple with similar ambitions were the Americans. Blumberg, 26, and Seibert, 24, chose to skate to Rimsky-Korsakov’s lush symphonic suite Schéhérazade. Under the tutelage of Bobby Thompson, a British coach close to Torvill and Dean, the pair had revamped their style over the past two years. In 1983 the effort paid off with a bronze medal at the World Championships. They had come to Sarajevo with real hopes for a silver, but finished in fourth place after being marked down .3 of a point below the panel’s average by Italian Judge Cia Bordogna. Later she insisted that the couple’s selection of classical music that could not be “danced on the floor” was the reason for her low marks, though a ballet has been choreographed to Schéhérazade. The competition referee had advised the judges before the final evening that he had examined all the routines in practice sessions and found them acceptable under the rules. Bordogna nevertheless decided to place the Americans fourth on her card, which put a medal out of reach. Bitterly disappointed, Blumberg and Seibert plan to retire. Said Seibert: “I still feel that what we did was important and is the right direction for ice dancing to follow. But if only Torvill and Dean can do it, then how is anybody else to climb any higher, expand the sport any further?”

Ironically, another American benefited by the couple’s misfortunes. Two nights later, a different Italian judge appeared to make amends by leaping .3 of a point above the rest of the judges in her marks for Tiffany Chin in the women’s short program. But then, two can play that game: the American judge bottomed out an Italian skater’s average and, more egregiously, placed Katarina Witt, who won the short program with an incandescent performance, .3 of a point below the judges’ average.

It was precisely the Blumberg-Seibert aggressive approach that put silver medals around the necks of the Carrutherses. For the first time in memory, or at least since the Soviets started competing in Winter Games, in 1956, there was no commanding partnership in pairs skating. The long reigns of the Protopopovs and Irina Rodnina and her succession of partners, Sergei Ulanov and Alexander Zaitsev, had come to an end. Since Lake Placid, several pairs had taken aim at one another, among them the Carrutherses, two Soviet pairs (Elena Valova and Oleg Vasiliev, and Veronika Pershina and Marat Akbarov) and East Germans Sabine Baess and Tassilo Thierbach. Compared with the liturgical certainty of pairs skating during the past three decades, the Sarajevo Games were a free-for-all.

The smart handicappers predicted that Kitty, 22, and Peter, 24, would win friends but not influence judges, six of whom came from Europe (three from the East bloc) and all of whom frowned on the more robust American style in pairs skating. But as happens when no confirmed champion operates from a position of strength, the Soviets and East Germans overreached themselves in technical ambition. Only Valova and Vasiliev managed to skate a short program free of bobbles. The Carrutherses, meanwhile, skimmed through the wreckage, their bloopers merely those of timing, not of standing upright. When the smoke cleared, they were tied for second going into the free skating. “Did we expect it?” Peter asked later. “Are you kidding?”

It was a golden opportunity. Make that silver. Two days later their coach, Ron Ludington, the last American pairs medalist (bronze in 1960), summed up the free skating: “I’d call that walking right through the door, wouldn’t you?” Wouldn’t anybody? On the big night Valova and Vasiliev held their gold-medal lead on a more difficult program. Nurtured, like the Protopopovs, in the Leningrad school, they showed its hallmarks: coolly cerebral slow passages alternating with flashy jumps and lifts. But the performance of the young Soviet pair, Larisa Selezneva and Oleg Makarov, with whom the Carrutherses were tied, was the crucial one. Though Kitty and Peter had not watched it, there are some things that are impossible to hide from, even in the basement of an ice-skating arena. Said Kitty: “We could hear the crowd, and I knew they had missed. That made me more nervous. I thought of all the hundreds of times we’ve skated that program in practice, doing it perfectly day after day, but then I thought, ‘Oh, but this is the only one that counts.’ ” With a huge American contingent cheering them on (Hamilton later referred to it as a “hockey crowd going ‘Grrr, kill ’em!’ “), they went out to skate for the medal. “The music was so loud and the crowd was so loud that we couldn’t hear,” recalls Kitty. “I always count the camels [the number of revolutions in a special spin] for Peter, and nobody can tell. But this time I was just screaming them.” Peter adds, “It didn’t matter, though. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that we were so symmetrical, so as one, that it was as if something had taken us over and bonded us.” They gave the competition its most emotional moment, forgetting the required protocol of bowing to judges and crowd in favor of a tight embrace that lasted almost a minute at center ice. Said Kitty: “When you get every single thing you worked for and dreamed of together … well, we just wanted to enjoy that moment together for as long as we had it.”

For Katarina Witt, 18, it was a matter of gathering her efforts into a winning program, and after four years of international competition, she did it just in time to win the gold. Leggy, sexy, with a saucy smile that flirts with the camera, Witt was the prettiest champion and one of the best. Indeed, Witt may be the synthesis of artist and athlete that women’s skating has so badly needed in recent years. Until her Olympic appearance, one ideal had been sacrificed to the other. But grace and athleticism are not mutually exclusive, as Witt convincingly proved. Her free-skating program was the most technically difficult of all the competitors, and included three triple jumps and a triple toe loop in combination with a double jump that she performed faultlessly in the opening seconds. With that difficult maneuver safely tucked away on the judges’ scorecards, she broke into a radiant smile that never faded through a medley of mostly Gershwin songs. Here, too, she taught the others a lesson, for rather than self-consciously choosing one approach or the other, she simply skated as the music demanded: lyrical to a love song, witty with a Broadway toe-tapper, intelligent and expressive in every mood and movement.

In Witt, the arguments ended, for here was a skater of both athletic power and aesthetic sensibility. She has a natural fizz that makes the efforts of most others look labored. In fact her coach, Jutta Muller, is a stern drillmaster who is accustomed to Olympic triumph: her daughter Gabriele Seyfert took the silver medal in 1968, and Anett Poetzsch, another pupil, was the Lake Placid gold medalist.

Among the Americans, Elaine Zayak, 18, dropped quickly out of contention with a weak showing in the school figures. Though she had no hope of a medal, Zayak refused to hang her head. She turned in a charming short program that scored higher on technical difficulty than did Sumners’, and in the free skating, she put on perhaps the best performance of her life, cleanly landing four triples, including one in a combination with two other jumps. Her farewell was an emotionally satisfying slam dunk in her critics’ faces, and earned admiration for her tenacious spirit.

Chin was already widely touted as the winner in 1988. Small and fragile-looking, she skates with elegant ease and has some of Witt’s knack of making the Axels and the Salchows look simple. She was the crowd’s favorite, swirling and swooping through a move she has patented as the “Chin spin”: stretching out to brush the ice with one hand while she whirls with one leg fully extended. After finishing second overall in the combined short and long programs, she is no longer a comer, but the star of a new generation.

For U.S. Champion Rosalynn Sumners, 19, finishing second was a disappointment. In pursuit of victory, she and her coach banked everything on cultivating a delicate image of femininity. She covered that bet with a triple jump in her free-skating program, but her style has turned increasingly cloying, and looked weak in comparison with Witt’s exuberantly physical approach. Though she skated cleanly and with marvelous style (an Italian judge gave her a 6.0 for artistic impression), her program contained but one triple jump in combination with another jump. That proved crucial, because it was precisely triple combinations that had pushed Witt’s technical marks beyond reach. She had been scheduled to perform others but Summers failed to pull them off, and with that she lost the gold. “I let up a little too soon,” she said. “I didn’t push myself far enough.”

Even in triumph, Hamilton had something of a letdown too. He had hoped for a transcendent performance. He likes to call his style “apple pies and Chevrolets,” and it is the quintessence of the clear, fast American approach to the sport. Along with Torvill and Dean, he was the overwhelming favorite of the Olympics. He was on top of his sport and all the hoopla that surrounds it through 17 straight competitions, stretching back to September 1980. Graceful under pressure, unfailingly helpful and generous to younger skaters, he is perhaps the most popular champion in modern skating history. He glided through the compulsory figures in first place, but then, in his short and long programs, left fans bewildered by committing the most obvious errors that anyone had seen since he took over as World Champion in 1981. Meanwhile, Canadian Brian Orser was afire, popping off five of the seven possible triple jumps in his long program to win the silver medal. Hamilton went up for two triple jumps, realized in mid-air that they did not feel right and converted them into doubles. Said the barricade kicker, Gary Beacom: “Scotty always skates a clean program. For him to miss two moves is a disaster.”

Such are the standards Hamilton has set for himself. Yet there are some things that are beyond even a champion’s control, and others have arrived at the big moment tired and sick. If ABC color commentator Peggy Fleming sounded sympathetic in her coverage of Hamilton, the reason is that she has been there too. In 1968, nervous and with a sore throat, she faltered in her long program and burst out crying at the end. Like Scott she won her gold medal in the school figures.

Hamilton had developed a cold and ear infection in Sarajevo. Though he refused to blame his curtailed performance on the illness, close observers noticed its effects. Several practices had been marred by an imperfect sense of balance, and in competition Hamilton, who is a classic skating technician, was off the proper axis in his jumps. The ideal jump is a typical Hamilton jump: straight up, the body spinning perfectly upright, not tilted off that central axis either front to back or side to side. But in Sarajevo, that textbook technique was tilted, and it cost him the triple jumps, the flawless program that would have ratified the accomplishments of the past four years.

Nothing was wrong with his theatrical instincts, however. After the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner at the medal ceremony, Hamilton grabbed an American flag and skated an exhilarating victory lap around the arena with it. When it was all over, Hamilton reflected, “The whole last four years have been for this night. I’ve worked so hard, trained so hard, waited so long. I wanted it to be special. I wanted my greatest program. It wasn’t my best, but I did it. I came here to win the gold medal. Maybe it wasn’t pretty, but I did it. I feel like I just fell off the edge of the world.” —By B.J. Phillips

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