Say it Ain't So, Marie-Reine!

Categories: Sports

Yesterday, my son was rejected by CCM as a piano performance major.  Fortunately, he got over it in a few minutes because he liked Bowling Green (where he was accepted) better anyway. 

I mention this because if you're planning to push your child into something, piano is better than figure skating, especially pairs figure skating.  Pianos are expensive, but they're cheaper than ice time, skating coaches, skates (you'll have to have more than one pair, because your feet will keep growing as you get older, although maybe less than most people's if you're a girl and aren't allowed to weigh more than 100 pounds).  Plus even if you're playing a piano duet, there's practically no chance that your partner's skate blade will pierce your skull.  Jon Jackson's 2005 On Edge: Backroom Dealing, Cocktail Scheming, Triple Axels, and How Top Skaters Get Screwed; and Joy Goodwin's 2004 The Second Mark: Courage, Corrpution, and the Battle for Olympic Gold make this pretty clear.

I guess we all spend a lot of time thinking about the 2002 Olympic pairs figure-skating competition, so maybe the following summary isn't necessary: The Russian pair made some mistakes, and the Canadian pair skated great.  Those in the know would have guessed that the U.S., Canadian, and Japanese judges would vote for the Canadian pair, and the Russian and other Soviet-bloc judges would vote for the Russians.  This left the French judge's vote up in the air.  The French judge, Marie-Reine LeGougne, ended up voting for the Russians, who came away with the gold. 

Later, in the hotel lobby, LeGougne broke down and said she had been forced by the president of the French figure-skating federation to vote for the Russians.  In return, the Russians promised that they would vote for the French ice-dancing team.  The upshot was that the judges ended up giving a second gold medal to the Canadian team.  People thought there would be a scandal and a lot of changes in the corrupt judging system, but there weren't.  The scoring method changed, but for the worse.  A lot of people are still ticked off.

Jon Jackson started skating when he was 13--too late to become internationally competitive, but he did very well regionally.  In his 20s, he decided to become a figure-skating judge, and he progressed quickly, first judging local competitions and then international ones.  He became increasingly concerned that other judges seemed to award medals based on skaters' overall reputations rather than on their actual performances during a specific competition.  The unfairness of the 2002 pair-skating competition judging pushed him toward anger.  A lawyer with an MBA  (who says he aced the math part of the GMAT), Jackson decided to start a new figure-skating federation with the goal of wresting power from the corrupt U.S. Figure Skating Association. 

Goodwin, who covers figure skating for ABC Sports, agrees that the new scoring rules have not made judging any more fair.  Much of this engrossing book traces the Olympic paths of the six medal-winning 2002 pairs skaters--the Russians, the Chinese, and the Canadians.  Except perhaps for Jamie Sale, the Canadian woman, all of the skaters endured a lot to reach the elite ranks.  The story of the Russian woman skater, Yelena Berezhnaya, is particularly harrowing: a previous pairs partner regularly and publicly beat her up, and no one really intervened for way too long.  She's also the one who suffered the brain injury from her partner's skate blade. 

There are many options if you want to look into the art and business of figure skating; some are available in print form here at the library; others are available online.  After you've read the two books I described above, you'll find that most of the names have become like old friends (or enemies). 

• Mark A. Lund's 2002 Frozen Assets mentions the 2002 scandal but is equally concerned with the difficulties faced by skaters who decide to go pro in a world with limited professional options.  Why, he wonders, are there so few many fewer opportunities for pro skaters now than there were in the '90s? 
• Skating magazine is the official magazine of the U.S. Figure Skating Association, and you can browse back to 1923.  The focus is on great photos of skaters, event schedules, and ads for correspondence schools (including one where you can take your coursework via iPod).

The online magazine Ice Skating International continues to criticize the judging system.  Two books you can order are longtime figure-skating referee Sonia Bianchetti's 2005 Cracked Ice: Figure Skating's Inner World; if you read French, you can buy former judge Marie-Reine LeGougne's 2003 Glissades a Salt Lake City: L'Honneur Perdu d'une Juge Francaise.  Here's a particularly funny blog from the Washington Post mocking LeGougne for claiming to have brought integrity back to figure skating.

It's interesting that it's LeGougne who's received most of the bad rap for Skategate.  What about the Russian and other Eastern-Bloc judges, who presumably also recognized the Canadians' superior performance but didn't vote for them?  What about the ice-dancing competition (which the Friench team won)?  What about the Russians, who presumably set up the scoring scam in the first place?  We'll probably never know the truth, since the mobster who apparently arranged the vote fix is now unextraditably back in Russia.

A young man who plays piano about 100 times better than my son worked at an aquarium store I used to frequent.  I'd marvel at his rather short but obviously magical fingers when he dipped the net in the tanks to collect the fish I was buying.  How could he play so well?  Once I imagined buying a piranha or two, you know, and when he dipped his hand in the water to scoop them out--oh, the fish might--never mind.  Maybe there's a little Tonya Harding in all of us.