A Few Thoughts by Sonia Bianchetti
The World Championships in Los Angeles are over and we can now draw some conclusions.
I was not in Los Angeles and therefore I could only watch the best two groups in each event on TV.
Of course, there is a great difference between seeing programs in the arena or on TV. The speed, the use of the space and also part of the choreography are lost on a small screen. Still some programs looked just outstanding to me: in Ladies, Yu Na Kim and Joannie Rochette; in Men , Patrick Chan, Evan Lysacek and Samuel Contesti ; and in ice dancing, Davis/ White and Virtue / Moir.
Now that the IJS has stripped the emotion out of so many programs, it is a welcome sight to see some artistry again. Both Patrick Chan and Yu Na Kim were just wonderful. Yu Na was in a class of her own. She is so natural and elegant. I was impressed by her ability in expressing and interpreting the music, by the harmony of all her movements, by the excellent choreography. Her short program was superb, one of the best programs I can remember in a long time. It made me cry! She made me feel that “artistic emotion” that I have been missing for many years.
This program will go down in skating history like the Bolero of Torvill and Dean, Katarina Witt's Carmen, Kurt Browning’s Casablamca or Yagodin’s Winter. Thank you Yu Na!
As an Italian I cannot help expressing all my distress at the performance of Carolina Kostner. Carolina is a very talented skater, she can be very artistic, but that evening she looked like a ghost on the ice; she was totally lost, as if she had a mental black out. Really sad. I do hope that she will soon recover from this shock.
In spite of a few outstanding programs, the overall standard was rather depressing, except perhaps for ice dancing. Out of approximately 250 programs, only a few were flawless.
While occasional stars like Yu-Na Kim or Patrick Chan still find a way to meld grace with passion under the new system, they are the exception, not the rule. And this cannot be considered satisfactory.
No wonder that figure skating popularity has vanished in North America in the past few years. The rating for the Ladies’ final, the only live telecast on NBC, was 2.7, but just 0.6 among adults 18-49. And in 2010, as reported by The Star, “CBC won't cover Grand Prix figure skating events or the world championships in Turin, Italy. Moore's argument is that the worlds are less important in an Olympic year. Regardless, the international skating package doesn't turn a profit. So far, we have not been able to make enough revenue on (international) figure skating to make it worthwhile". Isn’t this amazing considering that Canada can count on skaters such as Chan, Rochette and Virtue/Moir to be among the favourites for a medal at the Olympic Games in Vancouver?
Some people claim that the lack of interest in North America. is more related to the lack of any “great star”. This may be part of it, but I don't believe it's the whole story. A lot of fans in other countries as well just don't understand and don't like the new scoring system.
Nevertheless, Ottavio Cinquanta, the ISU President, declared in Los Angeles : “If figure skating is going down in TV in this country we are sorry but the standard is very high. We are improving the quality.” Are you sure, Mr.President? And: “ If it is not acceptable by the market what can we do? We are not a marketing company.” A suggestion? Revise the IJS so that the skaters may be free once again to express their feelings, their creativity, their passion instead of being obliged to skate like robots, and make sure that the public in the arena and at home can understand the scoring and the results!
Cinquanta also said the sport's popularity is growing in Asia, which has produced some of the top female skaters in recent years like South Korea's Yu-Na Kim and Japan's Mao Asada. How long will this last? A sport, to survive, cannot just rely on the popularity of one or two stars, especially when these stars often shine all too briefly.
One of the main problems that emerged in Los Angeles and caused a lot of discussion was judging. I have always tried to support and defend the judges as much as I could, knowing from experience how difficult it is to judge well in an objective, fair and honest way. But what happened in Los Angeles is difficult to understand. And the reduction of the number of judges in each panel has probably contributed to this disaster.
How is it possible that, in the men’s short program, a skater like Chan, who has fabulous skating skills, choreography and transitions, received lower PC marks in those areas than Joubert? A real scandal that perhaps should set off some alarms!
Chan's program, in my opinion, was by far the best If it could be argued that Joubert got a few more points in the technical score thanks to his quad combination, although sloppy, in no way should he have been marked higher in the PCs.
It is almost as if the judges threw up marks without taking into consideration at all what the skaters were doing with regard to each PC. Nothing new, but if we want the scoring to establish some credibility something must be done to avoid such a shame. In my opinion the results in the short program should have been exactly the reverse: Chan, Lysacek, Joubert.
There were similar problems in the ladies' event as well.
This only confirms that the way the PCS are judged very often does do not reflect at all the performances on the ice. Why? Because the current PCs are too many and much too complicated to be judged by human beings , in a few seconds at the end of a program, may be after 8 or 9 hours spent on the ice judging 53 competitors!
