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Sporting News, The, March 7, 1994 by Michael Knisley

The Lillehammer Games exposed figure skating's many dirty little secrets

From the rubble in the wake of Tropical Storm Tonya rises the moral of the story, the lesson to be learned about this most peculiar of Olympic sports: The only difference between life and figure skating is that life doesn't wear so much makeup.

It's skating dirty little secret, and probably a subliminal reason for its great appeal. Figure skating dresses itself up pretty and over-paints its face, but then it conducts itself in the same smoke-filled, back-room manner your average city council does, or your average corporate board of directors does, or your average high school cheerleading squad does. Just like life, it gives you the illusion of meritocracy, but the reality is very, very different, certainly different from every other sport in these or any Olympic Games.

The other sports award medals to the athletes who fit the Olympic creed: Citius, Altius, Fortius. Faster, Higher, Stronger. In other sports, the Diann Roffe-Steinrotters of the world can come from out of nowhere to ski down an Olympic giant-slalom slope in uncontested gold-medal time and say, "It's one race, one day, and anything can happen."

Figure skating doesn't always reward the athletes who in one event, on one day, are fastest or strongest or suddenly perfect. Sometimes, it gives medals to the skaters who pay their dues and don't buck the system, who practice hard and wait their turn. Sometimes, it makes a gold medalist out of the skater who best represents that ethic, at the expense of the skater whose performance may have been better.

At other times, all the patience and practice in the Protestant work ethic isn't as important as the way you look -- so much like the workplace, where the nattily dressed associate who smiles at the boss a lot gets the promotion you so richly deserve. In figure skating, you can schmooze your way to the top. Everybody who is anybody in figure skating (a group, incidentally, that as of last Friday no longer includes Tonya Harding) knows that and lives with it.

When Ukraine's Oksana Bayul edged the United States' Nancy Kerrigan for the women's Olympic gold medal, she didn't so much out-skate Kerrigan as she out-flirted her.

"(Bayul) gives emotion to the referees and to the public," says France's Philippe Candeloro, the men's bronze medalist. "Nancy skates with a smile, because she is American, and she smiles the way the American people like. This is from the mind of the French people, remember. She skates with a smile, but not enough emotion for the referees."

The marks for Kerrigan and Bayul were extremely close, Bayul winning first place from five of the nine judges and Kerrigan from four. The difference wasn't in the scores for technical merit (the jumps and spins and footwork) but in the marks for artistic impression. The schmooze factor. The ninth judge, a former East German skater named Jan Hoffman, gave Kerrigan a 5.8 and Bayul a 5.9 out of possible 6.0

It was the separation between gold and silver.

"I preferred Nancy's program, but the judges react in a different way to people who focus their attention on the judges' stand like Oksana does," says Paul Wylie, the 1992 Olympic silver medalist from the United States. "Oksana doesn't play in the round; she plays on the stage. The judges are people, and they appreciate the attention she gives them. She makes them the most important part of her performance."

Those who say the athletes are prejudged in figure skating are absolutely correct. Clear-cut winners and losers on the day of the competition are a mirage, and the athletes who see through it the most clearly usually are eventual medalists.

You have to play the game that way to win, especially at the Olympics. Which is why 22-year-old Canadian Victor Kraatz isn't so despondent over finishing 10th in Lillehammer with his ice-dance partner, Shae-Lynn Bourne, who is 18.

"After this year, as far as the competition goes, other couples are going to retire," says Kraatz, in tune with the ethic. "So obviously, they're going to be the ones who are going to battle it out for the medals right now. But I think lots of people are going to be retiring this year. They're not going to keep going.. And then the next year, the new bunch of skaters will be moving up; and they're going to be the ones battling out for the next Olympics and World Championships. We're kind of just observing and sort of relaxing here, seeing what they're going through and maybe learning from their mistakes. And we'll carry on from there."

In Norway, Kraatz and Bourne didn't skate as well as the Russian gold medalists Oksana Gritschuk and Evgeny Platov, or the British legends Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, who won the bronze. But it wouldn't have mattered if they did, and they know it. And accept it.

In fact, after the top three couples, the standings in ice dance at the Olympics didn't change a whit in places four through 11, through the three stages of the competition. Bourne and Kraatz were in 10th after the compulsory dances, in 10th after the original dance and still in 10th after their free-dance routine. Finland's Susanna Rahkamo and Petri Kokko started in fourth and finished in fourth. Didn't seem to matter much how they skated.