The women’s figure skating competition gets under way in Sochi on Wednesday, and as many as five athletes could end up atop on the podium. Yet whoever triumphs, one bet is safe: the performances will be better with the volume muted.
Figure skating, the only sport aside from gymnastics in which competitors use a musical accompaniment, has always been a strange amalgam of hardcore athletics and softcore ornament, but the musical backing of this year’s competitors wins the gold medal in tastelessness.
So far in Sochi, skaters have taken the ice to such enduring hits as Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, a track from the syrupy crooner Michael Bublé, Queen’s Who Wants to Live Forever and two different Michael Jackson numbers. Other tunes that made the cut include a medley from West Side Story, a re-tooled version of the score from the Jim Carrey film The Mask, and the theme song from the Pink Panther that matched one skater’s bubblegum ensemble.
You know things are bad when Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which men’s silver medalist Patrick Chan skated to and which is inoffensive enough to back perfume ads, actually counts as the highbrow choice.
It’s tempting to pretend that the music was always this bad – Tonya Harding, after all, skated to the Jurassic Park theme song in 1994 Lillehammer Olympics– but figure skating music is actually getting worse. Sure, no skater dared perform to atonal modernism, but until recently you could usually count on some harmless Chopin or Tchaikovsky to carry you from the first jump to the kiss-and-cry. No more. Of the 24 competitors in the men’s free skate at Sochi, one journalist calculated that only seven chose classical music, broadly defined; nearly as many went for movie soundtracks, and the remainder plumped for showtunes, pop songs, and the bastardy of “classical crossover”.
Even reigning Olympic champion Kim Yu-na – the Usain Bolt of figure skating, whose world-record performances in Vancouver have not been bested these past four years – is not immune. Her long program at the last games was scored to Gershwin’s fine Concerto in F. Her short program? A medley of James Bond theme songs. In wintry Canada, the surfer-rock guitar line felt a little incongruous.
More than ever the schlocky tunes (and schlockier costumes) stand out, because while the music is getting worse, the sport is actually getting better. Figure skating is tougher than ever before, with harder jumps and greater technical sophistication, especially after a 2002 vote-trading scandal pushed the International Skating Union to introduce a new scoring system. Sequin-besotted detractors moan that today’s skaters perform less elegantly, and choreograph more disciplined programs – but that’s a good thing! The new judging system, unlike the old 6.0 scheme awards points cumulatively for each individual jump and maneuver, rewards athleticism and physicality far higher than dubious “artistry”. This, however, makes the dreadful music choices even more of a distraction than before.
Figure skating in 2014 looks nothing like the pseudo-sport of old. Someone like Sonia Henie, whose Olympics-winning programs included only single jumps, would be outskated these days by the children who gather up the bouquets and teddy bears fans toss onto the rink at the end of performances. Unfortunately, audiences and perhaps a few judges too, seem to prefer their figure skating be like a soap opera – with rivalries, romances, backstabbing (all too literally in one famous instance), and a schlocky score to boot. But why on earth would athletes spend the entirety of their teenage years learning how to land a quadruple toe loop, suffering a few dozen concussions on the way to joint surgery at the age of 23, just to go out looking like a twinkling artiste in Stars on Ice? Figure skating is a sport; those looking for treacly entertainment should stick to the abomination of ice dancing.
Is there a solution? Only one: Figure skaters should perform in silence, like at a tennis match or a Comme des Garçons fashion show. Until then, we will have to endure winter kitsch like this:
Yuzuru Hanyu: theme from Romeo and Juliet
The 19-year-old Japanese whippet fell twice in his long program but won the gold in the men’s event, thanks to two demanding quadruple jumps and a record-breaking short program. It would have looked even better had it not been scored to the saccharine accompaniment of this theme from a 1968 film adaptation, which surged to melodramatic heights at the program’s end. At one point Hanyu segued into a layback Ina Bauer – a move in which the skater bends back with his feet pointing in opposite directions – while the music surged and the crowd went wild: impressive, sure, but not as impressive as rotating 1440 degrees in the air and landing on one blade.
Jason Brown: Riverdance
The top American finisher (he placed ninth), Brown had no quad jumps in his routine – but this seems not to bother the millions of fans who’ve watched his viral performance, scored to music from the Irish step-dancing ethno-travesty that began life as an interval entertainment at the Eurovision Song Contest. (We pause here to note that Evgeni Plushenko, the dark master who dropped out of the men’s competition in Sochi, performed at Eurovision himself in 2008 – and his act won!) Brown’s mother, his choreographer says, had originally dismissed Riverdance as “too corny”, but consider what it replaced: he’d planned to skate to the theme from the movie Pearl Harbor.
Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov: Jesus Christ Superstar
The Russian gold medalists in the pairs competition opted for tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera, a mawkish musical that’s criticized for being anti-Semitic. (Although, it’s not the first time that Russian skaters have shown a little insensitivity: in Vancouver, the bronze medalists wore ersatz Aboriginal Australian costumes and performed what can only be called a minstrel show.) Volosozhar and Trankov suffered a few bobbles during their long program, but that did not seem to bother the ecstatic home crowd.
Yulia Lipnitskaya: theme from Schindler’s List
The most serious challenger to Kim Yu-na in this week’s women’s competition is a 15-year-old from Yekaterinburg, who can count Vladimir Putin as a fan. Earlier in these games she helped Russia take gold in the new team competition, thanks to a performance scored to music from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Holocaust drama. Here is not the place to expatiate on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Spielberg’s depiction of the Shoah (for that you can turn to Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Imre Kertész), but we might note that Lipnitskaya also decided to wear a red leotard in homage to a Polish Jew who dies in the camps. “This music capitalizes on her seriousness, her intensity,” said an announcer on American television during her routine. But in my memory Holocaust victims did not wear sequins.