General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Ice Dancing

30 Comments

This is an age-old controversy, but while it (and figure skating in general) is entertaining, it is not a sport. It’s ballet on ice, except that ballet has no judges, biased or otherwise. The American team was clearly robbed. I have no problem keeping it in the Olympics, and it’s athletics in the sense that it requires training and practice, but stop pretending that it’s a sport. Sports scores should be objective, not whimsical.

30 thoughts on “Ice Dancing”

  1. I guess you don’t want boxing, judo, wrestling, diving, water polo, field hockey, basketball, soccer, etc. in the games either. Ice hockey, for that matter would have to be eliminated as well (Soviet referees were notorious for their penalty calls). Let’s face it, there aren’t all that many sports out there where a little thumb on the scale by some official can make all the difference.

    In the ordinal based 6.0 judging system, ice dancing wasn’t really a sport. However, when the new element based system was introduced, there was a tremendous incentive to increase the difficulty of the elements. If you look at old ice dancing competitions, they look like modern low level novice skaters in comparison. The skill level of top ice dancing teams now is absolutely astonishing. The new judging system didn’t eliminate fraud, but what it did do was create a detailed trail of evidence that shows exactly how the fraud is committed. Ironically, the perpetrator of this particular fraud is of the same nationality that triggered the demise of the old judging system: France.

    Ice dancing is the second most dangerous figure skating discipline skated at the Olympics, and the third most dangerous one that is skated internationally. The most dangerous one is Pairs, and the second most dangerous discipline was invented as a demonstration sport for U of Michigan hockey game intermissions during the late 1950s (synchronized skating). Hasn’t made it to the Olympics, yet.

    The robbing of Chock and Bates hit my family particularly hard, as our daughter used to train on the same ice with one of them.

      1. Yes, they keep a score. Each element has a base value and this mark is adjusted by the judges based on how well the element was performed. That adjustment is called the GOE for Grade of Execution. In addition, the technical panel has to verify that the element was actually performed. In the rhythm dance, I believe that Madison Chock did not get on the proper edge for a “bracket”, which reduced the level of a step sequence from level 4 to 3, reducing the base value. You see this sort of thing in freestyle when a jump is “cheated” on the landing, something that a lot of skaters got away with under 6.0 (Ukranian gold medal, cough, cough). For a triple jump, you have to complete AT LEAST 2.5 revolutions in the air for the jump to avoid being downgraded to a double.

        On top of the element by element score, there are 5 scores from the judges called Program Component Scores (PCS), which essentially grades all the “in between” skating. This is traditionally where nefarious judging goes on.

        In this Olympics, the French judge had Chock and Bates about 8 points lower than the other judges, and those judges would have given the gold to the US. I’d have to look up on the ISU site whether this was from GOEs or the PCS. I seem to recall that it was mostly from GOEs, with the French judge maxing out GOEs for the French team.

  2. Any activity that relies on subjective scoring of performance is not a sport.

    Swimming? Sure, go fast. Synchronized swimming? Diving? Nope.
    Speed skating? Go fast. Ice dancing? Again, nope

    1. What about subjective assessment of penalties? You’d be surprised how few sports would be allowed if you rule that out.

  5. Dancing on wooden floors has been done as judged competition for decades. So long as there are reasonably objective judging criteria, I have no problem with calling dancing, ice or otherwise, a sport. At elite levels it certainly requires great physicality and athleticism. The problem of national-chauvinist judging can probably be dealt with via some sort of AI-based solution not many years down the road.

  6. Reading comments like these makes me grateful that I never gave a flying flip about spectator sports. Helps that as of yesterday I haven’t had a TV in the house for 17 years.

    1. I’m with you: I spend zero hours watching or listening to sports.

      I think the Olympics should return to only those sports that are directly needed in combat or surviving in the wilderness 😉

      1. In the past year I’ve spent three seconds (outside estimate) watching sports on TV. I did stop channel surfing on the Superbowl in the third quarter, saw the score and proceeded.

        And I actually played Div 1 football in college – in the Rose Bowl, even. Since then? Screw pro sports. I occasionally will stop and watch little league games, or high school games, because they still have some love for the game.

    2. I stopped having TV when I moved to the Country Estate in 2010. For the past year or so I’ve had a Starlink dish, so now I can watch cat videos on YouTube.

      I used to watch boxing videos with my dad, who boxed when he was in the Army, and my grandfather played minor league baseball, but I never like sports to watch or play. Unless you count off-road biking as a sport. I had a 28″ ten-speed I modified for off-road and bought my son a mountain bike.

      2. I don’t see why mountain biking could not be considered a sport if you define it as mountain bike racing.

        2. But this is the Winter Olympics–need to take this question up with the Summer Olympics.

          Skiers and snowboarders get along as well as ranchers and farmers in that Heaven’s Gate movie. I think they let snowboarders into the Winter Olympics, and right away, there was a competitor who tested positive for marijuana. Something tells me you get expelled from snowboarding if you fail to test positive for marijuana. Maybe because of this ethos, the snowboarders were kicked out of the Olympics?

    3. The last time I was a fan of any sort of sportsball was the last year or two of the Lombardi-era Packers and the football team of my not-quite college alma mater. I don’t actively hate pro sports, I’m just indifferent to them.

      I do watch a bit of women’s sports – gymnastics, diving and field sports mainly as I’m a lifelong fan of fit women in skimpy clothing.

      1. Yes, women’s sports.

        When I was in graduate school at a small institution of higher learning of the Greater Los Angeles area in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, I lived in a grad-student dorm, and the channel setting of the TV was by majority vote.

        I was watching Wide World of Sports (remember that?) that was switching between women’s gynastics and women’s figure skating. One-by-one my fellow students came into the room, wrinkled their noses at what I was watching, turned around and then left. I was told they wanted to watch something else (could have been 60 Minutes), but they they entered the room one at a time and couldn’t outvote my channel selection, so they all piled into the room of a student who had her own TV.

        San Gabriel Foothills Institute of Technology has gotten much more diverse over the years, but the dorm was largely men, and they thought that watching figure skating, women’s figure skating made them to be gay or something?

        1. I do indeed remember the Wide World of Sports. It’s where I first acquired a taste for female sports.

          Peculiar viewpoint by your fellow male students. Given the actual sexual orientations of typical male figure skating contestants, it should be obvious that watching male figure skating is what is gay. Watching female sports for the bodies just makes a man a certifiable heterosexual.

          1. Maybe this has changed, but back in the day, the typical male graduate student at San Gabriel Foothills Institute of Technology, or simply Gabtech, was known for being a couple standard deviations outside social norms.

          2. Thinking that watching fit women do sports in skimpy uniforms makes you gay is more like six or seven standard deviations off the norm.

    1. All you need to know about the figure skating world, and especially ice dancing, you can learn from watching Dancing With the Stars.

      It is all there. The pairing of an eager novice with a former dance competitor-turned-coach is done for people wanting to learn this activity the Canadian figure skating association calls a “sport-art”, especially for taking skating tests, which not only qualify mostly the very young skaters for the levels of competition but also for “adult” skaters wanting to improve their skills and to achieve bragging rights.

      The obnoxious remarks from judges, the capricious scoring, the lack of self awareness on how bad your dancing/skating is, the “crossover” between free-style skaters (jumps and spins) and ice dance, in Dancing With the Stars, the surprising success of some pro football players, amazing athletes all of them but not necessarily having style and grace, but many of whom may have been made to take ballet class early in their careers because Coach thought it was a good idea, and many may not be strangers to the “club scene.” DWTS has a lot of Russians, in my day coaches and partners were Canadians.

      Dancing With the Stars has had notable “ringers”, including Jennifer Grey (“Baby” from Dirty Dancing, daughter of Joel Grey, the creepy MC from Cabaret) and Meryl Davis (1st US Olympic Gold Medalist in Ice Dance).

      What I love about Dancing With the Stars are not only the hyped up performances, which are short, leaving time to fill because like in figure skating, they are more of a sprint than a long-distance run on account of how you manage your aerobic capacity. They also showed them in training–I swear I had been in one of the dance-practice studios–along with the bickering with the dance partner and the video “confessional” with the whinging about the judging.

      Now take ice dancer Meryl Davis, please! I know this is Hollywood and even “back stage” is scripted, but her first meeting with partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy, the dance pro she managed to drag across the finish line for his first win of the Mirror Ball Trophy. Ms. Davis enters the room with her back towards her partner, and she “introduces” herself by doing a “trust fall” into the arms of Maksim. She must have been an “interesting” student for her skating coach.

      In knocking figure skating, and especially ice dance in the Olympics, it is a fantastic recruitment tool. When the Winter Olympics are on TV, aspiring young skaters just pour into the local skating rinks for lessons, and as teen, I was one of them. I knew I was too old for the jumps and spins, but the intricate moves in ice dance looked like something I could learn, and for a young man who was “awkward” around women, women of all ages are eager for ice dance partners!

      You all here on Rand’s fine Web site, including me, are too old to seek women as ice dance partners, but don’t make fun of it.

  8. If you have competitive dancing, you can have competitive singing.

    The two kind of go together anyway.

    Singing is very athletic, if you focus on the small muscle groups involved, and it can be graded with all kinds of standards taken from a range of disciplines that would include tons of audio analysis.

    But it wouldn’t fit with our concept of a game or of a sport. It would just be either “The Voice – Olympics” or like tryouts for an slot in an opera company.

    And then we’d have to include all the instruments, too, with competitive guitar shredding and trumpet solos and whatnot.

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