Friday, February 15, 2002
Ice dancing's future may be on line
By STEVE BUFFERY -- Toronto Sun
SALT LAKE CITY -- The soap opera that is Olympic figure skating continues today with the most dysfunctional of all events, ice dancing.
And there is more on the line than just who wins gold, silver and bronze, even though Canada's No.1 team, Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz, is considered a favourite to land on the podium.
The future of the event may hang in the balance.
Ice dancing has been rocked by one controversy after another for years, although nothing as disgraceful as the fiasco of the 1998 Nagano Olympics, when a number of skating insiders leaked to the media the exact order of the finish -- before the competition had started.
At the time, there were allegations of vote trading and the victims were Bourne and Kraatz, four-time world bronze medallists, who were dropped to fourth in Nagano despite skating a brilliant free dance program. The same scenario played out a month later at the world championships in Minneapolis.
Those incidents sparked Canadian IOC member Richard Pound to warn the International Skating Union that it either clean up the sport or get rid of it.
Now, in the wake of the pairs judging scandal at these Games, there have been reports that the fix already is in for the dance, which begins today with the compulsories. The conspiracy theory suggests the reason the French judge in the pairs, Marie Reine Le Gougne, scored the flawed Russian team ahead of the seemingly flawless Canadians was because a deal had been made whereby the Russians, and possibly other judges from the former East bloc, would prop up the French dance team.
There have been published reports that the fix has been in for the ice dancing for months.
Unlike the Grand Prix Final in December, where Bourne and Kraatz were placed first after performing their splendid Michael Jackson medley free dance, there are no Canadians or Americans on the judging panel here. And that's a concern.
After the judges in Kitchener scored the Canadians ahead of the 2000 world champions Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat of France and the defending world champions, Barbara Fusar-Poli and Maurizio Margaglio, the ice dance referee, Alexander Gorshkov, and ISU president Ottavio Cinquanta immediately expressed their disgust to the judges over the result.
Neither felt the Canadians deserved to win and Cinquanta, an Italian, was fuming over the fact that his compatriots were dropped all the way to fourth.
RUNNING SCARED
Cinquanta subsequently appointed Gorshkov as the referee for the Olympic ice dance competition. All of that, of course, has the skaters running scared in Salt Lake City.
However, because of the pairs controversy, and the heat that is on the ISU, there's a strong feeling that the fix may now be off.
2002 Games Figure Skating Coverage
