SKATE-GATE

Okay, let’s get one confession out of the way right up front. I haven’t been watching the Winter Olympics. I especially haven’t been watching the skating. I haven’t watched figure skating for years, for reasons which should become apparent as you read further in this column.

This may come as a surprise to some people. Even though I am a manly sort of guy, skating has elements which should appeal to me. After all, I love a good chuckle, and some of the male skaters wear costumes so silly they’d make a dog laugh. And, of course, skating features cute, scantily-clad women with big smiles on their faces and gluteus maximii you could bounce a quarter off of. Not that I’d actually do that.

All that aside, for me the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City were basically an annoying interlude that pre-empted "The West Wing" for two straight weeks. But you’d have to have been dining in a cave with Osama bin Laden to miss the biggest story to come out of this Olympics.

Here’s what happened: Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, the Russian pairs team, skated an excellent program. That program, however, was marred by some small technical errors which normally might have cost them the gold. They were followed by the Canadian team, Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. The adorable Canadians turned in a performance that raised the roof. It was flawless. The consensus among all who watched was that it was a gold-medal performance. But when the scores came up, the crowd and the commentators were stunned to see that the judges from Russia, China, France, Poland and Ukraine had ranked Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze first. Sale and Pelletier were awarded the silver, China got the bronze.

If the story had ended there, it would have been just another hotly debated moment in skating history. But things took a decidedly interesting turn the next day when Marie-Reine Le Gougne, the French judge, had the sort of moment usually reserved for the last five minutes of ridiculous courtroom dramas on TV. She broke down and tearfully confessed that she had been "pressured" by her own skating organization to trade her vote. The idea was that she would vote for the Russians; in return, a Russian judge would be sure to vote for the French ice-dancing team.

This was touted as one of the biggest scandals ever to hit the Olympics, bigger even than the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan debacle. After all, the Tonya-Nancy knee-banging incident came off like some sort of low-rent soap opera script. But, the commentators huffed, what happened in Salt Lake City went right to the heart of the integrity of the sport. The incident was dubbed "The Scandal That Ate the Games". (Personally, I would have thought that "SkateGate" had more zing to it, but never mind.)

The heads of the International Olympic Committee and the International Skating union got together and decided to plug the public-relations hemorrhage by a move worthy of the Dodo in "Alice in Wonderland": All have won and everyone shall have prizes. Sale and Pelletier got the gold. So did Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze.

Unfortunately, the poor Chinese didn’t move up to silver; they were still stuck with bronze, which hardly seems fair. I mean, if the process treated the Canadians unfairly, didn’t the same sad rain fall on the Chinese? Heck, why not give them the Gold, too?

Frankly, all of this shock and dismay reminds me of the scene in the movie "Casablanca" where the corrupt but lovable French cop states that he’s "shocked, I tell you shocked" to find out that gambling has been going on…as the waiter walks up and hands him his winnings. I mean, since when is it a surprise that skating judges don’t always vote based on the actual merit of the night’s performance? It’s the nature of the beast when you mix patriotism and politics (national and personal) into a judged event where some of the scores are based on elements like "presentation."

Skaters work incredibly hard. They perform amazing feats. What they do is beautiful to look at.

But skating is not a sport. Sports have scores that are based on objective criteria: who crossed the finish line first. Who scored the most baskets or goals. Who smacked his or her opponent in the face more times. Sports have scores that mean something. Skating doesn’t. Neither, I would submit, does any other so-called "sport" where the contestants are judged on purely subjective criteria like "presentation" or "artistic impression." Do you see anybody in NASCAR going "Well, Jeff Gordon crossed the finish line fourth, but by golly, he looked good taking those final two turns, so we’re giving him the win"? Please.

Ponder this: how much of the "presentation" score is based upon the physical attractiveness of the participants? Before you answer "none", let me ask--have you ever seen an ugly championship skater? Now, have you ever seen an ugly basketball player? Your Honor, the prosecution would submit Exhibit 1: Dennis Rodman. Case closed. Any field of competition where looks count towards victory, even a little, has lost the right to be called a sport.

Ice skating, at its best, is a form of art. So let’s call it that. Then we can turn all the judges into critics, and let them write reviews instead of pretending to be objective.

COPYRIGHT 2002 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.