| Some funny things happen at the end of the NFL season. Sundays suddenly seem horribly empty and there’s no longer a good excuse to put aside home projects or errands or pesky bits of paperwork that need to be attended to. Football fans go into an anxious funk for a little while, annoying the heck out of their family members as the reality takes hold that it will be seven long months until games resume. And, once every four years, America goes bananas for figure skating, getting utterly transfixed by spins and flips and sequins and drama, then mostly forgetting all about it until the next Winter Olympic cycle. On the surface, there would seem to be very little in common between the brutal physicality of the gridiron and the graceful charm of the ice. But when the Winter Games commence in Beijing next week and the broadcast, as always, skews heavily to the skating arena, football supporters who don’t know what to do with themselves might suddenly find a perfect temporary antidote. Yep, seriously. “Years ago I sat on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, grumpy because there was no football,” Adam Melis, an e-commerce business owner from Rancho Cucamonga, California, told me. “Then, to make things worse, my wife and daughters put on figure skating from the Vancouver Olympics. By the end of the next week, I was yelling at the screen … because I was hooked.” Figure skating is, at its core, an inherently strange sport. Even those who love it the most will freely admit that. But when it comes to spinning a narrative, playing with the emotions of fans and creating tension and unpredictable excitement, few athletic activities do it better. “It is possible to not like sports but to love skating, for the artistry and the costumes and the music,” USA TODAY Sports national columnist Christine Brennan, who has covered every Summer and Winter Olympics since 1984, told me via telephone. “But on the flip side, you can be a total jock and love it for the physicality, with remarkable (quadruple) jumps and incredible athleticism. “For all the great skating there will be falls and face-plants. You don’t root for it, but it’s part of the sport. There is that danger. It is ice, they will take off, try to land their jumps on a blade the width of a butter knife — and may or may not land it.” Figure skating finds it impossible to avoid controversy because of the specific way in which the medals are decided. A judging system that allows a panel from various countries to give a subjective score to each of the contestants is always going to be ripe for argument and conjecture, and there’s no obvious way to fix that. “It is a performance, so even how you look matters, which makes it even harder,” Dan Wetzel, award-winning chief columnist for Yahoo Sports, told me. “No one asks if Michael Phelps is the most handsome swimmer. Usain Bolt doesn’t have to care if his uniform is the most colorful. So this other stuff that should have nothing to do with it comes in and it makes the athletes self-conscious. “Any time you have a judging system, you’ll never have everyone agree with it. If you are looking for drama, it is there, always.” Barely a day of Olympic competition goes by without tears from winners and losers alike, without spectacular leaps and throws, and explosive wipeouts, as well as the ever-present complaints that the scoring was all wrong. There have also been times when the sport has gone headfirst into the realms of “you couldn’t make that up,” like when the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding fiasco turned the short program at the Lillehammer Olympics into the sixth-highest-rated television show of all time. Brennan led reporting on that wild incident and subsequently wrote a best-selling book on the topic. Or when a devious plot to influence judges at the 2002 Games was unearthed, involving a Russian organized crime syndicate, no less. Amidst it all, athletes who have worked for years to be the best will get what could be their one-and-only chance. Mess up and it’s over. Make the right kind of splash and your life changes forever. “You don’t get a second free throw, a third strike or a fourth down,” Brennan added. “No other sport has a more non-negotiable moment of decision. Why do people watch reality shows? To see people in tough situations. Figure skating is the ultimate reality show, it was reality TV before reality TV.” In the men’s competition, the United States boasts gold medal favorite Nathan Chen, who is seeking to atone for his disastrous performance four years ago. Madison Hubbell/Zachary Donohue and Madison Chock/Evan Bates are medal contenders in the ice dance. The U.S. will hope to challenge Russia for gold in the team competitions, while in the women’s individual, Russia’s 15-year-old world record holder Kamila Valieva is a red-hot favorite. Wetzel, Brennan and I are often among a tiny group — we cover the Super Bowl and then find ourselves at figure skating just days later. Usually, the Winter Games come right after football’s greatest show. This time, with the two events overlapping, something had to give. I will cover the Super Bowl in L.A. Brennan and Wetzel are preparing for their trip to China, where constant COVID testing and atypical restrictions await. Wetzel, who has spent his career at the biggest events in pro and college football, basketball and at blue-chip competitions like the Masters, says his appreciation for figure skaters has only grown over time. “The free skate is the most intense thing I’ve ever seen in sports,” he said. “You are alone, four minutes on ice, against the best in the world, with no timeouts and no coach with you. And it is so hard that everybody falls down except one person, who wins gold. It is unbelievably dramatic. If you are there live, it is electric. “I am the last person you would ever expect to be a figure skating fan, but here we are.” Same here. I get it, it’s not the most obvious replacement for football, even for a window of just a couple of weeks. It is hard to describe the appeal, honestly, except to tell you to give it a shot and see if it grabs you. In most cases, it does, which is why the figure skating coverage gets placed in prime-time Olympic slots, time and again. It plays out like a weird and wonderful plot. It’s a sport that sometimes defies explanation or reason, and where the unexpected inevitably happens. The biggest surprise of all might come for the fan who is new to it and approaches with the most skeptical of eyes. “That was the greatest upset in my life of watching sports,” Melis said. “Me, this totally old school sports fan becoming such a watcher of Olympic figure skating. All I’d say to anyone who insists they’ll never get into it — watch it for two nights, then let’s talk.” |
