Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski
The popularity of figure skating has suffered in the United States in recent years, which can produce one of those vicious cycles: a less popular sport is watched by fewer little kids, meaning fewer little kids see a skater and say "I want to do that," meaning the United States has fewer chances to produce the champion that would boost the sport's popularity ... you get the picture. At the Sochi Olympics, while the United States won bronze in the newly created team event and Meryl Davis and Charlie White won gold at ice dance, the U.S. did not win an individual medal for the first time since 1936.
In recent years, figure skating has also been dinged by judging scandals, has instituted a points system that has failed to eliminate questions about the integrity of the judging while simultaneously pushing skaters drastically toward paint-by-numbers programs oriented overwhelmingly to jumps. But I love it anyway, and the National Championships are this coming week. With Davis and White no longer competing, the United States has a lot of rebuilding to do.
But this is also a fascinating cultural moment in figure skating, which in the United States tends to be seen as an uber-gay sport. (The men, anyway.) Interestingly, though, do you know how many top top skaters have come out during their competitive careers? By many counts, the number is two. One of them, American Rudy Galindo, did so in 1996 immediately before winning the national championship—but he didn't come out as a top men's contender. He came out as a nearly retired skater who'd been far more successful as a pairs skater and had not medaled in singles to that point. He didn't think he had much to lose, in other words. Part of this is probably because not quite as many figure skaters are gay as popular opinion would have it, but that's not the only reason.
This past December, though, a skater came out at the top of his career. That would be Canadian pairs skater Eric Radford, who, with partner Meagan Duhamel is an Olympic team silver medalist and a two-time world bronze medalist with his eyes on the 2018 Olympics. But wait, you're thinking. This is a risk? Even if they're not out, doesn't everyone know that skating is an uber-gay sport? Actually, it's a conservative sport in which many of the powerful figures are defensive about that image. Follow below the fold for more.
Last year, in a fantastic article on the subject, Blair Braverman wrote:
To insiders, though, it’s no surprise that skaters are reluctant to speak out on LGBT rights, let alone come out themselves. Most male skaters and officials are committed to keeping their sport in the closet, whether that means choosing “masculine” music, hinting about a girlfriend, or outright denying any connection to homosexuality. A figure skater can never quite outskate the judges’ opinion of him, and judges and institutions, it turns out, are notoriously conservative — as some would say, “family-friendly.” At the National Championships, which took place this January in Boston, a phrase I heard often was “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
That Eric Radford has come out may say something about changing times, or about Radford himself, but it also likely is made easier by the fact that he's a pairs skater. Even if in his personal and now public life he's gay, on the ice, he's got his hands all over a woman in, effectively, a performance of heterosexuality. Even given that,
there's a real danger of biased judging, as Outsports noted when Radford came out:
It's a scary path to walk for a figure skater. Unlike a sprinter, they are not timed. Unlike a football player, they don't have stats like catches and sacks. A figure skater's success depends on the subjective scores of judges. Those judges are certainly given guidelines. They walk through rigorous instruction on how to judge, and they have deep connections to the sport - An elite international judge won't give a "5" to a "9" performance. But a point here and there? It very well may have cost Weir a medal in 2010.
While no current American skaters are out, if you watch this year's National Championships, you'll see a piece of the cultural shift away from fear of teh ghey in the form of the aforementioned Johnny Weir. While Weir never came out during his competitive career, his closet door wasn't closed quite as tightly as some in the sport might have liked, and, serving as a daytime commentator at the 2014 Olympics, he and co-commentator Tara Lipinski, the 1998 gold medalist ... changed the tone of American figure skating commentary. And I don't just mean by being snarky and wearing—and talking about—occasionally over-the-top coordinated outfits.
To understand the shift, you have to understand what they're replacing in 1984 gold medalist and longtime commentator Scott Hamilton. Where Hamilton did his best to anoint the skaters that best fit the image of figure skating he thought would be popular, Lipinski and Weir are less inclined to cheerlead. They make clear that as former skaters they are rooting for good skating, that they thrill to an excellent performance ... but they are also willing to call out empty or paint-by-numbers choreography, to analyze what went wrong technically, and debate the quality of the performance. Even if it's an American. Even if it's a photogenic American. And—hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah—with Lipinski and Weir, we get to move past Hamilton's strenuous efforts to paint his favored male skaters as the butchest avowed heterosexuals to ever lace up a pair of skates and his favored female skaters as dainty ethereal princesses. Weir and Lipinski's commentating has drawn wide praise and very much opened the question of whether they can make figure skating feel more relevant even in the absence of Americans racking up big medal counts at international events.
That's because while male skaters are very much assessed according to how masculine they are (usually expressed as "athletic" skating vs. "artistic" skating), let's not forget that they're competitors doing something incredibly hard. While attention often focuses on the jumps, think about the effort of doing squats. Then watch a skater do a sit spin and think about the athleticism that goes into that. Figure skating needs to come out of the closet not skater by skater so much as overall, to say, as a sport, "okay, some of us are gay. That's not actually a joke about the sport, and it's not something to be defensive about." However many individual skaters do or don't come out, easing the pressure and defensiveness, the need to emphasize quadruple jumps and elevate a few skaters as showing traditional masculinity, could attract a broader audience, rather than the reverse.
2015 U.S. Figure Skating Championships
A lot of people skate at Nationals, and in the singles disciplines especially there is always the chance of a breakout performance. Here, I'll briefly discuss skaters who medaled at Nationals last year or in the recently ended Grand Prix series.
Women
To the extent that women's (pardon me, "ladies") singles gold at the Olympics is the big driver of figure skating popularity in the United States, it is a problem for the sport in this country that the only American woman to medal since the gold medalists of 1992, 1998, and 2002 has been Sasha Cohen, who took silver in 2006.
With that in mind, last year's national champion, Gracie Gold, continues to be the skater you can hear the marketers of American figure skating salivating over. If she would only win a major international event, Gold would be the perfect blonde ice princess figure. There are two problems. Most relevant to her competition placements, she can be inconsistent. Perhaps equally relevant to viewers, her skating is as bland as you'd expect of the ice princess it girl, not the more interesting personality that occasionally comes through when she talks. She has for instance been thoughtful in interviews about what it means to have been dubbed America's skating "it girl" in time for the Sochi Olympics. On the ice, though, she's pretty, but ... eh. Happily, though, Gold is not an Anna Kournikova figure—she can really skate when she's on, finishing fourth in Sochi and qualifying for the Grand Prix Final this year on the strength of a third-place finish at Skate America and a win at the NHK Trophy. However, she had to withdraw due to a stress fracture, so we don't know how she would have held up under the pressure.
Polina Edmunds took silver at Nationals last year with one of those breakthrough performances that fearless teenagers are so often capable of. At the time she had what might be called a coltish look, which is to say her knees and elbows were all over the place in the actual skating portions of her programs. She's got that a little under control, but has been uneven in the Grand Prix series, doing poorly in the short program and very well in the long.
Mirai Nagasu came in fourth in the 2010 Olympics and is a past national champion who took bronze at Nationals last year. When she's on, she's a lovely skater. However, she's been extremely inconsistent over the years—her last four finishes at Nationals are third, seventh, seventh, third, and her Grand Prix series finishes this year were fourth and sixth. Though she took bronze at Nationals last year, she was left off the Olympic team in favor of Ashley Wagner.
Speaking of whom, Ashley Wagner shared in the team bronze and finished seventh in the individual event at the Olympics after being (quite controversially) put on the team in place of Nagasu on the basis of a fourth-place finish at last year's Nationals ... or, alternatively, on the basis of her bronze at that season's Grand Prix final and a fifth-place finish at Worlds that had helped earn the Americans a third spot at the Olympics to begin with. Love her or hate her, Wagner is perhaps the most interesting top women's skater in the United States. She is an unabashed competitor and the rare woman you'll find skating to a Pink Floyd song. Wagner can be uneven, but she may be the most likely to grit out a tough performance against the odds. In this season's Grand Prix final, she rose from sixth (out of six) after the short program to third after the free skate.
Men
Last year's men's champion is Jeremy Abbott, with his exquisite musicality, exquisite taste, gorgeous deep edges ... and unfortunate inconsistency. He's the rare skater you can tell has chosen his own music because he loves it and has thought through how his programs work beyond just the point totals they rack up. No cookie cutters here. But in a world where male skaters need a quad—even if it's an ugly quad in a boring program—Abbott is at a disadvantage, rarely landing a clean quad. Being older than just about any of his serious competitors, at 29 years old, cannot be helping him develop the needed consistency, though his relatively advanced age (ha) is surely a contributing factor in his strengths—his relationship to the music, the choreography, and the audience is that of an adult with fully formed tastes. In the Olympics and the World Championships last year, Abbott tended to have trouble in the short program and then fight back in the free skate. In this season's Grand Prix series, he reversed that pattern, delivering strong short programs and then falling behind in the free skate.
Jason Brown, second at last year's Nationals, is also not a cookie-cutter skater, though in his case it's at least as much about an extraordinarily creative choreographer as about personal taste. Brown and his team elected not to stay in the same vein as last year's wildly popular Riverdance program, but the interesting footwork, beautiful spins, and unexpected entries to jumps remain. Unfortunately, Brown's consistency on jumps has suffered a little since his breakthrough performance at last year's Nationals (perhaps due to the sudden spotlight?) and he still doesn't have a quad, so he is always being forced to play a little catch-up. That said, he came in second at Skate America last fall and after a rough short program put him in seventh at the Rostelecom Cup, he battled back to fifth after the free skate.
Max Aaron, who took bronze at last year's Nationals and a third and a seventh in Grand Prix events this season, was the quintessential Scott Hamilton favorite of recent years. Hamilton would relentlessly describe Aaron as "athletic" on the basis of a history as a hockey player, a semi-consistent quad, and mediocre skating and choreography. To Aaron's credit, he has clearly put some work into the aspects of skating that don't involve rotating in the air, but his programs still tend to feel like he's marking time between jumps.
Richard Dornbush makes this write-up by virtue of a third-place finish at Cup of China, where, during a warm-up for the free skate, Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu (in second place after the short program) and China's Yan Han (in third place after the short program) collided dramatically, injuring both. Though both went on to skate, they were visibly shaken and gave Dornbush, who had been in fourth after the short program, an opening. He has a lovely line as a skater and one of the more reliable quad jumps you'll find among American men, but ... there's something missing.
Pairs
Oh, boy. Pairs have rarely been an area of American strength—no Americans have ever won gold at the Olympics and the last American pairs medal was in 1988—but this year, it's not even clear who to talk about for Nationals. Last year's national champions (and Olympic team bronze medalists), Marissa Castelli and Simon Shnapir, have split up and are now skating with other partners. That sets them well behind, as new partners take some time to mesh; additionally, Castelli's partner is Canadian and their status is unclear. Last year's silver medalists have split up and the bronze medalists are not competing this season.
That leaves Haven Denney and Brandon Frazier, who are the only American pair to have medaled at a Grand Prix event this season, taking silver at Skate America after a fifth-place finish at Nationals last year. The other highest-placing American pair has been Alexa Scimeca and Christopher Knierim, who were fourth at Nationals last year and at Skate America and Trophee Eric Bompard in the Grand Prix series this season.
Basically, as unfortunate as it is, if you're interested in pairs skating you'd do better to look to other countries. If you'd like to stay North American, the aforementioned Duhamel and Radford of Canada are successful and have had some lovely programs, last season's short program in particular (the music for which was composed by Radford).
Dance
Ice dance, however, is a great reminder never to give up on the United States producing a top team. Between 1976, when dance was made an Olympic sport, and 2006, Americans won only one ice dance medal, and that was a bronze in 1976. Then, in 2006, Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto won silver, followed by Meryl Davis and Charlie White winning silver in 2010 and gold in 2014.
Dance may also be the one discipline that's been improved by the changed points system. With no jumps, dance can't be forced in that direction, while added technical requirements have forced out some of the unmusical posturing and over-emoting that too often ruled the scene in the 1990s.
With Davis and White out of the picture, Madison Chock and Evan Bates have emerged as the top American team. They took silver at last year's Nationals, gold at their two Grand Prix events this season, and silver in the Grand Prix final. They come into Nationals with something to prove, though, after an uncharacteristic fall in the short dance at that Grand Prix final. Clearly they are immensely accomplished skaters, though to me, they frequently bring more drama and bombast than dance and musicality.
Next we have Maia and Alex Shibutani. I find this sister-and-brother duo much more musical than Chock and Bates, but for the past few seasons, they have consistently placed just behind Chock and Bates—two National bronze medals, ninth and sixth at last year's Olympics and World's to Chock and Bates' eighth and fifth, and fourth at this season's Grand Prix final.
Though Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue were fourth to the Shibutanis' third at last year's Nationals, and Hubbell and Donohue racked up two third place finishes at Grand Prix series events this season, there's a noticeable drop-off between the two teams. Hubbell and Donohue start their free dance with a surprisingly effective bit to Lana Del Rey's "Young and Beautiful," but by the time they're on their fourth musical selection, the program has lost momentum in all the mood shifts, plus it feels like it's straining to be hip, fresh, and relevant.
Last season, Kaitlin Hawayek and Jean-Luc Baker were Junior World Champions, and they took third at the NHK Trophy in their first season as seniors. I've seen very little of them, but from what I have seen, they are just lovely.