Skating’s Popularity Catching Up To Football
Maybe it was the Nancy KerriganTonya Harding soap opera, the cynical disintegration of baseball or just the combination of athletic thrills and sheer showmanship. But figure skating has exploded.
The current Campbell’s Soups Tour of World Figure Skating Champions is the latest in a yearlong whirlwind of live and televised shows and “competitions.” (It visits the Tacoma Dome on June 25.) We’ve had the U.S. Open, North American Open Skating Championships, Ice Wars, Challenge of Champions, Gold Challenge, and the Rock and Roll Skating Championships. We’ve had Kerrigan at Disney World, Stars on Ice, even a “Nutcracker” on Ice.
Never has skating been so popular. A recent Business Week poll found that four of Americans’ seven “favorite sports” were figure skating disciplines, with women’s figure skating hot on the heels of the frontrunning National Football League. Propelled by the Kerrigan-Harding drama, the 1994 Olympic women’s competition earned CBS the sixth highest ratings in history, and CBS started using skating to replace football games that the network had lost to Fox. Other networks and cable channels jumped on the bandwagon, giving the sport unprecedented visibility.
Top skaters can become stars with major name recognition and sixfigure incomes. The Campbell’s Tour, which will play 70 cities around the country, will draw crowds not because it is an athletic competition that might produce the next Olympic medalist, but because it has the biggest names in the business, such as Kerrigan; Oksana Baiul, the teenager from Odessa, Ukraine, who beat out Kerrigan to win the 1994 Olympic Gold; Lu Chen, the Chinese Bronze medal winner; and gymnastic African-French Surya Bonaly, who placed fourth. They’ve got all three of the 1994 Olympic Men’s medalists: Russian Alexei Urmanov, Canadian Elvis Stojko and Frenchman Philippe Candeloro, and 1992 Gold medalist, Ukrainian Viktor Petrenko.
They’ve got Brian Boitano, who besides being the 1988 Olympics, world’s and U.S. national champion, has been on the cover of Sports Illustrated and has had his own TV special. They’ve got 1992 Olympic Silver ice dance medalists Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay, and 1994 Olympic Gold winners Oksana Gritschuk and Evgeny Platov. They’ve got the hottest up-andcoming American skaters, 1995 U.S. national champions Nicole Bobek and Todd Eldredge and budding star 15-year-old Michelle Kwan.
But the boom has also produced controversy and confusion. Officials at the organizations that determine Olympic eligibility, the International Skating Union (ISU) and its American arm, the U.S. Figure Skating Association (USFSA), are worried that the proliferating skating shows and flashy entertainment-style competitions (which don’t use Olympic judging standards) are stealing the thunder from the Olympics and other officially sanctioned competitions (like the U.S. Nationals).
And that the best skaters, after earning a name on the Olympics, are abandoning the Olympic circuit for more lucrative professional shows. On the other side, skaters and producers think the ISU needs to catch up to skating’s popularity, include more events on the official circuit and generally make the sport attractive to its top practitioners.
“The ISU is so far behind on this issue right now,” said Boitano. “They can’t do it without the professional skaters being included. When a Todd Eldredge or an Elvis Stojko wins an Olympic medal, he’s going to go where it’s best for his career, and the ISU has a lot of work to become the best place for your career. … They’re going to have to totally readjust to be competitive. Because these (television and pro producers) are pulling out all the stops to get the talent.”
Besides the financial incentives, the professional circuit can offer greater variety, especially for skaters who have already won titles but remain serious about keeping their standards and reputations high, Boitano said.