John Blanchette: Skating doomsayers should relax

Another afternoon of figure skating, more waves of applause and huzzahs from a near-capacity Spokane audience – its love for the mediocre almost as loud as for the medalists.

“They’ll applaud the Zamboni,” said one journalist, not completely with admiration.

At least the relentless appreciation from the seats served to drown out all the hand-wringing being done in the corridors underneath, where just about anyone with an event pass – the press, the personalities, the power brokers – could join in a woeful kyrie. The real sport this past week at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships was fretting over the state of the skate.

Television ratings are down. The contract is up. The stars are gone. The scoring system is a catastrophe.

Skating, you’d conclude, is just one global sequin panic from ruination.

Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?

Look, maybe all the ice underneath our lovable twirlers really is about to be pulsed into the world’s largest margarita. But not likely. Those closest to their sport are always addicted to its doomsday prophecies. From the contraction scare of a few years ago to the ongoing steroid shame, baseball is supposed to be in crisis. But guess what? It’s really not. NBA commissioner David Stern has embarked on a puritan’s reformation because his game – and let’s call it the way he sees it – is too black. Except it’s not.

Golf: the equipment’s juiced, the courses can’t hold the players, Tiger’s too good. NASCAR: stymied from breaking into important new markets, competition compromised – it’s now placin’ and not racin’ – by the Nextel Cup, TV ratings down.

And that’s always the crux: ratings are down.

Never mind that in Spokane, the skating was embraced by record crowds in a dull post-Olympic year. This was somehow deemed virtually irrelevant because it’s more of a desperate market than a destination market – not that everyone agreed.

“If there’s fan interest in Spokane, it’s not unique,” said U.S. Figure Skating president Ron Hershberger. “There’s that kind in other places, also. We just have to tap into it.”

Well, OK, but about those ratings …

It’s true that skating’s TV numbers continue to ebb – they’re now into the fours (as in millions of homes) for the U.S. championships, down from the sixes and sevens at the millennium turn. Olympic ratings for the ladies were off more than 30 percent from Salt Lake City to Turin. This will significantly cut into the treasure skating will realize in its next contract – the last one was $100 million over eight years – and hasten the growth of its Internet outlet, the Ice Network.

Blame has been sprayed all around for this decline, beginning with oversaturation – for a time, there were more skating events on TV than infomercials. Lately, the villains have been narrowed to:

“Too much churn among the stars, that is to say the female stars, the only ones who count. This should hardly be a surprise, seeing as how they give up childhood and adolescence in this single-minded pursuit. Tara Lipinski and Sarah Hughes bailed from competition immediately upon winning Olympic gold, and now Sasha Cohen is on hiatus. Michelle Kwan hung around as long as she did because she couldn’t win the really big one, but the rest skedaddle because they can. And yet there will always be another face.

“The confounded scoring. The new system is actually a vehicle of performance evaluation and not a corrupt popularity contest, but the old-schoolers are in a hissy about the dismantling of the 6.0 system. Never mind that the skating fan couldn’t tell a 5.8 from a 5.9 or ordinals from origami – or that when TV now puts up a graphic that says, “Needs 119 points to win,” it’s pretty obvious that Emily Hughes’ 118 isn’t going to get it done. How does that equate to less drama?

But the hilarious part of skating’s “crisis” is that it starts with a faulty baseline – the Knee-Whacking of 1994 and the Tonya-Nancy nonsense in Lillehammer, which with a 48.5 rating remains the sixth-most watched television show in history.

Here’s the thing about the Nielsens: Not a single other show in the all-time Top 10 – “Roots,” the “M*A*S*H” finale, you name it – aired after 1986. Not one Top 30 show is post-1998. Since 2000, the only sporting event in the Top 15 other than Super Bowls is – ta-da – the 2002 Ladies long program.

American viewing habits have been irrevocably splintered. Network news ratings have fallen in large part because the consumer can find a point of view he prefers on another channel. There are 50 basketball games a week on basic cable. The Super Bowl survives as something special, even with diminishing numbers, but nothing else.

So the complaints that skating didn’t properly take advantage of its spike in popularity are pretty funny. Take advantage how? With more assault? More fixed judging? The skating folks scream if you suggest it’s not a sport, but the two things that drove ratings more than anything else were the least sportsmanlike acts imaginable.

Yes, precautions must be taken that skating never becomes track and field, which is now a corpse. But it is what it was before the Lillehammer lunacy – the enduring Olympic centerpiece, with ratings for its biggest moments comparable to the Final Four, or Daytona, or the Masters, yet still something of a niche product without the male demographic television lusts after.

Besides, it’s more than a TV show. A week in Spokane proved as much.