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side to Skategate
The melodrama and bad press may help skating
By Carl Bialik
Skategate, the moniker for the Olympic pairs-figure-skating judging scandal that seems to intensify by the day, has inspired media rants against the sport's woes, the irredeemable subjectivity of the judging, and skating's impending doom.
But Skategate may be the best thing to happen to figure skating, in terms of building its popularity as a TV sport.
Generally scandals are death for sports, but figure skating may be the one major exception.
Here there appears to be no such thing as bad publicity.
Call it the Tonya Harding effect.
"The scandal won't hurt figure skating in the least," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.
One effect of the scandal, which erupted again yesterday when the Russians threatened to pull out of the Games, has been to get the sport all over the front pages of America's newspapers and covered in depth by TV news.
"In the end this is not going to turn people away from the sport nearly to the extent that new knowledge of the sport as a result of this will turn people toward it," says Thompson. "It will probably introduce it to people who might otherwise not have seen it."
Consider it a case of the off-ice drama coming to match and then exceed the considerable drama of the on-ice competition.
It doesn't hurt that the Canadian pair David Pelletier and Jamie Salé are attractive, funny, and, well, North American.
"Usually pairs winners have relatively unpronounceable Russian names with a lot of Zs in them and in many ways are interchangeable as far as the American public is concerned," says Marc Ganis, president of sports consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd.
"Here there are Anglo and French names that we know and understand."
Also, Pelletier's and Salé's class and irreverence show that "you don't have to be a figure skating automaton to be exceptional in that sport," Ganis adds.
American success last night in the women's individual competition will likely help the sport even more.
Sarah Hughes, Michelle Kwan, and Sasha Cohen finished 1-3-4 in the competition, and all three have excellent TV presence.
Also working in skating's favor, in terms of building its future as a TV sport, is the way the scandal has been handled by Olympic officials, with the awarding of the gold to the Canadian pair.
"If Skategate had been resolved in an unsatisfying way, it could have created an image that figure skating is fixed like pro wrestling or boxing," says Lynn Kahle, professor of sports marketing at the University of Oregon.
"But they avoided that by how events have unraveled. Most people feel the way the controversy was resolved was fairly positive."
Last night's decision by judges to award the gold to Hughes certainly suggests that judges are responding to increasing pressure to place merit ahead of other concerns.
The judges' decision, albeit narrow, was a nod to Hughes' clearly superior long program, even though she lacked the experience on the world stage of her competitors, notably Kwan.
We should expect long-term improvements in judging, as well, according to Shawn Bradley, vice president and chief operating officer of the Bonham Group Market Research Company.
"Skating has had a black eye for some time," he says. "There had been several suspicious decisions in skating's history. [Olympic officials] are going to have to enact some guidelines on how skating is officiated and judged. I think we'll see that happen pretty quickly. We're already hearing rumors of them discussing it."
In the meantime, the ongoing scandals of skating will continue to burrow the sport deeper into the American consciousness, with each day offering new melodramatic developments.
Will the Russians walk, as they threaten? Will Olympics officials bend?
Stay tuned, with more Olympics coverage to come.
February 22, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Carl Bialik is a New York writer and a contributor to Media Life.
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