Harry Pearson
Ice skating has a reputation as a sport beloved of old ladies. The International Skating Union (ISU) fights hard to keep it that way. Over the past five years the sport’s governing body has taken action against male skaters displaying chest and underarm hair, women wearing form-hugging unitards and men donning tights, the American Brian Boitano having apparently given a group of elderly judges palpitations with a case of VPL in which the P did not stand for panty.
Now the union is getting a grip of gussets, or at least their wanton display during lifts such as the hydrant and the helicopter. According to reports, the authorities decided to act after a grand prix event last year. Whether it was the manoeuvre which saw the female partner carried upside down while executing the splits, or the fact that the musical accompaniment for the performance was Nearer My God To Thee is not recorded but as of last week ice dance judges began deducting points for “undignified movements”.
As one senior international official observed: “If I want a young man waving his partner’s assets in my face, I can rent a porn movie.”
But, while ISU officials may be able to preserve the sport’s twee image on the ice, off it they meet with altogether less success. Supporters of skating like to think of it as an extension of ballet. In the past decade, however, there has been plenty of evidence to suggest that it has more in common with American soap operas of the 1980s, less Swan Lake than Flamingo Road.
Fittingly, as the ISU announces its crackdown on crotches, one of the stars of the long-running melodrama, Tonya Harding, is set to appear in a Vancouver court after her landlord filed an eviction notice.
Harding, of course, leapt to prominence when her former husband Jeff Gillooly and two of his friends (a trio so unfathomably stupid that FBI reports referred to them simply as The Three Stooges) were convicted of whacking her arch-rival Nancy Kerrigan on the knee with a crowbar in 1994. Other highlights of this sub-plot include the attempt by Gillooly to flog a video of the couple’s wedding night to a cable TV network, a car chase in which Harding claimed to be pursuing a professional golfer who was stalking her and a conviction for smacking her boyfriend with a hubcap.
And then there is the double Olympic gold medallist Pasha Grishuk. The Russian has the same agent as Sharon Stone but seems to have borrowed her character from Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, so memorably brought to life by Joan Collins.
Pasha it is Russian for passion changed her name from Oksana to avoid any possible confusion with Oksana Baiul who defeated Kerrigan to win the 1994 Olympic gold. Baiul was later convicted of drunk driving, an incident that led the charitable Grishuk to describe her as “fat” and “washed up”.
Popular with spectators, Grishuk never established the same rapport with her fellow competitors. She was allegedly knocked to the ground in a scrap in a hotel lobby by one rival, Nicole Bobek (Bobek denies hitting her) and suffered an elbow injury after an on-ice collision with another, Anjelika Krylova.
Grishuk’s aunt, meanwhile, posed as a journalist to get into the press conference of the Canadian skaters Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz, then loudly denounced their routine for not being “rock ‘n’ roll”. Perhaps it should be added that Grishuk has performed to Celine Dion’s All By Myself and appeared in the “Salute To Barry Manilow” ice-capade, pretty radical by skating standards.
Back in the days when Grishuk was plain old Oksana, she and her ice- partner Evgeny Platov swept all before them, winning 22 competitions on the trot. It was during this heady period that she began an affair with Sasha Zhulin, the male half of their rivals Zhulin and Usova. That Zhulin and Maya Usova also happened to be married to one another was an added complication. When Usova found the pair together in a Los Angeles restaurant she reacted by bashing Pasha’s head against the bar-top.
Grishuk’s assessment of the incident was a minor masterpiece. Having first derided her attacker for taking over two years to find out what was going on, she told the press: “People like her are jealous. I am a pretty woman with the whole world in front of me.”
Happily for fans of sport’s answer to Falcon Crest, these undignified movements are quite beyond the interference of the ISU.
The Winter Olympics start in Salt Lake City on February 8