Perhaps the figure skating discipline that is now the most different from what it was during the 2002 Olympics is ice dance. In Salt Lake City, ice dance had been undergoing a transition into a more athletic discipline. And of course, those Olympics gave rise to the catalyst that will give ice dance a complete makeover in the next few years, the ISU Judging System.
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The scandal continues
It was really pretty fitting that the conclusion of the pairs judging scandal happened during the ice dance events – Sale/Pelletier were awarded their gold medals and stood atop the podium with Berezhnaya/Sikharulidze between the original dance and the free dance. And I say it’s fitting because ice dance has always been the discipline where corruption was easiest – subjectivity plays a much bigger role when there isn’t anything overtly calculable.
Of course, the awarding of the second pair of gold medals in pairs wasn’t the end of the saga – the judging system would receive an overhaul following the conclusion of the Olympics, and over the next four years, we would see the phasing out of the 6.0 system.
In dance, there were still some questionable decisions being made. France’s Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat took the gold in a 5-4 decision over Russia’s Irina Lobacheva and Ilia Averbuch. Italy’s Barbara Fusar Poli and Maurizio Margaglio took bronze with a fall, over Canada’s Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz, who also had a fall.
But Lithuanians Margarita Drobiazko and Povilas Vanagas had a superb free dance that was both clean and arguably stronger than both, if not the three teams, who were in front of them. I’ll leave it at that, as I’ll fully admit that I am not as familiar with ice dance rules and trends of that time – and it would be unfair of me talk much more about it.
Compulsories? What are those?
Well, I’m exaggerating, since the compulsory dances were eliminated only last season. But this would the last Olympics during which two compulsory dances would be competed (only one was competed in 2006 and 2010).
Though still an integral part of ice dance, compulsory dance was a snoozer to most audiences, because it was the same pattern, the same music (or a couple of similar pieces) that often had no real ending. It’s the ice dance equivalent of school figures, though I imagine compulsory dances stuck around longer than figures because at least there was music involved.
That’s what they called “twizzles”?
One of the most noticeable differences between ice dance then and ice dance now is, particularly to those not familiar with the nuances of ice dancing, the twizzles. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t do twizzles back in 2002 – it’s a fundamental turn in ice dance, and it was really starting to become incorporated in free skating as well – but the power, speed, length, and sheer RPMs of twizzles in 2012 have vastly increased.
Lifts and dance spins have also changed quite a bit since 2002. In Salt Lake City, lifts were already in transition to become more athletic and acrobatic. Dance spins, however, were still more choreographic in nature. These days, dance spins are much more like pair spins (except, and many would agree, that the top ice dancers tend to do better pairs/dance spins than the pairs skaters do).
Another big difference, albeit subtler to the untrained eye, is that you don’t see the amount of partner skating ability imbalance that you sometimes used to. There was, with some of the top teams, a tendency for one partner (often the female half) to be a stronger skater than the other. This imparity was often the result of how ice dance was choreographed, where the man does the leading while the woman performs the more intricate steps and turns. These days, the IJS has closed that gap because both partners are required to do the tough steps in order to achieve higher difficulty levels. And of course, both have to do them well to get high grades of execution.
Big names on the rise
If you look further down the standings, there are more than a few teams whose names skating observers would become very familiar with in the next few years. Olympic champs in Torino Navka/Kostomarov were tenth in Salt Lake City. Two-time World champions-to-be Denkova/Staviski were seventh. 2006 Olympic bronze medalists Grushina/Goncharov were ninth.
Two-time World silver medalists-to-be Dubreuil/Lauzon, perhaps even more famous because of a more-than-an-ouch fall in Torino, were 12th. 2008 World champs Delobel/Schoenfelder were 16th, and 2010 World bronze medalists Faiella/Scali were 18th. It really was a field of extremely strong names.
Who wasn’t there?
Perhaps the biggest names who weren’t at Salt Lake City were then-U.S. silver medalists Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto. Belbin was not yet an American citizen, and they had to wait another four years before they would compete at their first Olympics (and even then, it took an act of Congress to do so), taking silver in Torino.
DANCE (final standings)
1. Marina Anissina/Gwendal Peizerat FRA VIDEO
2. Irina Lobacheva/Ilia Averbuch RUS VIDEO
3. Barbara Fusar Poli/Maurizio Margaglio ITA VIDEO
4. Shae-Lynn Bourne/Victor Kraatz CAN VIDEO
5. Margarita Drobiazko/Povilas Vanagas LTU VIDEO
6. Galit Chait/Sergei Sakhnovski ISR VIDEO
7. Albena Denkova/Maxim Staviski BUL VIDEO
8. Kati Winkler/Rene Lohse GER VIDEO
9. Elena Grushina/Ruslan Goncharov RUS
10. Tatiana Navka/Roman Kostomarov RUS VIDEO
11. Naomi Lang/Peter Tchernyshev USA VIDEO
12. Marie-France Dubreuil/Patrice Lauzon CAN
13. Sylwia Nowak/Sebastian Kolasinski POL
14. Eliane Hugentobler/Daniel Hugentobler SUI
15. Marika Humphreys/Vitali Baranov GBR
16. Isabelle Delobel/Olivier Schoenfelder FRA
17. Kristin Fraser/Igor Lukanin AZE
18. Federica Faiella/Massimo Scali ITA
19. Natalie Gudina/Alexei Beletsky ISR
20. Katarina Kovalova/David Szurman CZE
21. Julia Golovina/Oleg Voiko UKR
22. Weina Zhang/Xianming Cao CHN
23. Beata Handra/Charles Sinek USA
24. Tae-Hwa Yang/Chuen-Gun Lee KOR
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