Sequins and Scandals: Reflections on Figure Skating, Culture, and the Philosophy of Sport

By M.G. Piety

M.G. Piety has written an important social critique in the form of a series of vibrant essays about her chosen sport. Her main point is that figure skating is naturally fun and that those who participate in it ought to be having fun while doing so. She decries the fact that so few people in the figure skating world - skaters, coaches, judges, officials, and even fans - seem to be having any fun with it. She further laments that the International Skating Union (ISU) and other governing bodies systematically undermine efforts to keep figure skating fun and that they contribute toward creating a culture in which fun is nearly impossible.

But this lack of fun is not unique to figure skating among sports, games, and other structured recreational activities. For example, the National Football League (NFL) under the administration of Roger Goodell has been bashed from many sides as the "No Fun League." Yet fun endures in football despite Goodell. Its dominant culture is one of fun. Much of the success of Chip Kelly, his Philadelphia Eagles, and his Oregon Ducks is because he obviously has so much fun coaching these teams. You can see it in his face. He exudes joy. His sideline demeanor infects players and fans alike with enthusiasm. Which is not to take anything away from the success of grumps like Bill Belichick.

Contract bridge expert Charles Goren famously said of his favorite game: "You should play bridge for fun. The instant you find yourself playing the game for any other reason, you should pack it up and go on to something else." Piety claims that too many people associated with figure skating have become disgusted with its prevailing culture of joylessness and have indeed gone on to something else.

Foreword by Mary Louise Adams, author of Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gegensatz Press
• Release date: Feb 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781621306832

Book preview

Sequins and Scandals

Reflections on Figure Skating, Culture, and the Philosophy of Sport

M.G. Piety

with a Foreword by Mary Louise Adams

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Published by Gegensatz Press at Smashwords

2014

ISBN 978-1-62130-683-2

Copyright © 2014 by M.G. Piety

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in book reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Mary Louise Adams

1. Introduction

2. Time Travel

3. The Sorcerers' Apprentices

4. For Slava

5. The Wizard

6. Edward Sprogis

7. Practice

8. Room at the Top: Some Ruminations on Sport, Individualism, and the Subjectivity of Aesthetic Judgment

9. Eros and Gender

10. Sequins and Scandals

11. What Has Brian Boitano Done?

12. The Lonely Sport; or, What's Killing Figure Skating?

13. On Style in Skating

14. Sport and the Sublime

15. Frozen in Time: Does Figure Skating Have a Future?

Annotated Bibliography

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to my many skating teachers. I've been fortunate to have received instruction from some of the best practitioners in the history of the sport, including Natalia Dubova, Oleg and Ludmila Protopopov, Brian Orser, Robbie Kaine, Slava Uchitel, Andrei Zharkov, Jeff Czarnecki, John Thomas, Michelle Pennington, Lynn Rimmer, Ron Kravette, and Kimberly Navarro. Special thanks must go to my current, and very favorite teacher, Chuen Gun Lee. C.G., as he is known among his students, is not merely one of the most beautiful skaters I have ever seen. He is a gifted teacher and a dear friend. I don't know where I would be today without him.

There are numerous other people in the skating community who have been instrumental both in my development as a skater and in helping me to understand the sport better. These people include Peter Bilous, the rink manager of the Skating Club of Wilmington and one of the most knowledgeable people on the sport of figure skating I have ever met; Sonia Bianchetti, with whom I have had an extensive and very helpful correspondence; Dick Button; Cynthia Drayton, without whose sponsorship I would not have been accepted as a member of the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society; Sue Lapin, a member of the Skating Club of Wilmington and a good friend who helped me to organize a program to teach figure skating to children in the Philadelphia public schools; and Martin Jackson of Lutheran Children and Family Services in Philadelphia, who not only provided transportation for the children to the rink, but whose interest in them led directly to the formation of my lasting friendship with one of these children, Briana Muldrow, who has since become a lovely and admirable young woman. My fellow adult skaters, who are too numerous to mention, have been a source of continuous support and encouragement and hence deserve my thanks as well.

Six of the fifteen pieces included in this collection are new, but nine were originally published elsewhere. I would thus like to thank the editors of those publications for their generous permission to reprint them: Jeff St. Clair, the editor of the online political journal, CounterPunch, for Chapters Nine, Eleven, Twelve, Fourteen, and Fifteen; Albert DiBartolomeo, the former editor of ASK, an official publication of Drexel University's College of Arts and Sciences, and Donna Murasko, Dean of the College and the force behind ASK, for Chapters Three and Eight; Patricia Cleary Miller, the editor of the Rockhurst Review, for Chapter Four; and Jason Wilson, the editor of The Smart Set, for Chapter Ten. Jason gave me the opportunity to cover Skate America in 2007 as press and published the piece from which this collection takes its title. Of course, all nine essays that reappear here have been corrected, re-edited, and where appropriate, updated.

I would like to thank Carol Rossignol, National Education and Accreditation Director of the Professional Skaters' Association (PSA) for encouraging me to join the PSA, and Graham McFee, one of the most prominent figures in the philosophy of sport today, for his kindness in reading many of the pieces in this collection and for his kind and helpful feedback.

I would also like to thank the many skating fans who have e-mailed me over the years to comment on the pieces included in this collection, including James Basler, Ralph Brown, Jo Burnette, Martin Butterfield, Sandra Frasier, Roxanne Harde, E. Stephen Hunt, Eric Irwin, Jane Kyle, David Macaray, Lorraine Papazian-Boyce, Beverly Rice, Mark Rowan, Bob Shaw, Barry Sheridan, Gregory Stricherz, Elaine Trogman, Fred Williams, Sharon Whitlock, and Dr. Eric Zilmer. I publish articles on a wide variety of topics, but the ones on skating always generate strong responses, and that has encouraged me to keep writing them. I would like to add that I am particularly grateful to Faith Barrow-Waheed for correcting an error in the original version of Frozen in Time.

Finally, I must thank my husband, Brian J. Foley, not only for reading and commenting upon every page in this book, but also for actually taking up figure skating with me so that it would be something we could do together. Brian has endured many slings and arrows in his pursuit of this sport that is still erroneously viewed by many in the general public as effete. His discipline and dedication have turned him into quite a skater. My heart swells with pride when I see him whip off jump combinations that elicit oohs and ahs from his growing fan base.

You are the best, Brian!

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Foreword

Mary Louise Adams

What a pleasure to read this collection of essays written by someone not just willing but also able to represent figure skating in complex tones. Author M.G. Piety takes up figure skating as high-performance competitive sport, as pleasurable leisure, as art, as technical skill, as memory. Writing for skaters and for people who love skating, Piety moves easily between criticism and social comment, history, philosophy, and autobiography. This is skating commentary for people who are interested in more than who won which competition.

In the nineteenth century and into the first few decades of the twentieth century, many skaters wrote. They wrote of technical challenges, of what skating felt like, of the direction their art was taking. They wrote reviews of competitions and of particular skaters. They imagined what skating might look like in the future. In textbooks and skating magazines, skaters actually debated skating. In the nineteenth century they debated the merits of competition, and the virtues of different styles and different skaters. Later they debated rules and argued over the relative weight of athleticism and aesthetics in judging. Even in organizational publications like the United States Figure Skating Association's magazine, Skating, views were contested and defended. For several generations, figure skating had its own spirited literature. But, over the last half of the twentieth century, this literature dwindled. Its demise may have had something to do with the rise of television and its expert commentators, whose voices came to be inordinately important in shaping the way people saw and experienced sports of all kinds. In the research I did for my book, Artistic Impressions, a gender history of figure skating, I read a lot of skating writing. More than once I thought how much I'd like to see writing by skaters on figure skating today - timely, reflective writing that takes skating seriously. Sequins and Scandals does just this.

It is no news to anyone interested in the sport that figure skating's fortunes have fallen steeply over the past decade or so. In the wake of the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding story, figure skating briefly occupied a position among the most watched sports in North America. With a growing television audience came a growing market for shows and tours, for videos and books. Biographies of famous skaters, popular histories, and glossy coffee table books found their way to bookstore shelves and it seemed like skating was on the verge of receiving the kind of careful comment and attention that one sees in reviews of dance performances or in the best versions of sports journalism and commentary. But overexposure quickly killed the new audience and, for the past decade and a half, skating's popularity has falling off dramatically. Skating has all but disappeared from bookstores and prime-time television. Even in Canada, where I live, and where you will find the largest and most informed skating audience in the world, fans now frequently have to watch international competitions online. Coverage of figure skating in my daily newspaper rarely goes beyond competition placings or profiles of medal contenders. People looking for thoughtful comment on the sport as a whole or on non-competitive versions of skating, scour online discussion boards and skating blogs, looking for the odd insightful comment, which is usually buried by fan-talk and gossip. This is the context in which Piety's essays are a welcome contribution that might help open up a broader, less parochial conversation about the sport. These essays pick up where the older skating literature left off. And they make it clear that there is certainly a lot to talk about!

Reading the essays, one senses Piety's vision for what figure skating could be, and a good sense of what's holding it back. Figure skating is an incredible and unique form of physical expression that delivers speed, elegance, pyrotechnics, and grace. At root, it is the art of gliding on ice. The long-held edge - a paradoxical stillness in movement - is the key and the pinnacle of everything else that a skater might do. At its best, skating combines technical virtuosity and musical interpretation; it is a creative and athletic form of physical expression. Unfortunately, since the introduction of the new scoring system, we rarely see skating at its best. Skaters don't have time for beauty, are not rewarded for creativity. The drive to quantify has made it difficult for skaters to pursue the more expressive aspects of the sport, the things that make it stand out from other sports and that make great performances memorable. It's