Special Topic: An Open Letter to Ice Dance

Didier Gailhaguet, president of the French Ice Sports Federation and 2016 candidate for ISU president, made an illuminating observation on the state of ice dance in a recent New York Times article:

“I was up high in the arena the night of [Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron's] free dance, and for at least two minutes of their four-minute program, it was so quiet you could hear the wings of a fly beating [...] Even up where I was, I could hear the sound of their skates on the ice. That means what? That means something was happening with the audience, something we can’t quantify but something that we have to give value to in our sport."

An unquantifiable and deeply subjective element, one could reasonably argue, actually has very little place in the outcomes of athletic endeavor.

Journalism by its nature is intended to elucidate the factual. This is in principle; in practice we know it is far more complicated. But the process is muddled far more by reportage on a sport in which fact -- in the form of scoring and placements, what we’re told -- can bear a striking difference from what’s seen by the eye, what’s enumerated in the sport’s own rule book. The Program Components category is not an artistic "second mark": as written, it does a fair job quantifying those qualities which may and do contribute to a more aesthetically pleasing, but athletically rigorous, performance.

And the simple fact is that this is a sport. That is how it defines itself; that is why it remains in the Olympics despite threats in the more openly -- but no more -- political era pre-IJS. My work has spent much time uncovering the artistic elements within ice dance via the utilization of vocabulary from the realm of off-ice dance, a valid line of inquiry given emphases on compulsory patterns and short and original dances meant to reflect a dance style’s “authentic” nature. But that dance is meaningless without a foundation in skill -- trained ability, determined effort at complexity. That is what I ultimately prize, whether it seems to be rewarded or not. And that seems to be lessening in value among the ranks, including perhaps among some teams I’ve esteemed quite highly and quite publicly in previous seasons. It’s a tremendous disappointment to see what such pressures have meant for teams with such undervalued and fundamental strengths.

Skaters and their choreographers are certainly welcome to paint with all the colors of the wind. They should not be rewarded based on how deeply those colors make a judge or a certain number of audience members feel.