Move to America Benefits Skorniakov

Uzbekistan’s Roman Skorniakov has been enjoying his skating even more since moving to the United States to train. Lacking enough ice time in Uzbekistan for year-round training, he and his wife, Uzbekistan’s ladies champion Tatiana Malinina decided to move to Dale City, Virginia, where they coach younger skaters to fund their own endeavors. After this season, the couple plan to teach full-time.

Skorniakov participated in his second Olympics in Salt Lake City. He finished 19th in 1998 and again this year. He has won a silver medal at the 1999 Asian Games, finished as high as seventh at the 2001 Four Continents Championships, and reached 14th at the 1998 Worlds. He finished 20th at the 2001 Worlds and 19th this season. “I’m…

Fans or Fanatics?

Until about ten years ago, figure skating was a relatively genteel sport, free of the fanaticism that has led to injuries and deaths in soccer melees and similar incidents in other sports. Most people who followed the sport or came to competitions were true fans of the sport, rather than groupies. But that is changing, and changing for the worse. As television and the Internet make winning figure skaters as recognizable as rock stars, skaters have become more endangered by the cults that have grown up around them.

Infighting among some of these fans has become so intense that they have nearly come to blows over who has the “official fan club” or the “official website” often driving long-time supporters of the skaters away in their frenzy. True fans have lost access to the sport they love through the questionable actions of a few fanatics. And because of that, much of the closeness that developed between skaters and fans in…

2002 World Figure Skating Championships: Ladies Highlights

After dominating the skating circuit for two seasons only to come up short at the World Championships both times, Irina Slutskaya quipped that one day she would have a world title, even if she had to stay in until everyone else had retired and she had gray hair. Never fear, Slutskaya did not have to wait that long. With the most inspired, if not quite the most technically difficult, performances of her career, Slutskaya won all three phases of the competition to claim her first world title at age 23.

The third time was the charm for Slutskaya, who has had a Goldilocks-type career at the World Championships since her comeback three years ago. In 2000, the performance was too soft, as Slutskaya left out technical content that she had been planning to include. In 2001, the performance was too hard, as Slutskaya tried too much technical content and ended up making a costly error on a triple lutz-triple loop…

2002 World Figure Skating Championships: Men’s Highlights

As amazing as it sounds that Alexei Yagudin has won the Grand Prix Final, the European Championships, and Olympics, what’s even more amazing is that he won all of them in a span of approximately nine weeks. Add to that a trip to Australia last September for the Goodwill Games, two Grand Prix events in Canada and France, and an appearance at the Russian Nationals (where he would later withdraw with injury), and Yagudin would seem insane for wanting to travel from his training base in Newington, Conn. all the way to Nagano, Japan for the World Championships, a title that he had already won three times previously.

But that’s the type of competitor Yagudin is. Perhaps the only thing more evident than his love for competition is his love of performance. Yagudin was simply showered with rare 6.0s in short program. He received one perfect mark of 6.0 for required elements, the first awarded since 1989 and the only…

2002 World Figure Skating Championships: Ice Dance Highlights

Not surprisingly, controversy clouded the ice dance event once again. And, even less surprisingly, the controversy was baseless and even paradoxical. First, there was no movement in the top ten, and the skaters and media complained about it. Then, there was movement, and 38 skaters signed a petition protesting the judging, which was equally lambasted by the media. The most subjective of the four disciplines to judge, ice dance has recently been plagued with a subjective series of protests by competitors who feel that they have not been given their due and offer little else but “the judging was incorrect” to back up their stance. This time, Lithuanian Povilas Vanagas did slightly more– he accused Boris Chait, the father of Israeli ice dancer Galit Chait, of buying the bronze medal, calling him a “mafioso” among other names. The potentially slanderous comments, for which no proof has been offered, complete the downward spiral that the image of ice dance has…

2002 World Figure Skating Championships: Pairs Highlights

Olympic co-champions Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, of Russia, and Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, of Canada, each elected to skip the World Championships due to a whirlwind of media appearances following the Olympic Games last month. Unlike the pairs judging fiasco that took all of Salt Lake City by storm, the only fiasco of the competition in Nagano was the dreadful level of performances among the top competitors. When the falls were counted and the scores were input, the message of the competition was that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze and Sale and Pelletier have set a near impossible standard for others to reach.

Thrice world medalists, China’s Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao were used to their flawless performances routinely placing behind less-than-perfect efforts from the now Olympic co-champions. What the Chinese had in raw athleticism, they lacked in refinement and purity of technique. This year, they enlisted the help of American choreographer Lea Ann Miller, and in Salt Lake City,…

Age is No Limit for Malinina

Don’t tell Uzbekistan’s Tatiana Malinina, a two-time Olympian, that she’s too old to compete. “Age has no meaning whatsoever. Some skaters become champions at 15, others achieve this later on. There is no age limit for competitions and I can skate until I’m 40 if I want to. I don’t have problems with my jumps and I’m winning against the younger competitors. And by the way, I look like I’m 16, and I’m skating that way,” she emphasized. Even at the age of 29, Malinina is still a few months younger than Russia’s Maria Butyrskaya.

Malinina’s been very successful in the last few years competing against younger skaters, winning the inaugural Four Continents Figure Skating Championships and the 1999 Grand Prix…

Gusmeroli Performs On Ice And Water

France’s Vanessa Gusmeroli used to be better known as a water skier than as a figure skater. The 23-year-old skater explained, “My parents have a passion for water skiing. My dad is a water skiing instructor at a friend’s Swiss Ski School in Clermont in Florida in the summer. He always wanted me to be a water skiing champion. When I was little, they took me two or three times a year to Florida for vacations and I learned to water ski when I was three. During the winter, it wasn’t possible to ski in Annecy, so my mother suggested that I try skating because it would be helpful to my water skiing. So when I was 7, I started…