Davis & White to regain World title?

Buttercup said:

There's no need for anyone - skaters, journalists or fans -to drag nationality into it.

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Aha. One need only to look at writing of some Russian fans to know that in Canada mushrooms (by that they mean --more or less -- that the skaters are not judged by merit but because of nationality and pushing of their skating federation) are growing like crazy. Particularly comments about mushrooms' grow were thick with respect to Caetlyn (that was after she won in Canada) and recently about Reynolds. But V/M also gets their share. Not to mention that a lot of fans over there said that they stopped dance not because Virtue was sick but because they wanted to rest and "knew that they can do it without penalty." In fact on one russian forum it was nearly a hate feast.!!!

gmyers said:

The only team to have its victories be seen as totally legitimate and deserved by north americans were really Torville and Dean. That's it!!

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Torvill and Dean are British. That means they are European, not North American.

OK lets be real here. Canada and the U.S never had the Worlds best ice dance team before Vancouver, except for probably Bourne & Kraatz in 2003 in a weak transition year. Some had said since B&S. Well since B&S:

1985-1996: U.S teams were so far from being worthy of contenders this period it is too laughable to even contemplate someone considering them winning anything. I will make a small note of Roca & Sur who were underrated and should have been regularly in the top 10 in the World, and maybe eked into the top 5 (but not on the podium) at some point. They were a much better pro team than amateur though. Canada had Wilson & McCall in the late 80s who were a good team, and deserved their bronze medals, but were probably lucky too that the judges dont generally like sweeps so might well have held W&M up into 3rd place to keep the 3rd Soviet dance team Annenko & Stretenski off major podiums. Bourne & Kraatz emerged as a promising team in the mid 90s but werent fully matured yet, and IMO were majorly gifted the 96 bronze due to home ice.

1997-1998: IMO Punsalen & Swallow were excellent and could have easily been given a bronze at one of the major events this time. I think they were competitive with a still developing Anissina & Peizerat and Bourne & Kraatz, but not competitive with Gritschuk & Platov or Krylova & Ovsiannikov. Bourne & Kraatz meanwhile were exactly as they should have been. Bronze contenders. Many today even found they were overrated in their careers.

1999-2002: Peter & Naomi were a good team and somewhat underrated. However not a top 3 team, should have been a top 6 or 7 team for a few years. Bourne & Kraatz again where they belonged, as bronze contenders, they were clearly never as good as a matured Anissina & Peizerat, and about the same level as several others, and the real underrated team of this time was Drobiazko & Vanagas.

2003-2009: Well this was the Belbin & Agosto era in U.S dance. The first U.S team you could seriously consider and hope to win a major title. Blumberg & Seibert were good enough, but had no chance in their time as the competition was way too strong. IMO they did as well as they should have in the end. It was dissapointing they didnt win a big title but were not robbed of it by poor judging, but just didnt improve after 2005 the way people expected, and the vagarities of chances didnt go their way in the later years. Their big chance at a major title was the 2008 Worlds which they blew with a fall. There was a case for them being robbed of winning the 2009 World title, but Delobel & Schoenfelder would have easily won this year based on the season to date had they been able to compete, just as Domnina & Shabalin would have easily won in 2008 had they been healthy and able to compete. Navka & Kostomarov were better than them in the mid 2000s, and Denkova & Stavyski and Delobel & Schoenfelder many thought were better too but politiked down below B&A to keep them away from N&K. If anything in 2005 and 2006 Belbin & Agosto were overrated to win the medals they did.

Bourne & Kraatz capatilized on a number of teams retiring and also had their best programs ever in 2003 to deservedly win silver at the post Olympic Worlds of 02 and their long awaited World gold in 2003, then retired due to personal strife betwen them and age. Dubreuil & Lauzon never had the footwork, speed, or overall technical abilities (apart from lifts), and did well to win 2 World silvers based mostly on their very romantic style of skating and great programs those two years. Lost a chance of an Oly medal due to a horrible crash.

Still Bourne & Kraatz, Belbin & Agosto, and to a lesser extent Dubeuil & Lauzon represented an improvement in the level of NA dance teams caliber. This improvement has continued with V&M and D&W who are clearly another level up from these teams. That has coincided with a MASSIVE decline in Russian, ex Soviet, and European dancing, which is also a HUGE part of the NA dominance and success in dance now, even with their own vastly improved teams compared to the past. Anyone who does not see all those needs to take the blinders of.


BTW Blumberg & Seibert were often jobbed I agree, they deserved silver at the 83 Worlds, bronze at the 82 Worlds, screwed themselves with a fall in 81 which set the tone of the pecking order that quad, and were robbed of atleast a bronze but IMO even a silver at the 84 Games. However there was no hope of them actually WINNING a major title that era with Torvill & Dean dominating.

As for complaints about ice dance scoring they have always existed and they mostly come from the defeated parties. Today tons of European skating fans, just as many as NA skating fans in the past decades, complain about the (in their opinion) inflated and exagerrated scores of Virtue & Moir and Davis & White and the huge gaps judges have them over all others no matter what, many skating fans (even some NA) were disgusted by the Shibutanis World bronze in 2011, and as I mentioned there are some who thought Belbin & Agosto were overrated at times in their career.

The perpetuated myth that everyone thinks ice dance judging is finally perfect and politics free since NA teams is on top is a huge ROTFFFFLLLLL!

I've got to agree.

True, but not quite true. Soviets skaters were professionals, trained from the childhood and boosted by communist system. At that time American skaters (and many European skaters) were not professionals. That was one of the reasons why Soviet skaters won. Soviet skaters were better but that was because they weren't amateurs.

And Soviet skaters stayed together because they had to. There was no choice, so no partner shopping.

D&W's few programs put all of the old school Russian pairs to shame. I can't imagine any single one of them skating to a D&W programs without puking, passing out, dying on the ice at the end. They were never in the same league technically, although people still think the theatric dramas they amped up somehow make them more "artistic" Yeah, whatever.

tulosai said:

Torvill and Dean are British. That means they are European, not North American.

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I know they're British that's not what I was saying. "By north Americans" meant audiences and commentators in America not the team of t/d.

FlattFan said:

D&W's few programs put all of the old school Russian pairs to shame. I can't imagine any single one of them skating to a D&W programs without puking, passing out, dying on the ice at the end. They were never in the same league technically, although people still think the theatric dramas they amped up somehow make them more "artistic" Yeah, whatever.

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Maybe some like Bestiamanova & Bukin or Usova & Zhulin. However Klimova & Ponomarenko, Gritschuk & Platov, and Krylova & Ovsiannikov all skated incredibly difficult programs, and did so with amazing power, command, and a larger than life quality.

pangtongfan said:

Maybe some like Bestiamanova & Bukin or Usova & Zhulin. However Klimova & Ponomarenko, Gritschuk & Platov, and Krylova & Ovsiannikov all skated incredibly difficult programs, and did so with amazing power, command, and a larger than life quality.

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And the women had better lines and positions than Meryl, while they were at it

It's worth noting that dance teams in the past had to put a lot more time and effort into training CDs. We see teams now struggle to hit the required points when all they have to do is patterns in the SD, but up until a decade ago, teams did two CDs in competition. I don't know if it's comparable to training figures, but surely it would have affected the training and its focus.

I don't see much point in comparing difficulty between eras when the program requirements were so different.

Actually, the old timers didn't hit the key points, as currently described, in the CD's. Platov gave a rather amusing interview about it, re that wide stepped Choctaw in the rhumba last year.

For that matter, there is that infamous video of Tracy Wilson talking about Grishuk & Platov in the GoldenWaltz prolonging a step to get nice toe point vs Bourne & Kraatz not having their legs line up in the same steps. G&P would have lost the key point for Timing (and as it happens, B&K were at least at one point, not on the correct edge, and they wouldn't get the key point either), provided the step highlighted had been selected as a key point that year (they change).

Because the rules are different, it really is difficult to compare.

dorispulaski said:

Actually, the old timers didn't hit the key points, as currently described, in the CD's. Platov gave a rather amusing interview about it, re that wide stepped Choctaw in the rhumba last year.

For that matter, there is that infamous video of Tracy Wilson talking about Grishuk & Platov in the GoldenWaltz prolonging a step to get nice toe point vs Bourne & Kraatz not having their legs line up in the same steps. G&P would have lost the key point for Timing (and as it happens, B&K were at least at one point, not on the correct edge, and they wouldn't get the key point either), provided the step highlighted had been selected as a key point that year (they change).

Because the rules are different, it really is difficult to compare.

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I actually knew this, but thanks for adding the extra information. What I was trying to get at is that CDs are not an afterthought, and training them was demanding and likely cut into the time that could be devoted to other things. Today the skaters skaters have very specific things they need to do in the SD patterns, yet even with all the feedback and guidelines, they still don't find it easy (we saw some of the reactions to the Finnstep, which Petri Kokko has described as not that difficult!). In the past skaters didn't have these sorts of stringent requirements, but that also meant that the judges had any number of things that they could pick on if they were so inclined.

I think that despite our disagreements about the merits of different teams, we can both agree that ice dance was/is demanding under both systems, and making it to the top requires a lot of talent and hard work - just not necessarily directed at the same aspects of one's skating.

Yes, that is absolutely something we can agree on. And I think many of the teams of the past would have had no problem with excelling in the current system, if they had been brought up on it, although some would have had to be very clever and very dedicated to avoid the back and knee problems experienced by skaters like Domnina &Shabalin, who were built like the old time dancers, and so had difficulty with the lifts required today.

And I rewatch a lot of the old routines, and a lot of the new ones.

I hope we can agree, at least generically, that some good dances have been produced in both eras, even if we might not agree on the selection of dances.

dorispulaski said:

I hope we can agree, at least generically, that some good dances have been produced in both eras, even if we might not agree on the selection of dances.

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Absolutely. I have my issues with the IJS, but I think it has had both positive and negative effects, not just one or the other. There are certainly programs from the past decade that I very much enjoyed and like to rewatch - by both European and NA teams.

Yes, and I have programs by both North American & European teams that I rewatch from the current era, as well. But I have to admit to watching some North American teams from the old days, too, even though they weren't medal winners.

dorispulaski said:

Yes, that is absolutely something we can agree on. And I think many of the teams of the past would have had no problem with excelling in the current system, if they had been brought up on it, although some would have had to be very clever and very dedicated to avoid the back and knee problems experienced by skaters like Domnina &Shabalin, who were built like the old time dancers, and so had difficulty with the lifts required today.

And I rewatch a lot of the old routines, and a lot of the new ones.

I hope we can agree, at least generically, that some good dances have been produced in both eras, even if we might not agree on the selection of dances.

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I agree that you can't compare, and anyway who would want to? The ice dancers of that day gave us gooseflesh with their most stunning programs just as much as the teams of the present do now. It would be like looking at today's skaters in all disciplines and saying, "Why get excited when we know that in the future, there will be jumpers who will put these folks to shame." Where's the fun in that?

I do have a question, Doris. What do you mean that D/S were "built like the old-time dancers" and so would have difficulty with the lifts required today? Are you saying that there has to be more of a height differential or something? I know that's been true in pairs since the eighties or so. I know that in the case of some American pair skaters of the past, there was almost no height differential (I'm thinking of Tai and Randy and JoJo Starbuck and Ken Shelley) between the man and the lady, and that would be just about impossible nowadays. Is that true of ice dance now as well?

Both Domnina & Shabalin were impressively tall skaters, and also did not have a huge height difference between them. In the old days,, most ice dance ladies were quite tall; now, not so much. D&S's size and heigh difference would have been thought ideal.

Oksana's ISU bio says she is 173 cm tall, Maxim's that he is 183 cm tall.
http://www.isuresults.com/bios/isufs00006187.htm

For my feeble English unit brain, that is she is a little over 5'8" and he is a hair over 6 feet, and there is only 4 inches difference between the two.

The kind of lifts done today are very difficult given such a big lady, and the man not that much taller. It was hard on Maxim's body to do those level 4 lifts. I would not be surprised whether some of the magnificient pairs of the past would have had trouble.

If they started early, I'm sure they could have learned twizzles (more than 2) and better dance spins. But I would not be surprised to see them have the kind of trouble with lifts that Faiella & Scali had (falls) and Domnina & Shabalin (injuries).

dorispulaski said:

For my feeble English unit brain, that is she is a little over 5'8" and he is a hair over 6 feet, and there is only 4 inches difference between the two.

The kind of lifts done today are very difficult given such a big lady, and the man not that much taller. It was hard on Maxim's body to do those level 4 lifts. I would not be surprised whether some of the magnificient pairs of the past would have had trouble.

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Yes, you translated the heights correctly. Domnina is very tall for an ice dancer, and Shabalin, while taller, isn't that much taller. Her height was certainly shown to advantage at times, but it probably made things more difficult for them. It's worth noting that Tanith Belbin is also on the tall side (5'6'' - the ISU bio is wrong), and I wonder if some of Ben's back problems might be linked to that; and V/M are now quite close in height, and we've seen some of the difficulties they've had.

In that respect, D/W are very much suited to the demands of the current system, because while the height difference between them isn't huge, it's big enough - and Meryl is strong but quite petite.

Thanks for the explanation, Doris and Buttercup.

I'm sort of sorry in a way. I loved that there was a branch of skating where the girls had the possibility of variation in physique. Is ice dancing going to turn into tiny girl-carried-by-tall-man, like pairs skating? There's an emotional element in ice dancing that's best expressed between a couple that looks as if they're at the same stage of life. Heaven forbid that we end up with those man-child combinations that have little chance of eye-to-eye contact. Though I love Meryl and Charlie, I also love couples like Krylova/Ofsiannikov, Klimova/Ponomarenko, and Denkova/Staviskiy.