Posted on 02/12/2002 5:45:39 AM PST by baltoga
SALT LAKE CITY - A very bad day for Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics got a whole lot worse late last night at the Delta Center.
Jenny died in vain, again.
Love Story, the evocative Jamie Salé-David Pelletier portrayal of the doomed Ali McGraw movie character and her preppie Harvard boyfriend, was as good as gold last night ... and the only people in the building who didn't know it were on the judging panel.
Instead, after an error-free thing of beauty by the young Canadian pair, the judges awarded -- by a five-four split -- the gold to a classical Russian pairs skate by their arch-rivals, Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, and silver to the Canadians.
China's Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao were a distant third.
It was the 11th consecutive Olympic pairs title for skaters from Russia or the former Soviet Union, and the seventh straight time since 1960 that reigning world-champion Canadians have been denied the ensuing Olympic gold medal.
It was never going to be easy to halt either streak. But the way this one was judged, it makes you wonder how many of those titles the Russians won on the ice, and not in the backrooms.
After the blow to the solar plexus Canada took earlier in the day with speedskating world champion Jeremy Wotherspoon's shocking face-plant out of the blocks in his 500m specialty -- eerily reminiscent of skier Ken Read's loss of a ski at the top of the men's downhill in Lake Placid, 22 years ago -- there was none-too-subtle pressure on Salé and Pelletier to restore the national team's equilibrium.
They tried, valiantly.
With 25 seconds left in the warmup session, Salé -- skating backward through the middle of the ice -- was involved in a substantial collision with Sikharulidze, who could not get out of the way and ploughed into the tiny Salé, knocking her to the ice, where she held her ribs on the left side before leaving the ice.
Sikharulidze was immediately concerned and went to Salé to see if she was all right.
The rival pairs, skating second and third in the final flight, had time to go backstage and make repairs before the Russians had to re-emerge to skate their program.
Skating to a yearning violin solo from music by French composer Jules Massenet, the Russians were fast and elegant and nearly flawless, making only one glaring mistake -- Sikharulidze staggering out of a side-by-side double Axel and slightly throwing off the timing of an ensuing jump.
They received 5.7s and 5.8s for technical merit, 5.8s and 5.9s for presentation, leaving some room -- not a lot, but some.
Then out came Salé and Pelletier, and laid down a perfect, emotionally draining rendition of one of the sweetest pieces of skating their sport has ever seen. They nailed every element, despite expressions of pain from Salé on two of the throws, and left the audience in tears with the power of their program.
At the end, Pelletier dropped to his knees, kissed the ice and screamed out in joy.
So certain was the crowd of their victory that when the second set of marks, for presentation, appeared with the Canadians' ranking -- second -- the audience erupted in a cascade of boos, of a volume and duration rarely seen in skating, and even more rarely when it's not the home team getting robbed.
Canada's No. 2 and 3 pairs, Jacinthe Larivière and Lenny Faustino, and Anabelle Langlois and Patrice Archetto, finished 10th and 12th, respectively -- and respectably -- in their first Olympics.
There had already been quite enough pressure from history on Salé and Pelletier.
Despite its standing as one of the world's leading figure skating countries, Canada hadn't won an Olympic gold medal in the sport in 42 years, dating back to the 1960 pairs victory of Barbara Wagner and Bob Paul in Squaw Valley, Calif.
Six times since then, Canadians had held the last world title before an Olympic Games -- Donald McPherson (1963), Brian Orser (1987), Kurt Browning (1991 and '93), Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler ('93) and Elvis Stojko (1997) -- and none of them could win the big one.
Now, it's seven, but through no fault of the skaters.
The 24-year-old Salé, from Red Deer, Alta., and Pelletier, 27, of Sayabec, Que., rocketed to the top of the figure skating world in only their third year together, winning the 2001 world championship in Vancouver, to which they have since added their second ISU Grand Prix crown, all of which gave them clear title to the No. 1 seeding going into these Olympics.
They had wobbled only once in the past two seasons -- at last month's Canadian championships, where there was no pressure to win -- and though Saturday night's Olympic short program left them in second place owing to an uncharacteristic fall on their closing pose, they seemed back in control of their fate.
They never looked more in control than last night, but it was an illusion.
The real control lay in the hands of the judges, and they left a sellout crowd, the world's media and no doubt millions of viewers on television wondering what explanation there could possibly be for what they had just witnessed.
They had always beaten the Russians on artistic marks, and this time seemed a no-brainer.
Their charisma on the ice comes naturally, but the program they owed to an inspired piece of choreography by Lori Nichol of Keswick, Ont., who used the two skaters' chemistry to concoct a skate that routinely leaves audiences dabbing at their eyes.
Nichol made her reputation designing programs for four-time world women's champion Michelle Kwan, but Love Story may be as evocative a pairs program as the sport has seen.
"With Michelle, it was many years of developing and starting from the very beginning," Nichol said, after the pair's 2001 world victory.
"With Jamie and David, I was handed a very beautiful product on a silver platter. They came to me highly-trained, their personalities meshed, they're older, they're passionate people, they're accomplished skaters -- they're a choreographer's dream."
Salé went to the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer with a former partner, Jason Turner.
This was Pelletier's Olympic debut, and he must have been inconsolable in defeat. Salé was still weeping as the two waited to go on the ice for the medals presentation.
ccole@nationalpost.com
There was a book published about 8 years ago, trashing the standards used for the Olympics "little girl" events - ice skating and gymnastics. It turns out that - although the Olympics have modernized their equipment so that comparisons of performances over the decades would be misleading (e.g., SLC has the ice rink temperature controlled and layered with special de-ionized ice so that it remains completely frozen .... in previous decades the Olympic ice was outdoors and the earliest skater got the most solid ice and by lunchtime the unlucky ones were trying to skate in slush) - the standards applied to judging have deliberately been petrified; trainee-judges are made to evaluate performances simultaneously with the real judges, and a newcomer whose opinions are different from the old judges flunks the training.
Stronger, faster, higher. Stay within the rules and may the best one win. But when you have to look at the scoreboard after you've given your all to see what some clueless dweeb from a third-world backwater *thought* of your performance, you're just begging for a letdown.
In the 1972?? Gold Medal game against the Soviet Union, The U. S. led, 50-49, with three seconds to play. Inbounding the ball from under their own basket, the Soviets twice threw it the length of the court without scoring, but both times the officials ruled that the scoreboard clock had to be reset. On the third try, the court-length pass succeeded and a Soviet player scored the winning basket. The U. S. appealed the decision but lost, and the team unanimously voted not to accept the silver medal.
Many of the new sports are judged. Skating and diving are often won on reputation, hype or politics. Greg Lougainis (sp?) settled for a silver in platform diving at his first Olympics when he clearly won the event, at least in my humble estimation. On the other hand, Lougainis seemed to benefit late in his career from this same phenonmenon. For him it was a "wash", but you have to feel sorry for Olympic athletes that get jobbed in their only appearance.
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