US men are now more interesting
Lysacek's victory takes focus off woeful women
LOS ANGELES - In less than five minutes here Thursday night, a man in a tuxedo skating to Gershwin dialed the wayback machine to 1983. That's the last time a US male won a world figure skating title going into the Olympic year and made himself the guy to beat at the Games. "It hasn't even begun to sink in," Evan Lysacek said after he'd outpointed Canadian teenager Patrick Chan and former titlist Brian Joubert of France at
It's certainly going to sink in between now and next winter's Games in Vancouver. For the first time since 1952, when Dick Button graced the magazine covers and the newsreels, America's top man is going to be the skating story. In 1984, when Scott Hamilton came in as the planet's reigning king, Rosalynn Sumners also was the queen. Who knows who'll be America's queen next year? Could be any of a half-dozen, and we're not counting out Tenley Albright, who even now might hold her own among the current crop.
The truth is, women's skating in this country is a muddled mess. Since Michelle Kwan won her eighth straight crown in 2005, there have been four different champions, each less stable than the last. Yesterday afternoon Alissa Czisny crashed on two jumps in her short program and is buried in 14th going into tonight's free skate. Rachael Flatt, a 16-year-old rookie, staggered out of her first jump and is sitting in seventh.
Unless their combined placements are 13 or better, the US will have only two female entrants at the Olympics, which hasn't happened since 1994. How far have fortunes fallen in less than two decades? In 1991 Kristi Yamaguchi, Tonya Harding, and Nancy Kerrigan swept the medal stand at the pre-Olympic worlds, and that was with defending champion Jill Trenary out with an ankle injury.
If you want to know why figure skating has slipped off the radar screen in the States (unless you have the Oxygen channel), it's because the women are out of the spotlight. If the Americans miss the medal stand for the third straight time, which appears inevitable tonight, it'll be the first time that's happened since 1964, in the wake of the 1961 plane crash that killed the entire team.
It's remarkable that the most popular female skaters - Yamaguchi, Kwan, Sasha Cohen - are the ones who aren't competing anymore. What drives fan interest is continuity and gold medals. Right now, US women's skating has neither. Reasons abound - injuries, puberty, inconsistency. Which is why Cohen is contemplating a comeback. Why not?
Yesterday's big story - and it was huge in Tokyo and Seoul - was South Korea's Kim Yu Na blowing everybody away in the short program, leaving the last two world champions (Japan's Mao Asada and Miki Ando) in a pile of ice shavings. "It was just amazing," said Kim, who finished more than 8 points ahead of Canada's Joannie Rochette with a record 76.12 points. Kim, who's already treated as a movie star back home, might be elected president if she wins the Olympic gold medal, which no Korean has ever done in any skating event.
For women, skating's center stage has shifted from the US to Asia. "Every once in a while, you just have to let some of us take over for a moment," said Brian Orser, the former Canadian world champion who coaches Kim. The men's stage, for the first time in a quarter century, is back in North America, with Lysacek and the 18-year-old Chan as the main story line.
It may not be the Battle of the Brians, as it was when Boitano and Orser went head to head in Calgary in 1988, but it's intriguing enough. Chan, who'd be the first Canadian male to win at Olympus, already is feeling some of the same squeeze that Orser did. "If I came home [from worlds] with a gold medal, it would be really overwhelming," he said. "It's already overwhelming enough coming home with a silver."
And Lysacek, who'd be the first US gold medalist since Boitano, would be under pressure to maintain a perfect five-ringed streak. Every US world champion - Button, Hayes Jenkins, David Jenkins, and Hamilton - has won the Olympics the next year.
Skating is about rivalries, which is why the men now are considered more interesting than the women in the US. "A lot of that attention is because of the rivalry I have with Johnny Weir," said Lysacek. Weir didn't make the team and the other two guys - rookie Brandon Mroz and Jeremy Abbott - ended up ninth and 11th.
Lysacek was the story here and he'll be the story next winter, too, unless Cohen or Kwan or Albright decides to lace up and go to Spokane for the January nationals. That's how it was in 1952, when Button went off to Oslo to defend the Olympic title he'd won as a teenager in 1948. A succession of Albrights, Heisses, Flemings, Hamills, Yamaguchis, Lipinskis, and Kwans changed that, relegating the men to warm-up acts at the Games. All it took was four minutes and one inspired skate here by one guy in black tie to change that.
