Russia Go right ahead with Olympic business as usual and keep obsessing over the jumps as the women compete in the final figure skating event of these Games.
Sure, the jumps are where the risk and reward remain the highest, and also the inevitable focus of the television commentary.
This is a jumping sport, said the coach David Glynn. If you don’t have the jumps you are nothing.
But as the lutzes, salchows and points pile up, take a moment or more to savour something else in this year in which Yulia Lipnitskaya of Russia has joined the Olympic fray at age 15 and redefined the possibilities of a more subtle and frankly more beautiful skill.
“I think people who haven’t seen her will be more impressed with her spins than her jumps,” said Tracy Wilson, the former Canadian ice dancer who is now an analyst.
Many who have seen the stupendously supple young Russian feel the same way. Even her low-altitude double axel seems more spin than jump, considering the two and a half rotations she has to pack into very little airtime.
While jumps look like sport, spins look more like art. While jumps provide the suspense, spins provide the scenery, but there is so much more to the scenery than most viewers have time or means to grasp.
A women’s short programme lasts a maximum of 2 minutes 50 seconds; a long programme a maximum of 4:10. If commentators like Wilson and the former Olympic men’s champion Scott Hamilton used those limited television windows to break down the intricacies of each spin, there would be too much chatter.
“People would say, Shut your mouth, we want to watch the skating,” Hamilton said. “The spins are extremely important, and they can make the difference, but they are hard to really discuss because there is so much going on. If I told an audience, Right there! That change of edge! they are going to go, I don’t see a change of edge. I think when people are watching, they are really looking at the overall impression of the performance.”
Major roleAnd yet the spins play a major role in that impression. They can also prove decisive.
While it is true that a women’s free programme usually features seven jumps and just three spins, it is also true that a combination spin of the highest quality can, according to NBCs performance analyst Patricia Chafe, give a skater 5 points roughly equivalent to a clean triple loop. Many skaters use spins as breathing points or transitions to bigger things. Lipnitskaya uses them as strategically positioned showpieces, finishing both her programmes with her soon-to-be-signature upright split spin in which her raised left leg rests against her cheek as she turns into a blur. “They are well aware of what they have,” Wilson said of Lipnitskayas team.
So is the competition. “She is very good,” said Frank Carroll, the veteran American coach of Gracie Gold. “Very good and very limber.” But no great skater in recent years has managed to produce the same tightly wrapped package of great rotational speed and stability from such extreme positions.
Other contortionist wonders competed farther back on the timeline. Lucinda Ruh, a globe-trotter who grew up in Japan and represented Switzerland, is on nearly every short list of extraordinary spinners. So is the American Ronnie Robertson, who won a silver medal at the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.
Hamilton said Robertson, who died in 2000, would spin so fast that he would break blood vessels in his hands. Ruh, a limited jumper, never finished better than 13th at the world championships before she left Olympic-eligible skating in 1999 and focused on exhibitions and tours. But her renown in the skating community still far exceeds her results.
Phenomenal spinner“Phenomenal spinner,” Hamilton said. She and Ronnie would find that part of the blade that had no friction with the ice, and they would spin at the same speed forever. It just seemed like it would never end, and they could change positions and then recrank the spin and make it happen again.
Ruh said her uncommon skill became her identity and her refuge. “For me it was like a trance,” she said in an interview from New York, where she now lives. “I would go into it and wouldn’t even feel like I was spinning because I was spinning so fast. It was a beautiful experience.”
There are a number of prominent spin doctors, coaches who specialize in the craft. Ruh said she believed many of them were ineffective, and she said she saw no true successor among today’s skaters, though she does appreciate Lipnitskaya’s speed and flexibility. That seems the least Ruh can do, but the twist is that as Lipnitskaya’s spins are bringing that skill back to the forefront, the consensus in the sport is that the spins are in the midst of an identity crisis.
The culprit, as usual, is the new international judging system, known as the IJS, which is no longer so new. When it was begun in 2004, one of its objectives beyond rebooting the sport after the 2002 Olympic judging scandal was to give greater prominence and value to spins.The new judging system was the brainchild of the quantitatively inclined former speedskater Ottavio Cinquanta, who was and remains president of skatings international governing body. The system has defined what was once thought ineffable: awarding spins a level of 1 to 4 for difficulty and then grading them for execution.
Anyone who watches Lipnitskaya will have a pretty good idea, however. And anyone who watches her can never walk away thinking that figure skating is all about the jumps. — ©New York Times News Service
