Post by Admin on Jan 7, 2014 8:23:29 GMT -6
From the Philadelphia Inquirer:
February 17, 1988
THEY ARE THE BEST, AND THEY PROVED IT
by Bill Lyon
First there was Olga.
And then came Nadia.
Followed by Mary Lou.
And now there is Katya.
The camera finds them in the Olympics, these fetching child-women, falls in love with them, and then dares us not to be smitten in turn.
First there was Olga Korbut, the sassy Russian sprite, dissolving in tears over her mistakes, giggling and glowing over her successes.
Then there was Nadia Comaneci, the pert Romanian with the Silly-Putty body, littering the scoreboard with perfect 10s.
Then there was Mary Lou Retton, the American munchkin with the megawatt smile and the linebacker's legs. She attacked gymnastics with goal-line gusto.
And now . . . ah, now there is Katya.
Ekaterina Gordeeva.
Sixteen.
Bone structure by Wedgewood.
Skin by porcelain.
Pony-tailed and poised to become a haunting Russian beauty, a heroine worthy of the rhetorical raptures of Chekov and Tolstoy. She is a skater, though in truth she seems to spend more time off the ice, thrown up above it, up there where Air Jordan hovers.
Her partner, Sergei Grinkov, lifts her easily over his head. She is a whisper shy of 5 feet and weighs but 84 pounds, most of that in her coltish legs. He is 6 feet, 170, a beanpole really, but he seems a giant alongside her. It is said that they do not really constitute a true figure-skating pairs tandem, but rather an entry of one and a half. It is their size discrepancy, however, that enables them to perform their dazzling gymnastics on the ice.
He twirls her about for a while, flings her up near the balcony, skates around in small circles, and then comes back to catch her.
Most of the time.
Earlier this winter he did not get back in time to retrieve her. She crashed to the ice, bouncing her head, sustaining a concussion.
But there is true grit in Katya. She was back skating, back being thrown over the moon, within weeks.
They are the very best in the world and they solidified their status and their standing last night by winning the gold medal in a stunning 4 1/2-minute program that contained more liftoffs than Cape Canaveral.
She was a joyful ballerina, alternately coquettish and kittenish, and he the technically perfect complement. Their program was clean and precise, something fit for an ice palace. They were accorded a standing ovation, earned all 5.8 and 5.9 scores (6.0 is perfect) for technical merit, and all but the British judge (5.8) gave them 5.9 for artistic impression.
Eleven pairs had skated before them, and three came afterward, but it was obvious the standard had been set, and the race was for the silver.
They were reluctant partners initially. Each had wanted to pursue a career in singles. But their ice pairing was ordered by state decree, much like a royal marriage of convenience. That was when she was 10, he 15.
They may have been forced together, but they meshed brilliantly almost from the beginning. In less than three years, they had won the world junior championships. Then they won the last two world titles.
And, now, a gold medal.
It was theirs even before the competition began. In international figure skating, reputations count almost as much as performances, sometimes more. The judges become familiar with the routines and thus are able to detect - or overlook, depending on their bias - mistakes of both omission and commission.
Judging in figure skating is subjective, of course, but also unabashedly political. It was the unusually harsh scoring of an East German judge, for example, that had been the difference between the U.S. pair of Jill Watson and Peter Oppegard finishing third instead of second after the short program Monday night. Her scoring was so out of line that it was booed twice, when it was first announced in French, then again in English.
But from the nine-judge panel there had been nothing but unanimity about Gordeeva and Grinkov. The short program was 2 minutes, 15 seconds in length, with the execution of seven required elements. They had flowed flawlessly through that, so effortlessly that it seemed almost embarrassing that they were forced to perform such mundane movements. So, for spice, they casually threw in some lifts and tosses, a teasing foreshadowing of what was to come in the free program.
The short program counts for 28 percent of the total score, so it was still necessary for the child-woman and her catapult to come up with something spectacular Tuesday night, something to live up to their considerable reputation.
In the occasionally catty and back-biting world of figure skating, there is some undisguised jealousy of Gordeeva and Grinkov. There are those who contend that they are too athletic and not nearly artistic enough, that they depend too much on acrobatics, that they are a freak pair and have turned a classical event into nothing more than pitch and catch.
It sounds like envy.
Their sport is physical, but it remains aesthetic. It is unnecessary to be conversant with the nuances of the axel and the lutz and other technical intricacies to appreciate the child-woman and her battery mate and what remarkable anti-gravity wonders they perform.
You would recognize right off that they were the best in the world if they were doing this on dry land. That they manage it while balanced on blades only adds to the effect.
Perfection is perfection. In any language.
February 17, 1988
THEY ARE THE BEST, AND THEY PROVED IT
by Bill Lyon
First there was Olga.
And then came Nadia.
Followed by Mary Lou.
And now there is Katya.
The camera finds them in the Olympics, these fetching child-women, falls in love with them, and then dares us not to be smitten in turn.
First there was Olga Korbut, the sassy Russian sprite, dissolving in tears over her mistakes, giggling and glowing over her successes.
Then there was Nadia Comaneci, the pert Romanian with the Silly-Putty body, littering the scoreboard with perfect 10s.
Then there was Mary Lou Retton, the American munchkin with the megawatt smile and the linebacker's legs. She attacked gymnastics with goal-line gusto.
And now . . . ah, now there is Katya.
Ekaterina Gordeeva.
Sixteen.
Bone structure by Wedgewood.
Skin by porcelain.
Pony-tailed and poised to become a haunting Russian beauty, a heroine worthy of the rhetorical raptures of Chekov and Tolstoy. She is a skater, though in truth she seems to spend more time off the ice, thrown up above it, up there where Air Jordan hovers.
Her partner, Sergei Grinkov, lifts her easily over his head. She is a whisper shy of 5 feet and weighs but 84 pounds, most of that in her coltish legs. He is 6 feet, 170, a beanpole really, but he seems a giant alongside her. It is said that they do not really constitute a true figure-skating pairs tandem, but rather an entry of one and a half. It is their size discrepancy, however, that enables them to perform their dazzling gymnastics on the ice.
He twirls her about for a while, flings her up near the balcony, skates around in small circles, and then comes back to catch her.
Most of the time.
Earlier this winter he did not get back in time to retrieve her. She crashed to the ice, bouncing her head, sustaining a concussion.
But there is true grit in Katya. She was back skating, back being thrown over the moon, within weeks.
They are the very best in the world and they solidified their status and their standing last night by winning the gold medal in a stunning 4 1/2-minute program that contained more liftoffs than Cape Canaveral.
She was a joyful ballerina, alternately coquettish and kittenish, and he the technically perfect complement. Their program was clean and precise, something fit for an ice palace. They were accorded a standing ovation, earned all 5.8 and 5.9 scores (6.0 is perfect) for technical merit, and all but the British judge (5.8) gave them 5.9 for artistic impression.
Eleven pairs had skated before them, and three came afterward, but it was obvious the standard had been set, and the race was for the silver.
They were reluctant partners initially. Each had wanted to pursue a career in singles. But their ice pairing was ordered by state decree, much like a royal marriage of convenience. That was when she was 10, he 15.
They may have been forced together, but they meshed brilliantly almost from the beginning. In less than three years, they had won the world junior championships. Then they won the last two world titles.
And, now, a gold medal.
It was theirs even before the competition began. In international figure skating, reputations count almost as much as performances, sometimes more. The judges become familiar with the routines and thus are able to detect - or overlook, depending on their bias - mistakes of both omission and commission.
Judging in figure skating is subjective, of course, but also unabashedly political. It was the unusually harsh scoring of an East German judge, for example, that had been the difference between the U.S. pair of Jill Watson and Peter Oppegard finishing third instead of second after the short program Monday night. Her scoring was so out of line that it was booed twice, when it was first announced in French, then again in English.
But from the nine-judge panel there had been nothing but unanimity about Gordeeva and Grinkov. The short program was 2 minutes, 15 seconds in length, with the execution of seven required elements. They had flowed flawlessly through that, so effortlessly that it seemed almost embarrassing that they were forced to perform such mundane movements. So, for spice, they casually threw in some lifts and tosses, a teasing foreshadowing of what was to come in the free program.
The short program counts for 28 percent of the total score, so it was still necessary for the child-woman and her catapult to come up with something spectacular Tuesday night, something to live up to their considerable reputation.
In the occasionally catty and back-biting world of figure skating, there is some undisguised jealousy of Gordeeva and Grinkov. There are those who contend that they are too athletic and not nearly artistic enough, that they depend too much on acrobatics, that they are a freak pair and have turned a classical event into nothing more than pitch and catch.
It sounds like envy.
Their sport is physical, but it remains aesthetic. It is unnecessary to be conversant with the nuances of the axel and the lutz and other technical intricacies to appreciate the child-woman and her battery mate and what remarkable anti-gravity wonders they perform.
You would recognize right off that they were the best in the world if they were doing this on dry land. That they manage it while balanced on blades only adds to the effect.
Perfection is perfection. In any language.