If you do a quadruple-revolution jump today, someone else will do two (or four) quads tomorrow, so you’d better learn how to do more quads. [Some] athletes […] may think that the way to improve as skaters is to add an additional rotation to a jump. If so, they could not be more mistaken.
As a result, they ensure themselves a less significant role in skating history than they would occupy through developing other strengths. As soon as someone news comes along and adds yet another rotation, their accomplishments will fade. However, when the accomplishments are artistic and innovative, when a skater changes the medium of skating and moulds it to his personality […], he guarantees himself skating immortality.
It’s not me writing these words. What I write can easily be ignored by insiders, even if I know that someone reads me, because I’m nobody. In this case, however, I limited myself to deleting the names of the skaters mentioned and adding a word to have a complete sentence, precisely because I deleted some names. And whoever wrote these words, whoever published this book in 2000, knows figure skating, and while he was alive it was hard enough to ignore. ISU, what about wondering about the meaning of what is written? Ask yourself what pleases the spectators, what makes them love figure skating? And what is the direction taken by figure skating in the last years?
The skaters named are Elvis Stojko, some unidentified Russian skaters and Todd Eldredge on one side, and Gary Beacom and Laurent Tobel on the other. I don’t remember seeing Tobel compete, his international career didn’t last long, three World championships and a European championship, and unfortunately somehow I always managed not to see his programs. Beacom had already turned pro when I started watching figure skating. In fact, I happened to see the end of ladies’ free skate at the 1989 World Championship, and I fell in love with Midori Ito. The next day I turned on the television to watch the gala and fell in love with Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay, Kurt Browning and maybe someone else (did Kristi Yamaguchi attend that gala? Because it was love at first sight with her too). Some time later, I can’t say how much but not so much, I came across a show of skaters who were already pro. And I fell in love with Gary Beacom. He is one of the skaters who are at the root of my love for figure skating. And even though Beacom has only competed in two World Championships and one edition of the Olympic Games, and finished tenth at most, if the choice is between watching Beacom, Stojko, Eldredge or any Russian skater (and I mean the contemporaries of Stojko but also to those who arrived before and those who arrived after him), I watch Beacom. Without the slightest hesitation.
The book, just to clarify, is Toller Cranston’s When Hell Freezes Over. And immediately after the passage I quoted (p. 238), are these lines:
At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Tara Lipinski’s win in the ladies’division was justified by the “experts” on the grounds that she had executed one more jump than Michelle Kwan, the beacon of light, the ultimate contemporary skater, and perhaps one of the ultimate skaters of all time. Such a rationale in itself is a crime. That should not be the reason why a skater wins an Olympic gold medal.
Although there have been much more egregious examples, that sort of thinking tells the skating audience at large that the quality of skating, the quality of jumping, choreography, musicality, and beauty mean absolutely nothing. The only important criterion is the number of jumps executed successfully – in direct contrast to the way skating was judged in the 1970s and 1980s, when figure skating build to the crescendo of popularity that it now threatens to fritter profligately away.
It’s not me saying it. It’s Toller Cranston, in 2000. I think they must have been a little distracted at the ISU, and they didn’t hear him speak.
