Sale-Pelletier flashback

Get it while you can: a flashback to a Mark Steyn column on the Sale-Pelletier judging fiasco from the 2002 Winter Olympics. Remember that one? The Russian pairs honked their long program with technical mistakes and the artistry of constipated sloths; the the Canadians blew the roof off the place and nailed their whole program. But the Eastern bloc judges and the French judge somehow gave the Russians the win. After tremendous public pressure, the IOC did a half-right move by awarding Sale and Pelletier a second gold; in all honesty, it should have reversed the gold-silver result.

Here now, excerpts:

. . . Something strange happened as the week wore on. The more the networks rebroadcast Jamie and David’s entire routine, the more choreographically dramatic and passionate it seemed to become, heightened as it was by fresh revelations of the great injustice, and brief talk-show glimpses of the team’s off-ice love for each other. . .

This apparently is why pairs skating is big business: the audience projects its own romantic fancies on to the couples, no matter how fantastical it might be, especially in the case of some of those ice-dancing chaps. It’s hard to imbue any other Olympic sport with affairs of the heart. Few of us watch the two-man luge and coo, “Oh, it’s so romantic! Look at how the top guy arches his back to avoid crushing the bottom guy’s nuts! It’s obvious they’re in love!”

Romantic projection seems as sound a judging method as anything else. After Monday’s fiasco, there were half-hearted attempts by the experts to attribute it to “cultural” differences: the Russians, Chinese et al would have preferred something classical rather than a sappy Seventies movie score. It was mooted that Jamie and David had made a big mistake by wearing sober, stylish, non-risible grey without any sequins or tassels. In other words, the judges are looking for high-toned symphonic music interpreted by guys in spangly pink bolero jackets. By interpreting cheesy music in serious clothes, Jamie and David had given the fatal impression they’d been reading the instruction manual upside down.

* * *
When it was pointed out that even these technical considerations didn’t quite cover the outrageous farrago of the pairs results, the officials, privately and publicly, offered various explanations, all of which were notable for the almost insouciant lack of pretence that there was any integrity to the judging process. There were those who tried to pass it off as some sort of typing error on the memo: the mandatory ice-dancing fix had somehow erroneously got extended to the freestyle pairs. Asked to respond to rumours that the French judge, Marie Reine Le Gougne, had been pressured into voting for the Russians, the French Skating Federation said Mme Le Gougne was “emotionally fragile”. They should know. By the end of the week, when she was ejected from the judges’ panel, it emerged that they were the ones pressuring her to switch votes. Who, in turn, was pressuring the Federation was less clear, at least officially.

Five months to the day after September 11th, another sinister foreign conspiracy had struck on American soil, and once again underestimated American resolve. Had Skategate taken place in a foreign city before a foreign audience and been broadcast over here in the middle of the night, they might have pulled it off. Instead, despite IOC President Jacques Rogge’s insistence that this is a new Olympic era, the usual corrupt officials blithely assumed they could get away with “victimising a North American pair on North American soil”, as Cam Cole put it in The National Post – and live in US primetime, to boot.

For all that pious guff about not tainting the “Olympic ideals”, the best Games have always been those infected by politics: a racially inferior Negro driving Hitler nuts by taking four medals in ’36; the mad-as-hell Magyars who, a month after the Hungarian uprising, whupped the Soviets in a brutal water-polo match in Melbourne in 1956 . . . to be honest, in the last decade the Olympics hasn’t been what it was. But what happened this week was, like the 1980 US-Soviet hockey match, not just a clash of sportsmen, but a clash of the dominant political philosophies of the day: on the one hand, the moral clarity of post-September 11th America; on the other, the principal challenger to that vision - the multilateralists who insist that any international deal is worth going along with: Kyoto, Durban, the quickstep round of the ice-dancing competition. In the week before Jamie and David hit the ice, you couldn’t pick up a paper without seeing something from Chris Patten or Lionel Jospin deploring the Americans’ lack of “sophistication”. Hubert Védrine, the French Foreign Minister, disdained what he called the “simplistic” approach of the Bush Administration.

Well, we got a good look last week at what French “sophistication” amounts to in practice. It doesn’t matter whether it’s because they’re “emotionally fragile” (like Mme Le Gougne) or just duplicitous bastards (like her Skating Federation), those two options accounting for pretty much every significant event in modern French history. It’s one thing for the “sophisticates” to insist in their own deranged media that the Americans didn’t really win in Afghanistan, it’s quite another thing to insist in the great state of Utah that two plucky Canadians didn’t win in the figure skating. The ISU conceded on Friday that “public opinion” – i.e., Americans - had persuaded them to award a belated gold to Salé and Pelletier, implying that once they’re on the plane back to Europe the skating establishment can resume business as usual. Maybe they can. But for now they’ve learned that, at least on US soil, the new Bush Doctrine applies not just to rogue states but to Rogge states, too.