Figure skating always was going to be the Winter Olympic highlight for U.S. audiences. It has been that way since the first live Olympic telecasts showed Peggy Fleming winning her gold medal in 1968, and the sport’s appeal has grown steadily since.
The final 20 minutes of the Katarina Witt-Debi Thomas confrontation in the women’s skating final at the 1988 Olympics got a 47 rating-numbers that usually apply only to Super Bowls. In 1992, Olympic skating telecasts placed fifth through seventh among the highest-rated sports shows of the year, beaten only by pro football playoffs and the Super Bowl.
Imagine, then, what is going to happen at the Olympics opening here Saturday, now that figure skating has impinged upon the general consciousness in a way no previous popularity statistics could begin to measure.
Scandal has put the sport on not only the covers of national newsmagazines but supermarket tabloids in the United States. The aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on Nancy Kerrigan also has been closely followed overseas.
L’Affaire Kerrigan got four pages in a recent issue of Paris Match magazine, which described rival Tonya Harding as a skating Salieri frustrated by being confronted with a Mozart. The Independent newspaper of London devoted three-fourths of a page in its Feb. 4 issue to a story headlined, “The skater in question.” Asian newspapers have turned the possibility that Harding had a role in the assault on her Olympic teammate into a morality play on the decline of American morality.
While the American public, the U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Figure Skating Association continued to debate whether Harding was involved in the attack on Kerrigan and whether she should keep her place on the U.S. Olympic team, another U.S. figure skater suddenly made news because of a bizarre family tragedy.
Six days before she was to leave for the Olympics, U.S. champion ice dancer Elizabeth Punsalan learned that her father, Ernesto, had been murdered in his Sheffield Lake, Ohio, home. Punsalan’s brother, Ricardo, who was home on a weekend pass from a hospital psychiatric unit, told police he had stabbed his father to death.
When USFSA spokeswoman Kristin Matta was awakened in the middle of the night by a call telling her of Ernesto Punsalan’s death, she found it nearly impossible to assimilate the information.
“I thought I was hallucinating,” Matta said.
Given everything else that had happened to U.S. figure skating in the previous month, Matta’s incomprehension was understandable. The circumstances surrounding the killing of Ernesto Punsalan made it seem even more like a nightmare.
A few minutes later, as Matta made the necessary phone call to Olympic authorities in Norway, she was hit by the terrible reality of the situation.
A couple of hours after that, Matta was running the press conference in which a figure skating investigative panel had found reasonable grounds to believe Harding was involved in or knew of the plan to attack Kerrigan.
“It is a sad, unfortunate sequence of events,” said Chuck Foster, vice president of the U.S. Olympic Committee and an international figure skating judge.
There is, of course, no logical connection or comparison between the attack on Kerrigan and the death of Ernesto Punsalan.
It has been easy to forget that the physical harm done to Kerrigan was fortunately minimal-a bruised knee, from which she appeared to have fully recovered three weeks before the Feb. 23 start of the Olympic women’s competition.
“In Norway, people don’t understand all this,” said Phyllis Thorenfeldt, the American-born mother of Norway’s eight-time national women’s champion. “They don’t understand how figure skating could be so important.”
Six quickie books about Kerrigan, Harding or both are soon to come off U.S. presses. More than 50 producers have expressed interest in doing movies on the subject. The 1994 Winter Olympic organizers made a last-minute switch of their press conference room at the figure skating site to accommodate four times the number of media they originally planned for.
The Kerrigan incident has attracted so much attention for reasons that have little to do with figure skating, except for the irony that such unseemly behavior has affected such an apparently genteel sport.
Coverage of the case has been blown out of all reasonable proportion because of its pulp mystery ingredients-the bizarre gang of four men who were allegedly involved in planning and carrying out the attack, and the possibility that Harding herself was a co-conspirator, which her ex-husband asserted while arranging to plead guilty to his own involvement.
Two-time U.S. champion Harding, 23, had already been the protagonist of many stories drawn from her dirt-poor childhood, her foul-mouthed disdain for friends and foes, and her gritty competitive spirit. The dirty laundry of her life, especially her on-and-off marriage with Jeff Gillooly, had been aired in public even before the attack on Kerrigan, the 1992 Olympic bronze medalist.
Whether all this has sullied the sport remains debatable, but there is no question it has overshadowed the rest of the Olympic figure skating competition, which begins Sunday with the paiqrs event.
Few remember that Kerrigan finished fifth to Oksana Baiul of Ukraine in last year’s world championships, for which Harding did not even qualify. Before Jan. 6, Kerrigan was only among the three or four gold-medal contenders. Since then, sympathy has turned Kerrigan into the gold-medal favorite.
Few remember that before this skating season, most of the attention focused on the expected historic confrontation in men’s singles. For the first time in an Olympics, two men’s gold medalists-Viktor Petrenko of Ukraine in 1992 and Brian Boitano of the United States in 1988-are to compete against each other.
The men’s event should be further enhanced by the presence of four-time world champion Kurt Browning of Canada, trying for the Olympic medal a back injury likely prevented him from winning in 1992.
That competition grew more intriguing when Browning was upset by Elvis Stojko in the Canadian championships, Boitano was upset by Scott Davis in the U.S. championships and Petrenko staggered to victory in the European championships.
The return of 1984 Olympic dance champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean of Great Britain promised to enliven the dance event here, and the European results ensured it would. Torvill, 36, and Dean, 35, who revolutioned the sport nearly 15 years ago, won by the smallest margin of their career.
Each of the top three teams won one of the three phases of the European dance competition, which creates a stunning amount of Olympic uncertainty in an event where results once seemed wholly predetermined. Russian dance teams Oksana Gritschuk-Evgeni Platov and Maya Usova-Alexandr Zhulin are clearly an even match for the formerly dominant Britons.
For U.S. audiences, the battle for first may seem secondary to the personal battle Elizabeth Punsalan must fight in the dance event. Punsalan, who partners with husband Jerod Swallow, will begin skating only 10 days after her father’s funeral.
“When you have a tragedy like this, having a goal can be very important to help take your mind off it,” said figure skating official Paul George. “When people get to a competition, their main focus becomes the job at hand.”
For the entire sport, refocusing on the ice will be a welcome relief from five weeks that no Zamboni can ever wipe away.
