Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 23, 1994                   TAG: 9402230106
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: B-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: HAMAR, NORWAY                                LENGTH: Medium

ICE DANCING: IS IT A SPORT OR ART?

It's the Olympics, so it must be time for an ice-dancing controversy.

Just like clockwork, the argument about whether ice dancing is sport or art has cropped up again. In Albertville, it was French ice dancers Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay, the silver medalists, who proclaimed the discipline was an art form that couldn't be judged.

Now, outraged Britons are blaming everything from judging incompetence to nationalism to illegal dance moves for the bronze-medal finish of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, who won the gold in 1984.

But Torvill and Dean have a simpler explanation for why their free dance - the overwhelming crowd favorite - was good for only third place behind Russia's Oksana Gritschuk-Evgeny Platov and Maia Usova-Alexander Zhulin.

Don't look for logic in ice dancing, they said.

"It's a subjective sport," Dean said. "It involves individual choices. Some people like ballet, some people like rock 'n' roll. Some like classical and some like contemporary music.

"In singles skating, it's so much more obvious. If Brian Boitano misses his triple axel, you automatically know there's a deduction, whereas in ice dancing, it's choreographic.

"You like it or you don't."

Of course, subjectivity enters into singles skating and pairs skating, as well as other judged sports such as gymnastics. Tamara Moskvina, the coach of Russian pairs skaters Natalia Mishkutienok and Artur Dmitriev, attributed their silver-medal finish to differences in taste.

In dance, those differences come into play even more, and even seasoned observers often are hard-pressed to explain why one couple wins out over another.

Margaret Ann Wier, a women's figure-skating judge at this Olympics and a former Olympic ice-dancing judge, acknowledged the rules in ice dancing are "very fuzzy."

Judges are required to watch practices to familiarize themselves with the moves and to determine whether they are legal and are being performed correctly.

"It's a matter of personal interpretation of the rules," Wier said. "If you're not sure, you have to go with the skater."

For ice dancers, reputation - their own or someone else's - often is the biggest obstacle to moving up in the world.

Waiting one's turn usually is the rule.

The Duchesnays finished third, then second, then first in successive world championships. The year they were first, 1991, Usova and Zhulin began their climb up the podium levels, capped by the championship in 1993.

"It was outrageously difficult for us to face the experience of two other pairs so well-known in figure skating," said Natalia Linichuk, the coach of Gritschuk-Platov.

"The biggest problem for us was to overcome those barriers and to show our style - fresh, young and talented," Linichuk said.

Torvill and Dean weren't happy, and neither was the crowd.

So does ice dancing have a credibility problem?

"You as the public have to decide that," Dean said.

In Britain, the public already has decided. An estimated television audience of 23 million tuned in to watch Torvill and Dean skate, and headlines Tuesday decried the results. "Robbery on Ice!" screamed the Daily Express.

"I think the judges are less popular than [prime minister] John Major at the moment," said John Jackson, a reporter for the Daily Mirror of London.