Is figure skating a vanishing art form?

Over three weeks at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the entire world was rewarded with some of the most brilliant athletic examples of figure skating ever.  But there’s a growing problem:  Under new International Olympic Committee (IOC) rules, performance was judged and medals were awarded mainly on  athletics at the expense of aesthetics. How so?

Under the new IOC scoring rules, judges automatically give points for succeeding, and sometimes just for attempting, difficult  athletic jumps and spins, such as quads, triples and doubles. The sum of these points far outweighs the credit given for artistic, balletic, aesthetic performance. Adding to this, the point value of every jump is automatically increased by 20 percent in “bonus points” if the jump is performed in the second half of the program. This scoring system is gradually changing what Olympic figure skating is all about.

In the women’s figure skating final, for example, 18-year-old Russian champion Evgenia Medvedeva was clearly leading in technical points and expressive artistry, and she was spreading her jumps across a fully choreographed program timed to the music, when her 15-year-old compatriot Alina Zagitova shrewdly saved all her jumps to the second half of her program, and won the gold on “bonus points,” while almost ignoring the musical and balletic components entirely. This is not to belittle Zagitova’s ability, but the new IOC point system failed to reward Medvedeva’s overall performance. 

The most artistic short program was turned in by Italy’s Carolina Kostner, but she made few jumps and didn’t medal. U.S. skater Adam Rippon delivered a brilliantly balletic and expressive performance, and contributed to a team bronze, but he was under-scored and  not awarded an individual medal. Later he was not even invited to participate in the closing gala. Why? Because he said he was gay? This is a potentially embarrassing example of bringing the wrong criteria into a world-class event.

The most artistic balletic performance in ice dancing was gifted to us by the French pair Papadakis and Cizeron, with fewer twists, but they didn’t make gold.  Canadians Virtue and Moir skated beautifully and won gold with a better overall balance of spins in their program. U.S. champion Nathan Chen, who has extraordinary aesthetic talent that we didn’t get to see in this Olympics, led off with six quads, had a couple of glitches and later caught the flu and left early, missing the closing gala. 

In the closing exposition gala, when athletic jumps weren’t required and didn’t count, the American brother-sister pair, Chibutani and Chibutani, as well as  the Russians Zagitova and Medvedeva and other medal winners, finally revealed their true, breathtaking artistry. Seeing this display of talent, a former Olympic gold medalist summed it up on NBC television: “What we have just seen is a vanishing art.” Yes, Olympic figure skating may be an endangered and possibly vanishing art form due to the new IOC point and “bonus point” scoring system, which favors athleticism over aesthetics. What can be done about it?

Years ago, the Director-General of the World Health Organization asked me to sit in on meetings of the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, to help work out a strategy for detecting and dealing with performance-enhancing drug abuse. You saw its successful application at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. As a totally informal and unofficial intervention, I put in a plug for women’s participation in ski jumping.  It took a while, but now we have it. More recently, though, I sent a figure-skating proposal to the IOC and to five-time world champion Dick Button, suggesting that some figure-skating events be divided into two types, one judged by an aesthetics panel, the other by a jump point scoring panel. The suggestion didn’t take, at least not yet. Something like this could be the solution.

The future of Olympic figure skating performance may be just one athletic jump after another.  Jumps are fine, and truly athletic, but the music alone demands the choreographic arts. If we don’t solve this scoring problem one way or another, then true aesthetic Olympic figure skating will become an endangered and possibly vanished art.

Anthony Piel is a former director and legal counsel of the World Health Organization.