Aimee
That question will be answered this season as the International Skating Union allows athletes in all disciplines to perform to music with lyrics for the first time. Skating insiders say that the lyrical free-for-all is an attempt to boost television ratings and lure younger viewers. Last year’s Winter Olympic qualifying competition, the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, saw a 20-percent decline in viewership from the previous Olympic year. And according to the United States Figure Skating Association, 52 percent of American figure skating fans are now over the age of 45. This is a far cry from the early Nineties, the good old days of none other than Tonya Harding.
Twenty-three years ago, when the then-reigning national champion attempted to defend her title, she performed to a baffling mix of the Robin Hood score, jazz saxophonist Gato Barbieri’s “Europa,” and “Sleeping Bag” by ZZ Top. It wouldn’t be the grandest imbroglio of the skater’s career – what with the later whack attack on Nancy Kerrigan – but at the time, with Harding’s teased tuft of bangs flopping in the wind, a torso’s worth of gold-sequin snowflake appliqués flying over the ice and ZZ Top crackling from a faltering sound system, her performance was transfixing, if not dazzling.
The year before, Harding had also skated to a peculiar cut that veered anarchically between snatches of musical genres, and part of the excitement of watching her compete derived from this mysterious incoherency. One moment, Harding might be plowing down the ice toward a triple Axel, a blonde, badass chevalier, the next, working her neck to the call of early Nineties percussion. A Harding program was something like a malfunctioning iPod Shuffle, and it was thrilling. Today, its wild card musical styling remains a rarity in the skating world, with skaters favoring reiterations of Swan Lake, Carmen and, perhaps lacking prescience, “Nessun Dorma” (“None Shall Sleep”). Hence: lyrics.
