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The 2006 Torino Winter Olympics have brought
their share of drama and pain, triumph and disappointment.
Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, cleared to represent the US
after Tanith's US citizenship application was finally approved, won
the USA's first Olympic medal in ice dance in 30 years.
Michelle Kwan, aiming to finally capture the Olympic Gold,
pulled out of her third Olympics with a groin injury instead. Irina
Slutskaya, poised to complete a Russian sweep, slipped instead to
third while Sasha Cohen, leading after the short and looking to
continue the US ladies' dominance at the Olympics, slipped to
second.
Rena Inoue and John Baldwin landed the first throw triple
Axel in international competition in their Olympic short program, but
placed seventh overall as the highest ranked US pair in the pairs
competition.
Johnny Weir, second after the short program, slipped to
fifth after a disappointing free skate, while his teammate Evan
Lysacek skated a triumphant free skate, pulling himself up from 10th
to fourth overall.
The
Russians virtually swept the competition to no one's surprise, earning
golds in men (Evgeny Plushenko), pairs (Tatyana Totmiyanina & Maxim
Marinin), and dance (Tatyana Navka & Roman Kostomarov).
For
all these athletes, the Olympics have been the ultimate goal, the
competition towards which they've worked their entire careers. With
the Olympics over, though, the question becomes "what next?" For
some, it's back to training and working towards the 2010 Olympics in
Vancouver. For others, however, the Olympics mark a turning point in
their lives. It's a time when many re-evaluate their eligible
competitive careers and decide to move on to the next stage of their
lives. And that next stage has typically been the professional
skating world, particularly the North American professional skating
world. But just what are these skaters moving towards?
Just ten years ago, there were 17 pro or pro-am
competitions being held worldwide. Today, there are two. Ten years
ago, the Stars on Ice tour reached 55 cities during its 10th
anniversary tour, selling out arenas and eventually hitting over 60
cities a year. Today, instead of extending its tour after the
Olympics, Stars on Ice has cut back to 48 cities for its 20th
anniversary tour, and has seen its attendance numbers drop by at least
half since the mid-90s. Champions on Ice still has an extended
post-Olympics tour, but has cut its tour schedule to less than 30
cities in non-Olympic years. When Ice Wars debuted in 1994, its
ratings for two nights of competition were 10.8/16 and 12.1/21. This
year, its twelfth, it was down to less than half that, to a 4.1/7 for
one night of competition. Opportunities still exist in exhibitions,
local shows, and large productions such as Disney on Ice or Broadway
on Ice, but on the whole, the North American pro skating landscape
looks a good bit more dismal than it did a decade ago. What has
changed?
To
answer this question, in December 2005 and January 2006 I talked to
some of the major producers of professional skating, as well as two of
the most dominant figure skaters in the pro world over the last
decade. Some were rather philosophical about pro skating's downturn,
saying that skating, like all sports, is cyclical, and that attendance
for all live entertainment in general is down. If we scratch the
surface a little deeper, though, it becomes apparent that the picture
isn't quite as simple.
Setting the stage
Before we can examine the reasons for the decline of
professional skating in detail, we must first set the stage with a
look at the current state of professional skating.
The
professional world today is dominated by exhibitions, rather than
competitions. The major - and just about only - player in the world
of televised professional skating is Disson Skating, which produces a
series of themed made-for-TV specials which air during the day on
weekends each year on NBC. The only primetime professional event of
any kind is Ice Wars on CBS. There are no individual head-to-head
professional competitions in existence today; the last was held in
2002. The remaining two professional competitions are team events,
only one of which, the World Team Challenge has a pairs component to
it. There have been no professional competitive opportunities
available for ice dance since 2001.
TV
ratings for professional skating have been on a steady decline since
their high in the mid-90s. Fred Boucherle, one of the long-time
producers of Ice Wars and formerly of Jefferson-Pilot
Sports/SFX/ClearChannel, contrasted TV ratings from the mid-90s versus
today: "Double digit ratings vs single digit ratings. Probably twice
the ratings that we're getting now as a rule. So if a skating show in
primetime is getting a 5 rating now, it was getting a 10 rating then.
In the afternoon on the network in the US, the skating shows now are
getting 1.5 to 2 ratings that were getting 3 to 4 ratings."
Attendance figures at live events are also down
considerably. Byron Allen of the International Management Group
(IMG), tour producer of Stars on Ice, explained. "The decline has
been substantial, there's no question about that. In the mid-90s, we
were probably drawing twice as many people as we are now."
Fewer and fewer skaters have chosen to turn pro over the
years, choosing instead to remain in the eligible world for well over
a decade. According to a January St. Louis Post-Dispatch article,
John Baldwin competed for his 21st time at US Nationals this year,
Michael Weiss for his 19th, and Amber Corwin for at least her 12th.
Michelle Kwan has achieved her impressive resume - 9 US Nationals
titles and 5 World titles - by staying in the eligible world through
four Olympics (she qualified for the first, in 1994, as an alternate).
In the meantime, the core crop of professional skaters that have
driven the professional world for over a decade are beginning to
retire or cut down on the number of events they do.
The rise of professional skating...
To
be fair, the situation may not be quite as grim as it seems on the
face. The pro skating boom of the late 80s and 90s in some ways was
more of an anomaly than the norm, and was the result of a rather
special combination of circumstances.
The
turning point came at the 1988 Olympics, which featured two major
rivalries - the Battle of the Brians, between American Brian Boitano
and Canadian Brian Orser, and the Battle of the Carmens, between
American Debi Thomas and German Katarina Witt - which captured the
hype of the media, and the imagination and attention of the public.
The personalities involved were larger than life, and familiar to the
American public - Brian Orser had won silver to American Scott
Hamilton's gold in 1984, while Katarina Witt had won gold and was back
for her second gold medal.
Speaking about the state of pro skating today versus in
decades past, Allen said, "I think it's probably similar to the level
which it was at before the Battle of the Brians and the Battle of the
Carmens, the 88 games [in] Calgary. After that it, really started to
go, but I would say that before that we were at about the level that
we're at now."
Brian Boitano, 1988 Olympic Gold Medalist and one of the
two famous Brians, shared his perspective of this time. "It was
interesting because figure skating really started changing, I think,
after Calgary. I think there was a large cast of people who the
public knew, and it was sort of the very first time [there were] the
big tours. In those days, it was like rock stars. It was new and
fresh. It was really the beginning of those golden years, I
think."
Although Champions on Ice had existed (under a different
name) as a periodic post-Worlds tour since 1969, it only became a
large scale annual production after the 1988 Olympics. At the same
time, when Scott Hamilton founded Stars on Ice with IMG in 1986, it
was a small tour visiting a few experimental markets, but within a
year it gained a sponsor - Discover Card - and began growing rapidly.
Stars on Ice was one of the first major tours to offer opportunities
that featured professional skaters themselves as the stars and
centerpiece of the show, as opposed to playing characters and
competing for ice time and attention with cartoon characters. This
allowed the audience to make a connection with the skaters and become
familiar with the individual personalities in the sport.
By
the time the 1994 Olympics rolled around, a number of factors were in
play that helped spike skating's popularity. There had been three
Winter Olympics in six years, due to the separation of the Winter and
Summer Games, and two in two years. This meant that figure skating,
always a centerpiece of the Winter Games, had been in the national
spotlight more prominently in the years previous. It also meant that
a large number of skaters were ready to turn pro by 1994.
"When we had the two Olympics in three years in '92 and
'94, a tremendous [number of] people came and turned pro. They'd had
Olympic glory, they'd had a number of shots at it, and basically, '88,
'92, '94, you have three Olympics in six years," Allen
explained.
From the public's perspective, the 1994 Olympics had both
the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan soap opera and more well-known names
- the reinstated pros such as Brian Boitano, Victor Petrenko,
Ekaterina Gordeeva & Sergei Grinkov, and Jayne Torvill & Christopher
Dean - to draw them in. The ladies' short program from the 1994
Olympics was the 6th highest rated television program in history. The
US had been enjoying a long streak of Olympic success - Scott Hamilton
(gold, 1984), Rosalynn Sumners (silver, 1984), Brian Boitano (gold,
1988), Debi Thomas (bronze, 1988), Paul Wylie (silver, 1992), Kristi
Yamaguchi (gold, 1992), and Nancy Kerrigan (bronze, 1992 and silver,
1994) - and all of these stars were well-known and active in the
professional world. At the same time, in the 1994-95 season, the
networks were seeking to fill in the gaps left in their scheduling by
the 232-day Major League Baseball strike and the 103-day National
Hockey League lockout. The combination of circumstances was ideal for
the proliferation of figure skating events and
opportunities.
As
four-time World Champion Kurt Browning put it, "We went through a time
where we had so much opportunity that now it seems like we have
nothing compared to that glory golden era, '94 to 98."
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Byron Allen
International Management Group
Byron Allen is a
tour producer for the Stars on Ice tour, and is involved in the
production of events such as the World Team Challenge
competition and the Holiday Festival on Ice Christmas show. He
described his work on Stars on Ice: "I started doing marketing
for the first few shows for some of the test markets, and gradually
got more and more into it. I took over as tour director in '88 or '89,
and added to that as sort of a tour producer, as opposed to a show
producer, which Scott has been. A tour producer thereafter, I've been
that since the early 90s."
IMG is one of
the largest sports management and marketing firms in the world,
representing some of the hugest names in a multitude of major sports,
and involved in the production of a large number of events all over
the world. It is also the primary player in the figure skating
business today, both in skater representation and in event
organization and production. IMG's entrance into the figure skating
world started relatively small, representing Toller Cranston, but grew
quickly once they signed Scott Hamilton in 1984. Scott Hamilton's
firing from the Ice Capades sparked an idea on a beach in Florida to
try to create a "tour which would feature professional skaters as
skaters and not necessarily characters, and really feature a show that
was all about great skating." And thus, Stars on Ice was born. IMG
also partnered with Dick Button to produce the television broadcasts
of the World Professional Figure Skating Championships, and became
involved in an increasing number of professional events from there.
Current partners include Disson Skating and the ISU.
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