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Competitive pros...
Given that the distinction between eligible and
professional skating is often drawn along the lines of sport versus
entertainment, professional competitions occupy an interesting niche
in figure skating. Although most professional skaters feel as 2002
Olympic Champion Alexei Yagudin does, that "we're here to entertain
people, that's the job for professional athletes," professional
competitions offer professional skaters the chance to engage in the
excitement of competition and give them something to work and train
towards each season.
"I
think it's nice to work towards something each year," Boitano
explained. "You get in great shape, with the feeling that competitions
are coming up."
For
Browning, the attraction of competition is that "I get nervous." He
relishes the different dimensions that professional skating has
offered him. "When I competed as an amateur, I was young and knew
nothing else. It is what you are suppose to do because you are young,
brave and healthy. When you get enough of that you want to grow as a
skater and as an entertainer. I wanted that growth and Sandra Bezic
and Stars On Ice gave that to me.. but I still loved the thrill of
competition. Being able to still flex my competitive muscle as a pro
was a gift, truly."
Even though the stakes for professional competitions are
not on the same level as eligible competition, many pro skaters still
feel stress and pressure when they compete. David Pelletier, 2002
Olympic Pairs Champion with Jamie Sale, theorized, "I guess skaters,
we've been doing this for 20 years, competing competing competing, so
as soon as you call something a competition, even though you tell
yourself, well, it's not really a competition... you know it's so
ingrained in you that it comes back. You know, the stress comes back
and you can feel the same stress that you used to feel at
competitions."
In
many ways, professional competitions are what the skaters make of
them. In the late 80s to the mid 90s, the skaters took many of the
competitions very seriously, particularly the World Professional
Championships, aka "Landover", striving to keep their level of skating
up and to continue to improve. Kurt Browning, three-time World
Professional Champion, called the World Pros "one of the most exciting
events I [have] ever been in," while six-time World Professional
Champion Brian Boitano spoke of Landover with a wistful nostalgia. "Oh
man..if you ever went to the old building in Landover...the
electricity, and it was packed, and it was just so special. It was
like the Olympics, really."
Winning one of these events may not have had the same
degree of international acclaim as winning Worlds or the Olympics, but
on a personal level, many of the skaters took real pride and almost
found a deeper personal satisfaction in their professional
accomplishments. Brian Boitano and Kristi Yamaguchi kept the bar of
professional skating high, motivating their fellow skaters to train
hard to meet and try to exceed their level of skating. In his
autobiography, Scott Hamilton speaks of how finally beating Brian
Boitano at the Gold Championships was one of the greatest nights of
his life. And Kurt Browning declares, "I have no doubt that winning
the World Pro Title over Brian Boitano was one of my proudest moments
as a skater. It was my respect for him as a person and a skater that
made it so worthy."
The decline of professional
competition...
This graph tracks the number of professional and pro-am
competitions per year by discipline from 1988 until today.* Between
1994-1998, the number of competitive opportunities for professional
skaters skyrocketed. Although events like the World Professional
Championships and Challenge of Champions had existed for years,
others, such as the Canadian Pros, the Gold Championships, Ice Wars,
and the World Team Championships were all created in 1994. "Fun"
competitions like the Fox Rock 'n Roll Skating Championships, the
first installment of which was the top rated pro skating competition
ever, were also created to capitalize on skating's popularity. In the
early to mid-90s, even skaters with little international competitive
success were able to compete in many of these events and create
successful pro careers for themselves.
Then, after 1998, the pro competition bonanza dried up
abruptly. From 1999 onwards, the number of pro competitions per year
dropped precipitously until there were only two competitions
remaining. The 2002 Olympics had no effect on this drop - in fact,
the number of competitions dropped by almost 1/2 in 2002, and halved
again in 2003. While ratings had been coming down a bit from their
1994-95 high, the abrupt disappearance of so many professional
competitions in 1999 has largely been tied to two things: the
transformation of many professional events into pro-am events, and a
rapid series of acquisitions of several of the major businesses in the
pro skating world by SFX.
The advent of the pro-am...
The
1998-99 season marked a huge shift in the professional competitive
world. Dick Button saw an opportunity to integrate the pro and
amateur worlds, and began to work with the ISU and USFSA to include
amateur skaters in his Candid Productions events. These events were
among the most well-respected, and longest running competitions in the
professional world. The World Professional Championships, the US
Professional Championships, the Canadian Professional Championships,
and the Challenge of Champions all became pro-am events, which allowed
professional and amateur skaters to compete against each other with
ISU judges and modified ISU rules. To Kurt Browning, the appeal of
pro-ams in general was that, "I thought it was great to get to compete
against the guys I just watched win the Olympics. They were modified
events meaning the number of triples were limited, this made an actual
competitive event possible. They were fun."
Never a big believer in the professional/eligible
distinction in the first place, Brian Boitano's view in general of
pro-ams is that, "I think pro-am's a good idea, but if they're going
to do pro-ams, they should open up everything to being all-inclusive
and professional skaters can do the Olympics and Worlds and whatever
they want to do. If they're interested...I mean it's still the same
way I felt in '94. If they want the best of the best, then they have
to let a person who'd want to compete and thinks he can hold his own
against these other skaters to do it."
Although in concept skaters do not object to pro-am
competitions, the transformation of the major existing professional
events into pro-ams was a major sticking point for many. While the
professional competitions were very important to the professional
skaters, to the eligibles, they were just another event to add to
their schedule. This wasn't an elimination of the pro/am distinction,
it was just an incursion of the eligibles into the professional events
without reciprocation. In particular, the transition of the World
Pros, the most prestigious competition in the professional world, to a
pro-am format was cited as a major reason for the disappearance of
that event.
Boitano feels that, "Landover lost its luster when they
turned it into a pro-am. It really ruined professional
competitions. Just that one year, it just tanked. Everybody lost
complete interest, it wasn't the same thing. And I think partially
because the amateurs don't hold Landover with the esteem that
professionals do. Amateurs were just doing it, and then they would
focus on their world. I mean, this was our world every year! So it was
important to us, and it wasn't important to them, and I think the
audience could feel that."
Kurt Browning was equally emphatic when the World Pros
were brought up. "They were awesome, but Dick Button changed the
format. Alexei Yagudin competed as an amateur in it, and he never
should have. Never should have. And that's when I said 'I'm not doing
this' and I stopped. Said, you know, how can we have a World
Professional figure skating champion who is the Olympic champion, and
hasn't turned pro? That's not what we're about. We're about
professionals who tour, and train, and have integrity, and compete
against each other. And we have a World Professional Figure Skating
Championship. So that killed it too."
All
told, the pro-am experiment for the World Professional Championships
was a failure. The event was returned to an exclusively professional
format the following season, but the damage had been done. Key
skaters such as Kurt Browning and, later, Brian Boitano decided not to
return to the event, and audiences, bewildered by the concept of an
eligible skater as "World Professional Champion", lost interest. The
World Professional Championships lasted just two more years after it
became a pro-am, and then disappeared.
There's no business like show
business...
The
other half of the equation is business-driven, but may have been
influenced by the lack of interest in the pro-ams. In early 1999, SFX
bought Jefferson-Pilot Sports' Skating division, which had been
responsible for a large number of prominent televised professional
events such as Ice Wars, Men's Outdoor Skating Championships, CBS
Ryder's Ladies Skating Championships, Fox Rock 'n Roll Skating
Championships, Champions on Ice on USA, Too Hot to Skate, and the ESPN
Legends Figure Skating Championships. Then, in July 1999, SFX bought
Dick Button's Candid Productions, producers of competitions such as
World Pros, US Pros, Challenge of Champions, and the World Team
Championships. Between the two of them, JP Sports and Candid
Productions held the majority of the professional competitions in
existence at the time. These acquisitions were made in the best of
faith that SFX would continue to develop and build the events it had
acquired. However, in June 2000, ClearChannel purchased SFX, and when
the dust from all these acquisitions cleared, Ice Wars was the only
event that remained standing.
While it is easy to blame ClearChannel and SFX for failing
to follow through on the events they had acquired, the elimination of
many of these events may have been inevitable. Public interest in
figure skating in general had already begun to drop, which was only
compounded by the move to pro-ams. The business model for sports on
TV had begun to change; networks were no longer interested in paying
license fees for any but the biggest major league sports, and had
moved to a time-buy model for all other sports. As ratings started to
drop, professional figure skating moved from the license fee model to
the time-buy model, which changed the whole game.
With time-buys, the production company have to put in the
money up front to buy the time from the network, and then are
responsible themselves for bringing in sponsors and promoting the
show. Byron Allen explained, "The networks aren't willing to carry
the shows without the organizers buying the time on the networks, and
the organizers can't afford to do that unless they've got sponsors
which are willing to pay really really big bucks to do it."
Fred Boucherle explained the shifting sports content
business. "Well the sports content business went to time buys, really,
it wasn't just figure skating. It was most sports except for the major
league sports, the NFL, the NBA, the PGA. Those were the big license
fees the networks were paying. But, that's where they put all their
effort, their sales effort and their concentration, because that's
where they were spending the big bucks. And so they had to dedicate
their marketing and their sales and all their efforts to those major
rights fees that they would pay for the big leagues. So, the one-off
events, as they call a lot of the Olympic sports - the non-major
sports, they didn't have the time to sell, so they weren't interested
in spending money to buy them. And they found a business model,
because there was demand for the air time, to sell that time. And let
the entrepreneurs, or the smaller businesses who can live within those
niches to flush the money out for those sports, because they really
didn't have the time or want to put the effort in."
Steve Disson of Disson Skating is one of the few to make
this model work. Asked why he succeeds where others have not, he
answered, "Well, maybe [I'm] the only one that's crazy enough to be
willing to do a time buy." He continued, "In order for us, or
somebody to do a show like this, you have to be willing to take the
risk. Those that are involved in skating in terms of promoting aren't
maybe necessarily people in the business side. I'm not a skater or
former skater, I do it as a business, so I have a business model. And
then, I think what I do is I surround myself with a lot of good people
from the skating/artistic side and let them do their thing while I do
mine. [I'm] just focusing my attention on making it financially viable
and let other people do the artistic thing."
"The model that I have is basically I work closely with
the network to get good time slots which means, wherever I can, try to
get that late afternoon slot, and try to keep the dates of our shows
fairly consistent when they air. I look to try to get buildings to be
the local promoter to help pay me towards my time buy because it's
better...if the building has a vested interest in the event... And
then my strength is obviously I have relationships with many companies
and sponsors. No one else is willing to kind of take that risk of
doing these shows because they don't have the sponsor
relationships. And so my model has been basically that I go out and
buy the time, way in advance, and then I bring the sponsors in that
buy the time, and try to offer them fully integrated marketing
packages where it's not just that they get commercial time, but that
they get benefits of the live event and abilities to sell products and
tie in retailers and things like that."
Disson has applied his business model exclusively to
produce exhibition-style shows rather than competitions. "I think
that some of these competitions, just because the changing nature of
the marketplace, they priced themselves out and they're no longer
economically viable."
Ice
Wars, one of the two remaining professional competitions, and the only
event actually owned and developed by the network, CBS, has struggled
with just this issue. Fred Boucherle explained that exhibitions can
be done for a lot less money and production than competitions.
"Because you don't have to have scoring and judging and... And
frankly, the skaters who participate in Ice Wars, train for Ice
Wars. So they have to be paid more in order to dedicate, to devote
more time to preparing. So they're more expensive. Whether you have
prize money or whether you have appearance fees, the skaters still
expect to be compensated for their time and their effort. All these
things you don't have to do for exhibition. So the business, financial
model for exhibition is much lower. So they can be done much cheaper,
and be sold for much cheaper."
Cristi Carras, another long-time producer of Ice Wars,
also spoke about the economic challenges when sharing her view on the
decline of professional skating. "I think it has declined due to lack
of audiences, the rising cost of producing a first-class event
(travel, trucking (fuel), labor)- makes it very hard to profit when
ticket sales are not there to cover the costs. Sponsors are still
supporting the sport somewhat, but I don't think the levels are as
high, especially when the television ratings don't increase - it makes
it hard to charge a sponsor more when the tv ratings don't support the
exposure that the sponsor would like to get from their affiliation
with the sport."
Talking specifically about the challenges of producing Ice
Wars, Carras continued, "It is a year-long process, but of course most
of the work is done in the last 4-6 months prior to the event
date. The challenges are finding markets that will support the event
through ticket sales- a large grass-roots skating presence helps. It
is difficult to find a market where the consumers have not already
spent their entertainment budget on one of the skating tours or other
exhibitions."
The
cutback in the number of professional competitions was due in large
part to declining interest in the sport. The move to pro-ams, which
diminished a great deal of meaning that the competitions may have had
in the audience and skaters' eyes, was cited as one reason for this
decline in interest. Another reason often cited is the
over-saturation of the market with events that didn't really mean
anything. In the post-1994 boom, everyone wanted to get in on the
profitable skating market, and events were being created left and
right.
Boitano explained, "It's been over-saturation for so many
years, of just some really bad things on show skating. I mean in the
90s from the mid-90s to the late 90s they would buy anything that had
skating related to it. So everybody's doing like 'the Playboy bunnies
judge the skating rock 'n roll competitions' or whatever, and skaters
were being tossed money, and they would do anything. I don't think a
lot of people started making decisions based on 'well is this good for
the sport or what?'"
Aside from the economic difficulties of holding the
competitions, Disson believes that this proliferation of contrived
events contributed to the decline of the pro competitions. "I think a
lot of these competitions just weren't real, you know what I mean?
They were fake competitions. There [was] not real money on the line. I
mean, I used to be involved with the pro-am events with the USFSA when
there was real money on the line. They were all competing for it. I
just think they're contrived competitions."
Boucherle agrees that the market was oversaturated, but
contends that this is just the nature of the business, part of the
cycle, as opposed to a primary reason for skating's decline. "Well TV
does that. At least in the United States. It cannibalizes. Anything
that's successful and good, you know how it is. There will be twenty
of them coming out the next season. So it does that by nature. So it
can and it does hurt, but again, it's just another factor. But it's
more like water finding its own level, really. If there's demand, you
know it's all relative to demand. And if the demand's not there, the
supply is too great, then it's going to over-saturate the market. But
if, you know, it finds that equilibrium, as water does, then everybody
kind of survives."
In
the meantime, the producers these days are sensitive to the
accusations of over-saturation, and try to avoid them. "People have
talked about the fact that, well maybe there is too much skating on
TV, maybe they're seeing the same programs over and over," Allen said,
explaining why they chose not to air full programs from this year's
Stars on Ice show in the NBC broadcast. Disson's model of themed
one-off shows is also specifically designed with this concern in mind.
"Part of the knock used to be on skating is you see the same skaters
doing the same show numbers over and over again. There used to be way
too much skating on. Now you see the skaters in our show, they're all
theme-driven or based on the entertainers, so we do an Earth, Wind,
and Fire show that's on the tribute show, it's all the music of Earth,
Wind, and Fire. You know, these are all going to be new numbers that
the skaters learn. We have a show with Kurt Browning that's
Italian-themed with Andrea Bocelli, and you'll see new numbers in that
show. And the holiday show..so each one has a different
theme."
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Brian Boitano
Brian Boitano is well-known for his accomplishments on the ice. He is
the 1988 Olympic Champion, two-time World Champion, four-time US
Champion, and six-time World Professional Champion. He was elected to
the World and US Figure Skating Halls of Fame in 1996, and was the
first American skater to land a triple Axel in 1982. In addition to
his accomplishments as a figure skater on the ice, however, Boitano
has also been extremely active off the ice. He owns his own
production company, White Canvas Productions, which has produced a few
shows a year for ten years, including the Brian Boitano Skating
Spectacular, in conjunction with Disson Skating. He and Katarina
Witt also co-founded the Skating tour with Bill Graham
Presents, which was bought by IMG in 1992 and became the base for the
high production-value tour the Stars on Ice tour turned into. Boitano
says, "I think I've been involved in sort of every aspect, from
amateur skating and competing, to professional skating. I've pretty
much done everything you could do - touring, my own tour, other
people's tours, tours in tours like the Nutcracker, TV shows. I think
that I've been involved in a pretty broad place, and for 10 years have
been producing our own shows as well."
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