Publisher for a Day

Have you ever watched Olympic figure skating for the skill, the artistry, the technique, the dizzying spins and the soaring jumps, the fluid movements and imaginative interpretations? Me neither. If you’re like me, there’s one thing that’s highest on your agenda when it comes to Olympic-level figure skating: the spills.

But lately I find falls onto the ice harder to bear. It isn’t be­cause my empathy has outgrown its britches — as the great for­mer Boston Bruins broadcaster (and player) Derek Sanderson once said, “We know where sympathy is in the dictionary; let’s leave it there.” It’s just that it’s hard to know who to root for — and, much more important, it’s hard to know who to root against. The Republican Party wasn’t the only victim of the fall of Communism in the early 1990s. The Olympics took a tumble, too, at least from a viewer’s perspective.

Oh sure, we got a bunch of new countries with colorful flags, and a lot more freedom for oppressed peoples of the world. But I don’t find their freedom very entertaining, darn it, and now they’re no longer obvious targets of abuse. Time was when the Commie challenger skated onto the ice (probably boosted by various performance-enhancing drugs con­cocted in East German laboratories) it was easy to know what to do. Applaud every “slight bobble,” as Dick Button used to say, and cheer for every tumble. There was nothing quite so satisfying as seeing years of training in a Soviet athlete-machine crumble to the ice like so many shards of glass from Lenin’s tomb.

Now practically all the athletes come from at least arguably free countries. (Like, say, this one.) They all have fetching stories about skating backwards on an iced-over puddle in their poor neighborhood before being spotted by a coach and whisked away to some sort of climate-controlled ice palace for round-the-clock practicing, good dieting, and yoga. They all sacrificed pizza, algebra, and teen movies to make it to this, their one shining moment, when they get to not only compete for a medal but lift the aesthetic consciousness of us, the viewers, by their artistry and grace. (And their endorsements.) So when that darn edge refuses to hold the ice and make a little C, but rather plunks down into some sort of Morse code that abruptly stops when they hit with some part of their anatomy other than their foot … well, it hurts. At least a little. I find it hard to watch, actually, as I witness their fleeting dreams effortlessly move into lifetime nightmares. For a moment, I wince and wish that these people from faraway places didn’t have to go through this mental and physical torture in front of millions of people. I can’t take it, I tell you.

Now when is the ski jumping coming on?