April 5, 2006
Article by Tina Tyan
Edited by Brittany Summers

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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