Word: ice
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...Ice dancing has always had a bit of a credibility problem. And at the Vancouver Games, it didn't earn any more respect when the Germans showed up in Hawaiian luau threads and the Russians dressed as Australian Aborigines. How can these people expect to be taken seriously? Where's the athleticism? Where's the sport? Is this anything that can be called Olympic? If ice dancing really wants to enjoy a boost, skating officials should take a few lessons from TV - and from Dancing with the Stars...
...world. Celebrities are clamoring to compete on the show and learning that dancing a tango or a waltz can actually be fun. (And, this being show biz, it is a plus that the brutal training schedule is a great way to drop a few pounds.) Just think of ice dancing as ballroom dancing - but navigating through a frozen dance floor on blades. Why shouldn't it benefit from the popularity of DWTS? (See the top 10 worst figure-skating costumes...
...Absolutely," says Tony Dovolani, one of the professional ballroom dancers on Dancing with the Stars, who has partnered with model and wrestler Stacy Keibler and soap-opera star Susan Lucci. "I see a huge transition in ice dancing coming from [the influence of] ballroom dancing. Even the outfits, the arm styling, the way they carry themselves are more ballroom-like." (See the latest pictures from the 2010 Winter Games...
Skaters have long turned to ballroom-dance lessons to learn about carriage, posture and how to best present themselves to an audience of tens of thousands in ice arenas. But until actors and supermodels and athletes took to the dance floor in made-for-television competitions, ballroom had the mothball aroma of a quaint, bygone era, when learning to waltz was part of one's social education, like etiquette classes and lessons in table manners. So take the ingredients of DWTS, the waltz and tango and rumba, put quarter-inch blades on the dancers, and get them moving...
...always kind of on the fence about ice dancing," admits Shawn Johnson, a four-time medalist at the Beijing Games in 2008 in gymnastics and a winner of Dancing with the Stars. "I never really watched it before. But having gone through Dancing with the Stars, it gives me a new appreciation for how hard they work for it," she says. And as a former competitor, she couldn't help but play armchair judge after watching the second of the three ice-dancing events in Vancouver. "Having been criticized on Dancing, I could see the different mistakes," she says...