Word: sporting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...likely bet to win a hatful of medals, was most noticeable as he smiled bashfully at cameras and gave gentlemanly praise to racers who were beating him. The expectations game was at least as delusive among the women. Wasn't Michela Figini, the fiery Italian-Swiss who is the sport's best woman downhiller, supposed to repeat her Sarajevo victory? And then claw it out for most of the other medals with her teammate and nonfriend the formidable German-Swiss Maria Walliser...
Witt was confident in her ability to score high on "artistic impression", she could avoid a technically challenging program. But those skaters who didn't pass the conventional glamour test had to design thrilling, athletic choreography, the kind of choreography that puts ice skating in the category of sport. No viewer can fairly say that the judges were biased against Debi Thomas--she stumbled and fell, she seemed awkward and unconfident. But it does seem that Witt won without the disadvantages Thomas and other skaters had to face: namely risky, exciting moves. While the audience waited anxiously to glimpse skaters...
...arguing for the elimination of artistry and elegance in the sport of ice skating. However, when athletic prowess is shown as a defect--as in the negative clips of Zayak--something about standards on women's ice skating should be questioned. In the Olympic gymnastic events athletes compete in teams, all wearing the same uniforms and little makeup. The women are judged not by their facial beauty or their "well-built" bodies, as Witt said she wished to be judged by, but by a true combination of graceful strength and athletic elegance...
Thomas and other skaters learned that avoiding athletic challenges can garner a woman the gold. Did Saturday night mark an advance in the sport of ice skating, as sportscaster Dick Button wondered? Not if woman's ice skating is to remain a sport. The Olympics, after all, are not the Ice Capades...
...stretched out, every venue and event had its delights, like the wooden shoes of the little Dutch girls echoing their clomps in the speed skaters' Oval. On Mount Allan, where Zurbriggen and Swiss Teammate Peter Muller drew most of the early glare, a softer scene involved the sport's former custodians, the Austrians. Leonhard Stock, 29, the fifth-stringer who replaced fabled Franz Klammer in 1980, then made it worse by winning the downhill gold, finished an unexpected fourth last week and was finally embraced. Two days later, when Zurbriggen found a gate between his skis in the combined downhill...