Figure skaters struggle with scoring, limited wiggle room

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Nostalgia clobbered the present day at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships this past weekend.

Michelle Kwan's induction into the Hall of Fame, at the same arena where she won the first of her nine national titles in 1996, would have stolen any skating scene short of a Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding duet. But the video tribute to Kwan added endless reminders that, much like the NBA after Michael Jordan's departure, figure skating hasn't been the same since Kwan's reign ended.

The audience at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, Calif., saw clip after clip that testified to Kwan's crossover celebrity. Vanna White turning over the letters of her name on "Wheel of Fortune." A "Jeopardy" clue about a skater named for a Beatles song. "Will and Grace" characters hailing her as "Michelle Kwan, goddess on ice."

Later, after Ashley Wagner won the 2012 title, she vowed to "show the world that ladies' figure skating in the United States is not over."

Her bravado is admirable, but she faces bigger obstacles than Kwan ever did. An event that should have sold out, the women's long program, fell 424 short of the 9,000 seating capacity. The audience during the week was alarmingly spare. The turnout for men's short program looked like the Oakland Coliseum during an A's-Royals game.

Figure skating doesn't deserve marginalization. With all due apologies to NFL wide receivers, no other athletes combine artistry and power quite so well. But the sport's appeal has been in retreat for a while, as it distanced itself from Harding's knee-whacking, ratings-pumping legacy and latched onto reforms triggered by revelations about corrupt judging at the 2002 Olympics.

One scandal giveth. The other taketh away.

A system implemented to assure more impartial scoring vivisected the sport's history and personality. It's as if someone replaced the star presenters at the Oscars with the accountants who tally the votes doing math onstage.

The old system of awarding up to 6.0s was simple, straightforward. With a ceiling on the scores, everyone understood where skaters stood. The new system ... well, listen to 2011 men's champion Ryan Bradley.

"These scores come up, and you look at the kids in the kiss-and-cry and they don't know what it means," he said. "I got my score last year and it was a 150 in the long, and I was like, 'Oh, I think that's good.' "

Even worse, the new requirements and degrees of difficulty sap some creativity from the skaters. Bradley indirectly expressed his disdain when he did an interview to entertain the crowd between competitions. He watched part of his winning routine on the big screen, grimacing at one spin that required him to bend at the waist, as if he were mooning the spectators.

"Not my choice," he told the crowd.

Another downside: because of the limited wiggle room on mistakes, skaters can refrain from pushing themselves, opting for a triple jump they know they can land over a risky quad.

There was no way figure skating could have sustained the popularity wave after Harding's blockheaded minions assaulted Kerrigan. That was reality TV backed by world-class talent. It set up a 1994 Olympic showdown that generated the sixth-largest ratings in TV history, pulling in 48.5 percent of U.S. households and surpassing all but two Super Bowls.

At about the same time, CBS lost its NFL rights, and started pumping out figure-skating specials and competitions almost as routinely as soap operas. Most everyone in the sport agrees that was overkill.

Kwan came along in that period, a lovely antidote to the scandal, so full of charisma that her pristine image failed to render her dull. Her gracious response to being upset at two straight Olympics endeared her to the audience as much as a gold medal cemented Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming's places in history.

In some ways, U.S. Figure Skating has responded wisely to the decline. It established a pay-per-view website that, for $39.95 a year, allows hard-core fans to watch all the live performances that NBC, trying to craft an easily digested show, won't broadcast. But in San Jose this year, some of the scheduling seemed unwise. The junior women's competitions started at family-unfriendly times on weeknights. It doesn't take an Oscars accountant to tell you those numbers don't add up to a strong future.

(Contact Gwen Knapp at gknapp(at)sfchronicle.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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