Is Figure Skating Dying?

LONDON, Ontario – I came to the world figure skating championships to cover the most important winter sports event leading up to the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. Instead, I found a wake. A tiny arena, not even 7,000 seats in all, unable to be filled to capacity for any single event until more than halfway through the competition. In ice-crazy Canada. Eleven months before the Winter Olympics. A sport adrift…  once was one of the most revered and most-watched of any world championships in any Olympic sport, winter or summer. A sport that has fallen on such hard times that the worlds were not shown live on television in the United States on a network that’s easily accessible to most Americans…. And to think that less than two decades ago, the world figure skating championships actually received higher TV ratings than March Madness. Really.

Wait.  What?  Figure skating “a sport adrift”?  “Fallen on hard times”?  Is that even remotely possible?  I’ll grant you I felt like something was up.  The Thornton house was in crisis mode all weekend, with the Worlds not on regular cable and My Precious Irish Rose scrambling around trying to find scoring updates.  I think she finally might have found some grainy, bootlegged video of the Free Skate on some Eastern bloc version of YouTube that had all the quality of an Al Qaeda hostage video.  But I just assumed everyone was as frustrated as we were.  It never occurred to me American Figure Skating could be dying.  I mean, what’s not to love?  The men are hitting quad jumps now on the regular.  We’ve got emerging superstars like the lovely Ashley Wagner and teen sensation Gracie Gold.  Throwback stars like former hockey player Max Aaron, who’s like an Elvis Stoyko for the new millenium.  Plus we’ve got the Davis/White ice dance team, who are the best in the world.  And the US women locked up the coveted 3rd Olympic slot for themselves, which should have the whole country buzzing.  Does that sound like a dying sport to you?  Because if it is, what does that make me?  A grown man wasting his time writing blogs about a niche sport no one cares about?  Not on your life.

I look at it like Spinal Tap’s manager when they asked him why the band went from playing 20,000 seat arenas to half empty 5,000 seat halls.  He said the audience isn’t getting smaller.  Their appeal has just become more selective.  Next year Nationals comes to Boston, the hotbed of Figure Skating in the US.  And you know the City of Champions is going to be out in full force.  The Garden will be packed to the banners and rocking every night.  As the nation’s No. 1 skating blogger I have vowed I will get a press pass and cover this thing top-to-bottom.  From the Kiss & Cry area to the men’s locker room and everywhere in between.  Then you’ll see the sport still has a future if I have to do it all myself. @JerryThornton1