In Russian Color

Mocking figure-skating fashions has become de rigueur, from television to Twitter, but I’m simply grateful to see the costumes in football jersey their full splendor. The last time Canada hosted the Winter Games—Calgary, 1988—I was seven, my family lived in what was then Leningrad, and we had a black-and-white TV. As each new skater took the ice, I sat stiff and anxious, waiting for the announcers to describe the colors of their costumes: Katarina Witt in red; Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinko in cornflower blue; Brian Boitano in navy with gold trim on the collar.

Gordeeva and Grinko were my favorites. They were so young, so fresh, so earnest. The Russian word for earnest is iskrenii, which shares a root with iskra, the word for spark—and when Gordeeva and Grinko skated, they sparkled. Even this week, as I went back to watch their gold-medal performance in the long program on YouTube, I see the magic, and can forget the brutal Soviet sports machine that made it possible.

My family left for New York the next year, and droves of athletes left after the Soviet Union collapsed. My inner Russian leaps for joy when, during the kiss-and-cry, I hear “Privet, Mamachka! Privet, Papachka!” (“Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!”) from skaters representing Germany, Hungary, or nba jerseys the United States. Maybe it’s age or distance, but skaters for the Russian Federation don’t sparkle anymore. Even Yuko Kavaguti’s story of giving up her Japanese citizenship sounds like a calculated business decision, not a flight of passion.

Those who remained in Russia seem to long for the Soviet system—not only because it achieved results but because there was always someone or something to blame. In the wake of less-than-stellar results in Vancouver, the retired skater Irina Rodnina, who won gold medals for the Soviet Union in 1972, 1976, and 1980, criticized the current head of the Russian Skating Federation, Valentin Piseev, for his poor leadership, and called for him to resign, according to the Russian news site Vesti. The men’s silver medalist Yevgeny Plushenko faulted the new scoring system for his loss to Evan Lysacek. This kind of scapegoating is such a Soviet move; why not simply acknowledge that Russian athletes were bested?

In hockey, figure skating’s bully of soccer uniforms an older brother, the Russians are still coming to terms with their loss to Canada. Boris Maiorov, an analyst for the magazine Soviet Sport (yes, it’s still called Soviet Sport), pinpointed the team’s seven deadly mistakes. He disparaged Evgeni Malkin, a center for the Pittsburgh Penguins when he’s not playing for the Russian national team, for losing the puck at the blue line: “These are the sorts of mistakes that get drilled in sports schools. Losing the puck on your blue line as well as on the opponents’ risks the most dangerous counterattack. And that’s just what happened this time.”

Russia’s fall from Olympic glory may be the byproduct of a nascent democracy. If the government can’t conscript children into sports at a young age, how can Russia achieve athletic greatness? In an extended interview published on the site of soccer jerseys the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Rodnina, the three-time Olympic champion, said, “Russian sport officials have lost their fear.” When you look beyond the medal standings, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.