Costume dramas cause crisis on the ice

AN EXCITING week at the European Figure Skating Championships in Dortmund. The BBC was offering condensed evening reports, with Sue Barker repeatedly promising us sightings of "the ever- popular Finns". If you really wanted to go ice crazy, you could catch every single minute live on Eurosport. When I tuned in, last Thursday lunchtime, the presenter was getting worked up about "a very promising couple from Poland - 23rd in the world and a lot of people are making very positive noises about them". At which point, I decided to catch it later on the BBC.

There's only so much fun you can have. The BBC had Alan Weeks and Barry Davies elucidating the moves rinkside - the doubles, the triples, the double-triples, all of which make the sport sound like a particularly reckless happy hour in a City cocktail bar. (Make mine a triple triple with ice and slice and a packet of cheese Moments.) Weeks sat in on the routines as they happened, pointing out the good bits ("Yet another one!") and Barry Davies glided in at the end of each to talk us reflectively through the replays and smooth us through the judging. We looked again at Ilia Kulik, the precociously gifted 17-year-old with the precociously voluminous bat-wing sleeves. "Took an extra turn after the landing," Davies pointed out. If you did that in our house,you'd end up in the spare bedroom. Here, the cost was greater - lost points on the technical side - though Kulik triumphed even so, becoming, as Weeks put it, "a name we're going to be very close to in years to come".

Sue Barker had also promised us "the entertaining" Philippe Candelaro and along he came, a man, it turned out, so entertaining he had dyed his hair. "One of the great characters of the sport," Weeks said. "He didn't have grey hair this morning. He, as I said, is one of the great characters of the sport." We've seen this hair-colour-as- index-of-fun-factor gambit before, when Andy Townsend, the Republic of Ireland midfielder, went carrot-topped mid-way through last year's World Cup Finals, and, let's face it, it didn't exactly turn him into Groucho Marx. Candelaro had taken out an additional humour insurance policy, though, adopting a pair of stripy trousers. "Inviting the audience to clap along with him," noticed Weeks. This was clearly a tragic figurewe were dealing with here. "Heh heh!" said Weeks. "Quite something very special," he added. Sadly, Candelaro took a tumble on the way round (I say "sadly", though the word which came to mind at the time was, "naaaaagghhh!") and by the end of the performance, even Weeks was forced to conclude this was "not quite the character we've seen in the past".

Let no one say that ice skating is a sport without claws. The misbehaviour, the sullenness and the downright ungraciousness which brightens so much of our sporting calendar has its place in the rink, too. The fixity of those skaters' smiles is our firmest guarantee of this. The lavishly talented French star and all-round tantrum expert, Surya Bonaly, forced to take a lousy second place this week, stood on the podium at the concluding ceremony and removed her medal in protest during the national anthem of the Japanese victor. Hard to imagine a future for her in diplomacy. But easy to imagine a future for her in sport - especially if Nike decide to break into skatewear and need an attitude-primed billboard star.

But to some degree, this is a sport in crisis. It is no longer enough to come out and fling yourself about athletically to a few minutes of Mantovani. Now the pressure is on to garb yourself in a themed outfit, hit the ice running and enact the entire plot of Miss Saigon, complete with helicopter sequence. When Candelaro got marked down, Barry Davies was forced to wonder whether, for a few of the judges at least, "this is sport, not a show". And when the Russian Olympic champion, Alexander Urmanov, appeared in a reassuringly old- fashioned pair of tight disco trousers and did a routine which involved no acting, no gesturing for the crowd's participation and positively no hair-dye, it was like a throw-back to another age. "He just came out and skated tothe music," Weeks said in a tone of amazement.

One fears that these distractions might have arisen out of boredom. Perhaps as an athletic challenge, the sport has become too easy for those who excel at it. There's only so many triples you can do in sequence before you run out of rink. It may be time,then, for the sport's governing body to intervene, to complicate the ice dance again in the interests of competition. For example, by the simple expedient of introducing on to the ice a few fences, as at the Horse of the Year show, the concentration of the athletes would be refocused. There would be less time for them to think about costume and drama if they were working out how to avoid barking their shins on a stripy pole or a section of polystyrene brickwork. Or perhaps a section of the competition could take place underwater. This would call for the development of completely different muscle-groupings but it would at least provide all competitors with an opportunity to deploy the ever popular fins.