I thought the whole idea was to make skating more "mainstream"--or at least increase its audience closer to the levels we saw back in the Kwan, Lipinski, Cohen eras. Hyping non-American skaters will never achieve that goal in the US any more than hyping US skaters in Russia would have any affect on interest there. If US Figure Skating had a dominant star among the ladies, interest would grow. I'm not sure it would ever reach the levels we saw in the 90s and early 00s, in part because of the scoring system and also because TV coverage is poor. I miss the days of ABC coverage, with Dick, Peggy and Terry Gannon, all of whom actually attended the big events and reported live, even if the event was shown on tape delay.
How can USFS better develop the sport?
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I thought the whole idea was to make skating more "mainstream"--or at least increase its audience closer to the levels we saw back in the Kwan, Lipinski, Cohen eras. Hyping non-American skaters will never achieve that goal in the US any more than hyping US skaters in Russia would have any affect on interest there. If US Figure Skating had a dominant star among the ladies, interest would grow. I'm not sure it would ever reach the levels we saw in the 90s and early 00s, in part because of the scoring system and also because TV coverage is poor. I miss the days of ABC coverage, with Dick, Peggy and Terry Gannon, all of whom actually attended the big events and reported live, even if the event was shown on tape delay.
As Dave himself noted and commented on, USFS was (3 times) given a fully-functioning demo of a database/archive system that could have been offered as a subscription service to coaches (and judges, as there was a judge-training component), with the option for a public side that could have been free in the style of the JGP videos, but with better indexing. They were offered this *at no charge*. Their entire response was to ask the developer to demo it for a company that they were paying to create a "judging game" as part of the icenetwork phone app.
IMO they deserve every bit of the scorn Dave has been throwing their way.
IMO they deserve every bit of the scorn Dave has been throwing their way.
It seems to me that Dave loves ice dance. I actually get kind of annoyed at the amount of time TSL spends on ice dance discussion. Ice dance is never going to gain a big audience in the US. The ice dance moves are too specialized and hard for an non-ice dance viewer to spot, let alone evaluate. The scoring system helped to make ice dance fairer, but it doesn't help the audience know why one couple won over another, at least among the top skaters. A winning ladies skater is what makes skating popular in the US--someone who is a gold medal threat every time and a winner at big events.
TSL brings up a really great point about the conflict of interest between USFS being a stakeholder in Ice Network. If you want to promote a sport they need to do human interest stories on non-Americans. Someone made a point earlier about League of Legends and how even though it isn't even remotely competitive (even the Chinese teams rely on Koreans) it still manages to fill soccer stadiums . It's partly due to fluff pieces like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV1doycNe9w. League of legends isn't the only super popular esport either. Dota 2 also does great pieces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzZGTbaENGo. These 'sports' are relatively young and are still managing to pull growing audiences in the right lucrative demographics.
If there isn't an English fluff piece for Evgenia Medvedeva going into the Olympics, than there is something horribly wrong with the whole ecosystem.
edit: A fluff piece on Hanyu and Javiar should be the bare minimum, and since they train in Toronto it should be so so easy.
If there isn't an English fluff piece for Evgenia Medvedeva going into the Olympics, than there is something horribly wrong with the whole ecosystem.
edit: A fluff piece on Hanyu and Javiar should be the bare minimum, and since they train in Toronto it should be so so easy.
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Ooh, totally forgot Oppegard and Rockne. And thanks for listing the others! Didn't know Rudi was also a coach - knew about his choreography, obviously.
It'd be great to see more of these coaches at Nationals with students.
I guess we really just lack a big star who has gone on to be a high-level coach, which isn't a huge deal.
I'm still mystified as to how the US hasn't had any big deal skaters train with BOrser since Adam Rippon.
And it's a shame USFS wasn't able to find a way to keep Ingo Steuer here a few years ago. Wooing great foreign coaches has done wonders in the past.
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To be fair to IceNetwork, as much as I hate it, they do have plenty of articles which focus on non-Americans. Their Ice Talk podcast has also had some great interviews with non-Americans. They're usually Canadian, but I also recall a fabulous interview with James/Cipres. They've also interviewed Misha, P/C, and Javier. (Ice Talk is BY FAR the best bit of content IN has ever produced, FYI, and I recommend it.) But IN content isn't reaching anyone who isn't already a skating fan.
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It will never reach the level of the 90's because leisure and entertainment is fragmented and there are so many options to occupy someone. I became a skating fan in part because growing up in the snowbelt in the pre-Internet era, there wasn't much to do when the weather was bad except watch CBC sports weekend. Now, if I'm trapped at home during a blizzard, I can just see what's good on Netflix.
And that goes for all sports. Ratings and attendance for all big sports, even the NFL, are down across the board.
Also Greg Zuerlein who is assistent coach in Shpilband's team. His senior career didn't last long but neither Igor's (IIRC Shpilband also retired young without and he never made the Euro/World team)
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Yeah the James/Cipres podcast was great. Nic and Jackie do a great job, but it's still pretty heavily US/Canada focused. Video though has much more impact and always seems to do better for exposure on youtube.
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Serialized crime podcasts are huge. IN/USFS should recruit a real journalist like Christine or Phil to do a Tonya Harding podcast (tired of the narrative as we may be, it's an enormous cultural touchstone for the US and would be hugely appealing to people in their 20s, for whom the story would be semi-fresh.) Parlay that success into a season or two that is actually about skating - season 2: the 2002 scandal and the birth of IJS - have ads shilling for current skaters and current skating, etc. It would be like printing money.
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I agree and there are way more issues in figure skating than just the debate of whether it is 'sport' enough. These are currently two of my major interests and I have been to both MSG for League of Legends and Boston for Worlds Figure Skating, so I thought I'd add in some of my thoughts regarding the similarities and differences between these two that might explain the differences in sponsorships. Both esports and figure skating have niche markets and are not really accessible to outsiders and are not 'mainstream'. Figure skating is perhaps the more widely accepted of the two because it's an Olympic sport -- if people are complaining about being seen as weird for liking/watching figure skating, imagine explaining to other people about watching people play video games on a screen in an arena.
However, the demographics for esports is much more clearly defined in terms of gender and age range (predominantly male and around 18-24), both of which are very desirable to sponsors, and esports itself is easily linked to sponsorship products like gaming systems or energy drinks like Red Bull. The demographics for figure skating is much more varied in terms of age range and is predominantly female, which makes it a harder market to target.
People are fan of teams, so even though players can be dropped or added, the support for the team can remain and the fanbase loyalty can be retained even after a popular player retires. Fanbase loyalty is very important for sponsorships. Figure skating is an individual sport and people follow skaters. Fans need to keep finding new skaters to support to remain invested in the sport. This means that the popularity of the sport is very susceptible to the public interest in the current crop of skaters. Also, esports personalities interact a lot more directly with fans on a regular basis since they stream their gameplay (practices) and chat with fans, so they can build their own fanbases and attract their own sponsorships as well through their own reach. Aside from twitter/instagram posts and some vlogs, skaters do not really interact with the fans via their trade (i.e. skating).
As you would expect, the audience cultivation and interaction for esports is largely online, which is true for the majority of skating fans as well. I don't think targeting TV audience would be a worthwhile investment in this day and age and figure skating as a sport is not really suited to TV watching because it is a long series of performances from individual skaters of varied abilities. The attention span of TV watchers cannot last that long, especially when you are starting with the lower-level performances. For esports, there are central streaming locations (twitch.tv, youtube gaming) that are free, global, easily accessible and provide a platform for people to interact via chat, which gives it a more 'group-like' experience. It is like posting on the forum threads here except the forum format is not a really ideal chatting environment during live streams. Having a global centralised and accessible viewing platform would make it much easier to attract sponsorships since the viewers would be centralised as well, so there is a clear indication of the reach that sponsors want to see. It's also easier to track where viewerships are coming from and where there are interests to host events. Figure skating viewership is scattered and spread across countries and platforms, hardly a desirable target for sponsors especially since the demographics is already so varied.
At the end of the day, I think instead of trying to make figure skating more 'mainstream', they should just make it easier to watch and share the performances online. Just satisfy and strengthen your core viewership and make it easy for THEM hook in new viewers! It does not make sense that it is so difficult even for long time skating fans to catch any event live, much less for casual viewers.
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I've been re-watching old skating tapes with my 18-year-old niece, so the TV coverage is fresher in my mind than it would normally be. Yes, in the 1980s and 1990s, the networks regularly aired fluff pieces on foreign skaters. In some cases-- Gordeeva & Grinkov, Katarina Witt, Viktor Petrenko-- they had to go behind the Iron Curtain to film this footage. (I even included a "filming a fluff piece for U.S. television" scene in my figure skating novel, which is set in the USSR, because that was standard media practice for that time period.) If Evgenia Medvedeva had been around back then, we would have seen a new fluff piece about her every season. And, yeah, how hard can it be to send a crew up to Toronto to do a piece on Team Orser?
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Dave has gone crazy, let's just face it.
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Did they take away his media credentials or something?? I thought at one point TSL was granted access during some events like Skate America as actual reporters. Are they still getting access or am I remembering incorrectly? I admit I stay as far removed from TSL .....as possible :scard7:
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I do not know why Dave went on this twitter rant, and as I said, I feel bad for him that he did. He may have had some nuggets of wisdom in there, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I can't imagine getting credentials (or interviews) after that.
He was on the pre-Worlds press phone calls (or at least the two I listened to) with American skaters. He asked decent questions. I do not know if he did not go to Worlds because he could not afford to do so, did not have credentials, or both.
As I said numerous times, I like TSL's interviews with skaters and coaches. Their interview with Alexa and Chris was why I started following Alexa and Chris. And to be a media blogger, as opposed to a purveyor of snark and gossip, IMHO TSL should have stuck to that.
More than you wanted to know....
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I am somewhat convinced that skating's mass popularity is limited because some in power prefer it that way.
You could get 10 random board members from GS, and in a couple of hours they could come up with 50 ways, large and small, that USFSA could grow public support and mass appeal for figure skating.
It would be a pointless exercise.
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Be careful what you wish for. NBC did a fluff piece on Plushenko prior to Vancouver - a fluff piece that was filled with communist symbols, carefully-cut questions/answers, some of which took particular advantage of English being his second language, dark lighting, all kinds of nasty little tricks to set up their Evil Communist Russian vs Sweet Innocent All-American Boy.
I would not at all put it past NBC to cast a Evgenia fluff piece as the Evil Communist Russian Robot Girl vs Free-Spirit Sweet American Girl.
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They still got access at last Skate America and I think Nationals too??? Not sure...I think the whole TSL crumbled when Jenny left.
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Lol, first there would need to be a legit US lady contender. And I'm trying to imagine a fluff piece making Evgenia look evil when she is just so sweet and innocent looking with her big doe eyes!!
This makes me think though....good guy versus bad guy narratives are good for the casuals. Simple stories, they know who to root for and who to root against. It's nationalistic and terribly unfair to whoever ends up portrayed as the "bad guy," but I doubt the US is the only country who has ever done it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the sport was pretty darn popular after the end of the Soviet Union with a continued faux Cold War narrative.
Ten year old me fell in love with the sport during the 2002 Olympics when I was rooting for underdogs Sale/Pelletier to end the evil Russian pairs gold dynasty and win OGM. (Obviously I have seen the error of my ways.)
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I think that it's more about does the USFG punish people who are critical of what they do? Is the problem for people who cover the sport that if they are too critical then access to skaters gets cut off?
Compare the coverage of figure skating to the coverage of more main stream sports. Hockey writers will come right out and say that such and such isn't working and that this person is under performing and this coach is making bad decisions. Why is it that skating journalists feel this need to treat skaters with kid gloves? In fact I would probably ask some of you guys that. Why is it that some fans are so opposed to any kind of criticism of their favourite skaters?
Compare the coverage of figure skating to the coverage of more main stream sports. Hockey writers will come right out and say that such and such isn't working and that this person is under performing and this coach is making bad decisions. Why is it that skating journalists feel this need to treat skaters with kid gloves? In fact I would probably ask some of you guys that. Why is it that some fans are so opposed to any kind of criticism of their favourite skaters?
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