About Those Gold Medal Hockey Teams...

The image Curmie prefers to remember

On February 22, 1980, Curmie sat in front of his TV, watching the “Miracle on Ice” hockey game, in which a bunch of American college kids defeated the mighty, seemingly invincible, USSR team by the score of 4-3.  There weren’t a lot of other people in the small Kentucky town where he lived at the time who knew a blue line from a cross-check; even fewer had ever watched a game live.  But within minutes after the conclusion of that telecast, there were dozens of people, mostly but not exclusively teen-agers, driving around town blowing their horns and hanging out of car windows, chanting “U-S-A!  U-S-A!  U-S-A!” with enough gusto that they weren’t just audible, but loud, in Curmie’s second-floor apartment.

It was a moment that those who watched that game (and its aftermath) will never forget.  It was a time of malaise, to coin a phrase.  The nation was still recovering from the energy crisis, the “misery index” (unemployment rate plus inflation rate) was over 20%, and the Iran Hostage Crisis was well into its fourth month.  We, collectively, needed some good news.

Not only that, but this was not merely Good vs. Evil, but also David vs. Goliath.  And a couple of guys named Jim Craig and Mike Eruzione brought their slingshots.  There has never been, before or since, a sporting event that so galvanized the nation.  (Curmie mentioned some other contenders a little over a year ago, but none of them can really compare.)

46 years to the day after the Miracle on Ice, the US men’s hockey team finally won another gold medal.  The circumstances were different.  The opponents, though probably a slight favorite even though playing without their injured captain, were hardly regarded as unbeatable, and the country they represented was our rival in sports but (at least prior to the reign of the Mad King of Trumpistan) our ally in everything else.  The US team was no longer a ragtag collection of college kids, but an all-star team of extremely highly-paid professionals (more on this in a moment).  So this was hardly a reprise of 1980; it was just another gold medal for the US… sorta like the one the US women’s hockey team had won a few nights earlier.

Indeed, the men’s and women’s tournaments were strikingly similar: the US defeated Canada 2-1 in overtime in the gold medal game behind stellar goaltending by Connor Hellebuyck and Aerin Frankel.  There were some differences, too.  The US women were clear favorites in their game, having dominated the tournament, outscoring their opponents 31-1 prior to the final, including a 5-0 rout of Canada in a round-robin game.  The men escaped their quarter-final game with an overtime win against Sweden.  But the women neared the end of regulation in the final behind because of a short-handed goal by Canada early in the 2nd period.  The US pulled their goalie to have a 6-5 skaters advantage, leaving an empty net, with about two and a half minutes left.  It worked, as Hilary Knight tipped in a shot from Laila Edwards to secure overtime with barely two minutes remaining.  Megan Keller took it from there to win the gold.

Both the men and women succeeded in making that commercial about how “for two weeks, we’re all on the same team” pretty much true.  Then, Kash Patel and Donald Trump went out of their way to break those bonds, and, alas, a number of players on the men’s team seem to have colluded with them.

The US women, who have won a medal—3 gold, 4 silver, and a bronze—at every Olympics since their sport was first included in Nagano in 1998, celebrated, accepted their gold medals, posed briefly for a photo, and that was it, except for a few interviews.  Curmie’s only regret was that in watching the awards ceremony, he missed seeing Alysa Liu’s free skate live.  He’ll survive.

The men, of course, had a different path.  Part of this was their own choosing; part was at least partially out of their control.  Their post-game celebration included parading the jersey of Johnny Gaudreau around the ice.  Gaudreau would have been their teammate had he not been killed in a car/bicycle accident a little under two years ago.  The team had hung his jersey in the locker room throughout the tournament as a commemoration/inspiration.

But then things got weird.  A couple of players skated over to the stands and collected Gaudreau’s young children, who were included in a couple of team photos, along with their dad’s jersey.  Curmie thought this was a bridge too far, and he wondered what Gaudreau’s widow really (as opposed to publicly) thought about seeing her kids used as props for a maudlin display of virtue signaling. 

Infomercial time: But wait!  That’s not all!  The scene now shifts to the locker room.  (Hats off to whoever took the video and sent it to ProPublica.)  There’s Kash Patel, who, rather than doing his job (although the country may be better off when he’s otherwise engaged) is partying with the team, apparently on the public’s dime.  And he calls Dear Leader, who offers to send “a military plane or something” to bring the team back to attend the State of the Union address.  He then, in what might be an attempt at humor from one of the most humorless people in history, says, jokingly (?), “And we have to—I must tell you—we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.”  

Perhaps actually believing Trump had said something funny, perhaps just picking up his tone, perhaps just trying to humor him, the players laughed.  One guy tried to get a “Two for two!” chant going, but it went nowhere.  Then Trump added, “I do believe I probably would be impeached [if I didn’t].”  Big yucks all around.  Sigh.

There are no surprises here.  We already knew that Patel is a grifter and that Trump, who congratulated precisely zero other US gold medalists, is a sexist asshole incapable of even attempting a joke that isn’t intended to be insulting, or of uttering a complete paragraph without ultimately making it about himself.  We knew, too, although we might not have been thinking about it, that if we were looking for an audience likely to respond favorably to the Mad King of Trumpistan, we couldn’t do a lot better than a gaggle of exclusively white male multi-millionaires who attended college primarily for reasons completely independent of intellectual pursuits. 

By way of comparison: the average salary in the NHL is just a little under $3.5 million a year, not counting additional income from personal appearances, promotional work, and so on.  If Curmie had made his final salary, as a tenured full professor with a PhD and decades of teaching experience, for his entire 45 year career, he wouldn’t have made that much.  And the players on the national team, of course, are stars, so their salaries are commensurately higher.  A number of the members of the women’s team, by contrast, are still in college, reminiscent of those 1980 men’s gold medalists.  The rest play in the Professional Women’s Hockey League, where the salary cap for an entire team is $1.3 million.  Curmie is not going to get involved in a debate about whether that discrepancy is appropriate or not (see his commentary about that phenomenon in soccer for some of the variables involved), but he does note its existence.

Anyway, the women’s team promptly declined the invitation, and they fool no one with their “other obligations” shtick.  They were offended by POTUS’s glib put-down, and they responded with a polite but transparent monodigital salute.  Trump proclaimed in the SOTU that they’ll be visiting the White House soon.  Yeah, maybe.  We shall see.  Anyway, was the women’s response appropriate?  Absolutely.  A lot of the commentary from other sources, especially the stuff strongly critical of the men’s team as opposed to POTUS, may have been a little overblown, but it was at least understandable.

What about the men’s team?  Curmie can’t get too upset with anyone who gets to attend the SOTU and get a White House tour.  He’d probably have turned down an invitation from Dear Leader, but almost certainly would have accepted one from literally any other POTUS, including those he voted against.  (They’re a lot less likely to have dissed my friends, for one thing.)  We know that many if not all of the men’s players were cheering on the women in their gold medal game and indeed in some before that.  It’s hard to muster a lot of anger at someone celebrating a big victory and not choosing to spoil the moment by making a scene.  And, of course, five members of the men’s team—coincidentally (?) four of them are from Minnesota—also declined the invitation.  But, to quote The Athletic’s headline, “The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room.”

Curmie will still pump his fist and shout “Yes!” when the men’s team scores in future contests, but this year’s gold medal in men’s hockey is relegated to maybe tenth place in the list of personal favorite Olympic moments: well behind the victories of a host of American women, including but not limited to Alysa Liu, Mikaela Shiffrin, Elana Meyers Taylor, and (of course) the hockey team.  Not just the Americans, though.  Johannes Høsflot Klæbo is unquestionably the greatest of all time at his sport, for example.  And, of course, there was Nazgul.

Alas, there’s one more thing.  Again, we have long since known that narcissism and boorishness continue their death struggle to be Dear Leader’s defining characteristic.  So now there’s a new video.  Watch it at your own risk, Gentle Reader, but Curmie strongly advises that you not do so shortly after eating.

Ice Dancing and the Inevitability of Discontent

Yeah, it’s another single-topic Olympics post.  Forgive me, Gentle Reader.  There may or may not be a combo post about the Olympics in the next few days.  We shall see.

Curmie’s lack of interest in what he regards as trash sports, or, rather, non-sports, i.e., those decided by necessarily subjective judges rather than by points or times or some other objective criteria, has been well-documented.  Traditionally, Winter Olympics events were largely objective: hockey, skiing (both Alpine and cross-country), curling, speed skating, luge, bobsled, biathlon, etc.  But even before the more recent proliferation of judged events on skis or snowboard, there was figure skating.  This discipline, alongside gymnastics in the Summer Olympics, stands as the most prominent pseudo-sport on record.  Be it noted: Curmie does not in any way demean figure skating or its practitioners; he just thinks that, like ballet, which also requires considerable athleticism,  it’s more of an art than a sport.  (Curmie, who has contributed in one way or another to well over 200 theatre productions, is unlikely to use any variation on the word “art” as an insult.)

The problem with competitions conducted in these terms is two-fold.  First, we’re not merely comparing the proverbial apples to oranges; we’re comparing the apples’ apple-ness to the oranges’ orange-ness.  In Curmie’s field, that means comparing one actor’s Macbeth to another’s Hamlet, or even to another’s Tartuffe… or his Rufus T. Firefly, for that matter.  There’s a reason Curmie cares little about the Tonys, Oscars, etc., unless a nominee is a personal friend.  (That has happened, but, needless to say, not very often.)

More importantly, at least in terms of the present discussion, is the fact that judges will disagree.  Fans of Team X will always argue that Team Y gets all the breaks on close calls.  It’s also true that sometimes referees or umpires or whatever they’re called in a particular sport just get something objectively wrong.  That was one of the problems in the women’s floor exercise debacle in Paris two years ago.  But some events are particularly susceptible to differences of opinion.  Figure skating is certainly near the top of that list, and ice dancing is the most subjective of the figure skating events, as there are fewer required elements.  It is completely reasonable that one judge might privilege athleticism, another technical mastery, another the difficulty of the routine, yet another grace or coordination with the music.

But there are two more serious problems, in that they affect the legitimacy of the “sport.”  One has bothered Curmie for decades: the fact, and it is a fact, that judges tend to give higher scores to the athletes who are supposed to win, irrespective of whether they deserve it.  We saw a variation on that phenomenon in the women’s slopestyle finals this year.  The gold medalist did significantly easier tricks than either the silver or bronze medalist, and her execution, if it was any better than her competitors’, was barely so.  One of the announcers for USA (the network, not the country) declared the judging “abysmal.”  Ah, but the winner was the defending Olympic champion, so of course she was wonderful this time, too, right?  

The ice dancing competition this year serves as another example.  The order of performance by the finalists is determined by their standing after the short program.  The first to go are the lowest-ranking finalists; the last are the leaders.  With one exception, a pair whose fairly significant errors were obvious even to a novice spectator like Curmie, every team moved into first place.  As far as Curmie was concerned, a number of the later teams weren’t even close to as good as earlier pairs had been.  But the order after the short program remained unchanged except for that one team that made obvious mistakes.

More importantly, of course, the French team that led after the short program held on for gold despite some pretty clear errors (like the lack of synchronization seen in the photo above).  But whereas the slopestyle competition mentioned earlier may have been judged… erm… whimsically, there was no hint of nationalistic impropriety.  One of the skiers whom just about everybody agreed should have been placed above the winner was from the same country, Japan.  The other was from New Zealand, and it was she, not the American who finished just off the podium, that the USA announcers (and Curmie) thought had been slighted.

But Curmie is old enough to remember the jokes about “and the Russian [or East German] judge gives it a…”  Soviet bloc countries cheated every way they could.  Some Eastern European athletes, like Nadia Comăneci in gymnastics or Katarina Witt in figure skating, were clearly the best of their respective sports.  But others, to be polite, were not.  That doesn’t mean that they didn’t get unreasonably  high scores from judges from other Communist countries (or that Western athletes didn’t get lower scores than they deserved from those same judges).

And now we just might be experiencing a little déjà vu: a particularly apt term, since the perpetrator is, well, French.  OK, OK, alleged perpetrator.  After the short program in ice dancing the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron held a narrow lead over Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates.  In the final free skate, French judge Jézabel Dabouis gave her country’s pair 7.71 more points than their American rivals despite some errors.  The US team received a lower score from Dabouis than from any other judge, more than five points below the average.  She also gave the French pair a score nearly three points higher than the average score. 

That sure seems suspicious, and there were allegations of similar partisanship from her at earlier events.  It’s been over a half century since Curmie took the one freshman-level statistics course of his collegiate career, and he’s forgotten more than a little of what he learned then.  He’s therefore not in position to endorse or undermine the accuracy (or relevance) of SBNation’s James Dator assertion that “Not only did she judge the French pair 6.45 points higher than the mean, but she undervalued Chock/Bates by -7.19 [this apparently includes the short program]— giving us a +13.64 delta favoring France over USA in the final score. This represents a staggering 6.37 standard deviation z-score difference across the event.”  Dator concludes that “there is no doubt that the scoring of Dabois [sic.] was the key differentiator in deciding who won the event.”

Well, maybe.  In ice dancing, as in a number of other sports (competitive diving is the first to come to mind), the high and low scores are omitted from the final calculation.  In other words, Dabouis’s under-scoring of the Americans on the free skate had only an indirect effect on the rankings: the lowest other score was counted, and it wouldn’t have been had Dabouis scored them at or near the median.  Dabouis’s score for Beaudry and Cizeron did count, but that’s because the Czech judge scored them higher than Dabouis did, meaning her score wasn’t completely out of line.  The highest score for Chock and Bates came from the American judge, and three of the seven judges from other than the US or France had the French pair ahead.  It was very close, in other words.  Beaudry claims their routine was more technically demanding.  Perhaps it was; Curmie’s not the guy you want making that decision.

The  powers-that-be supported the judges’ decision, which of course would have been the case no matter how egregious the ethical violation might have been.  The International Skating Union issued a statement asserting that “It is normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel and a number of mechanisms are used to mitigate these variations.”  The ISU claimed it has “full confidence in the scores given and remains completely committed to fairness.”  Uh huh.

But there’s one more thing.  Allow Curmie to quote two of the competitors.  One said, “I see some strange games being played that are destroying ice dance…. I don't think I’ve ever been to a competition like this in my career, from a judging standpoint.”  Another said, “Any time the public is confused by results, it does a disservice to our sport. I think it’s hard to retain fans when it's difficult to understand what is happening on the ice.  People need to understand what they’re cheering for and be able to feel confident in the sport that they’re supporting.”

Destroying the sport?  A disservice to the sport?  Those are pretty serious charges, especially coming from top competitors.  OK, Gentle Reader, wanna guess who said what?  The latter is Madison Chock after receiving silver instead of gold in Milan.  The former?  Guillaume Cizeron, after the rhythm dance at a Grand Prix event in Finland in November.  Indeed, at least one member of four teams (at least), including all three on the podium in Milan, has criticized the ISU and judging, just in the last few months.  True, there’s no doubt a little egotism at play, but it sure does look like there’s a real problem that the ISU doesn’t seem terribly interested in acknowledging, much less fixing.

There’s a suggestion that AI could be used to “judge” the technical elements, leaving human judges for the more artistic stuff, but that’s definitely creepy and almost certainly ineffective.  Not allowing judges from any country with a competitor sounds good in theory, but even if that were to apply only to the finalists, we’d still be wiping out the input of the dozen or so nations who best understand the sport.  It would be possible, presumably, to disallow a judge to vote on someone from their own country.  There could be ten judges, with one of them as an “alternate” who would vote only if one of the other nine was from the same country as a competitor.  Or maybe disallowing the top and bottom two votes instead of one.  Or…

The problem is that unless something is done, the appearance of impropriety will always overshadow honest disagreements.  The events Curmie considers trash sports aren’t going anywhere: they’re too popular amongst people who aren’t really sports fans and just want to watch some flashy showmanship every four years.  Looked at as an exhibition of prowess, a variation on Cirque du Soleil (or the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies), this is great stuff.  But if ice dancing in particular wants to be regarded as anything even resembling an honest competition, it needs to get its house in order.  Soon.

The IOC Is Hypocritical, Craven, and Inept. Also, Water Is Wet.

Curmie initially intended to write about this year’s Winter Olympics in general.  He may do that down the road, but right now there’s one story that deserves its own post.  Skeleton slider Vladyslav Heraskevych was barred from competition because he insisted on wearing a helmet honoring his fellow Ukrainian athletes killed in the conflict with Russia in his homeland. 

You can see a photo of the offending headgear at the top of this page, Gentle Reader.  There’s nothing particularly controversial there, as far as Curmie is concerned.  There’s no text, and it’s not like there’s a photo of Vladimir Putin with a target on his forehead.  It’s a memorial, full stop.

But, you see, the organization that won’t allow athletes from Russia or Belarus to compete under their country’s banner doesn’t allow political expression.  Yeah, that makes sense.  ☹ The London Olympics in the summer of 2012 included a recognition of those killed in the 7/7 bombings in 2005, as well as a reminder of the Blitz.  The fact that NBC couldn’t be bothered to cover that part of the opening ceremony doesn’t change the fact that it happened.  Such expressions are indeed commonplace.

Of course, the majority of the headlines are about how Heraskevych “violated the rules” or some such nonsense.  That’s because journalism is dead.  The alleged transgression is of rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter, which states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”  There’s a men’s figure skater who, according to NBC talking head Ashley Wagner, “becomes the Pope” at the end of his long program.  That’s not “propaganda,” but a helmet with a couple of photos of countrymen and -women is?  Give me a damned break.  Indeed, an over-zealous interpretation of the rule would prevent an athlete from wearing a cross or a Star of David to breakfast in the Olympic village.  Even the IOC isn’t that stupid, but it’s what the charter could be contorted into meaning.

The story is that the International Olympic Committee remains the quintessence of hypocritical waffling.  IOC President Kirsty Coventry’s statement is especially absurd: “It’s not about the messaging. It’s literally about the rules and the regulations and that, in this case, the field of play, we have to be able to keep a safe environment for everyone and sadly, that just means no messaging is allowed.”  Curmie awaits any rational argument that Heraskevych’s helmet affects the safety of literally anyone.  This expansion of the definition of safety is, alas, endemic, but that doesn’t make it reasonable.

It goes without saying that Ukrainians are virtually unanimous in support for Heraskevych.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s post on X is worth reading in its entirety, but he insists that “No rule has been broken,” and concludes his tweet (are they still called that?) with this: “We are proud of Vladyslav and of what he did. Having courage is worth more than any medal.”  Zelenskyy subsequently awarded Heraskevych their country’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Freedom.  (That link also includes the names of the 22 Ukrainian athletes memorialized on Heraskevych’s helmet.)

Of course, there’s a fair amount of posturing involved here.  Heraskevych wasn’t regarded as a medal contender, but now he’s one of the most talked-about athletes to have travelled to northern Italy of late.  Could he have accepted the “compromise” of wearing a black armband or something along those lines?  Sure.  But in refusing to compromise, he got a lot more attention.  Curmie has no idea whether Heraskevych’s intransigence was a function of integrity or publicity-seeking.  Either way, the IOC got clobbered by the Streisand Effect.  In attempting to suppress discussion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they called a lot more attention to it.  What would have been at most an isolated mini-protest by a single athlete became the stuff of international headlines.  Ukraine is appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Latvian coach is appealing the decision to the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation.

Still, the emotion displayed by Coventry in discussing her unsuccessful attempt at talking Heraskevych down caught Curmie’s attention.  It’s unlikely that she’s an idiot… which means that we should pay attention when she says “No one, especially me, is disagreeing with the messaging; it’s a powerful message, it’s a message of remembrance, a message of memory, and no one is disagreeing with that.”  That seems to be very close indeed to an admission that there’s nothing really problematic about that helmet.  And that would mean that perhaps Coventry isn’t all that unhappy about all the publicity, even if it seems to put the IOC in a negative light… it might just be worth it.

Curmie doesn’t necessarily believe that, but even he can dream.