Notes From the Ice Dance

The ice dancing finals at Torino are on tonight, and the U.S. has its first chance to win an Olympic medal in the sport since Gerald Ford was president. Normally, I don't watch ice dancing - I don't hate it, I just prefer to watch skiing or something like that - but the American couple favored to win a medal, Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, have aroused my interest. They're highly entertaining to watch, mainly for two reasons:

1) They skate with great passion and flair.

2) Tanith Belbin is hot. :-D

The closest the United States came to winning an ice dancing medal in the Winter Olympics since 1976 was in 1984, at Sarajevo. (That was the year Brits Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won the gold medal in the sport.) Americans Judy Blumberg and Michael Seibert put on a passionate display of athleticism and beauty in their ice dance, based on the story of Schaherazade, which many felt was at least worthy of the bronze medal. When the final scores came in, though, the pair lost out to a Soviet couple for third place. (Another Soviet couple won the silver.) Everyone was stunned at the result, and American observers - including Blumberg and Siebert themselves - were especially livid. Quite frankly, I thought they deserved the bronze medal, too. I suspected one or both of two reasons for their loss - because many of the judges were from the Communist Eastern bloc, I figured the Americans lost third place due to anti-Americanism or maybe even anti-Semitism. (Blumberg and Seibert, as you may have already guessed, were Jewish.) For her part, Judy Blumberg - who, it must be clarified, is not an author of novels for adolescent girls (that's another chick) - was bitter, but she vowed that she and Seibert would be back in Calgary for the next Winter Games four years hence.

Umm, er, they weren't. Not to the best of my knowledge, anyway. And the Yankee medal drought in ice dancing continued. And continued. And continued. And . . . well, you get the picture. :-(

Anyway, that could change in Torino when all is said and done. And if the U.S. gets its first Olympic ice dancing medal in three decades tonight, it will be in no small part due to the vivacious Tanith Belbin. A victory for her and Ben Agosto would have a delicious sense of irony to it; Belbin, born and raised in Canada, became a U.S. citizen only a few weeks ago. It will be the perfect immigrant story if they win a medal tonight.

And even if they don't, there'll be one saving grace - Tanith Belbin will still be hot. ;-)