Ah, January, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of -- what else? -- ice skating! If yours doesn’t, better get with the program, ducky!
I’m thinking now of one of the most famous moments in all of ice skating history. I mean besides that time in 1994 when Tonya Harding’s bodyguard whacked Nancy Kerrigan across the knee with
a metal pipe.
No, I’m thinking of the time ten years earlier (has it been 26 years already?) when Jane Torvall and Christopher Dean of Nottingham, England, became the highest scoring figure skaters of all time (for a single program) when they received twelve perfect 6.0 scores, including artistic impression scores of 6.0 from all nine judges, for doing this:
Well, actually, they did a bit more than that. Specifically, on January 6, 1984, at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Torvill and Dean did this, accompanied by Ravel’s Bolero.
Okay, I admit that the world of figure skating has also had a bad moment or two. Here’s one we’d rather all forget (and by we I don’t mean to imply that I am a part of the world of figure skating, just a representative of the general populace at large):
