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The story of the cancellation of the short program of Peter Gumennik due to the use of a song by the German group Rammstein made the public talk about a new level of censorship in sports. recalls other scandalous incidents related to music that have ever happened in figure skating.
During Soviet times, programs were systematically censored. The music had to, on the one hand, not discredit the country in the eyes of the rest of the world at international competitions. On the other hand, to form the correct idea of beauty among our own citizens. After all, they were the ones who adored figure skating until they lost their memory and gathered at the entrances of all TV owners during the championships. The skaters were something like leaders of public opinion.
For example, in the 70s, Yuri Ovchinnikov was prohibited from skating to the song “My Marusechka,” which was considered inappropriate. Igor Moskvin miraculously won the “top” the right for athletes to go on the ice to comedic and grotesque music, which some of the guardians of moral purity called “obscene.” For example, figure skaters from North Korea are now going through similar situations with centralized censorship.
Sometimes the source of prohibition is external, not internal. Shortly before the 2010 Olympics, the Russian dance duo Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin were accused of illegally using the composition Speaking in Tongues II by British performer Sheila Chandra. The singer's representatives sent a complaint to the Russian Figure Skating Federation (FFKKR) and even to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), threatening legal action. Although her song didn’t even have music — it was an arthouse a cappella performance in voice and whisper in an ethnic style. At that time, a conspiracy theory was popular that all these showdowns were initiated by one of the competitors in order to weaken the morale of Oksana and Maxim.
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The cut for the original dance had to be redone, and new music was collected a few days before the start. Compared to Domnina and Shabalin, even the current hero Gumennik does not look so badly damaged. Performance at ordinary test skates and the most important start in a career are still incomparable.
It’s interesting that changing the music didn’t help that number about the aborigines. Representatives of the Australian people, whose culture the couple's coach Natalya Linichuk was inspired by, considered the very fact that the skaters were performing in a form that imitated their national costumes and dances offensive. There was a big fuss — the skaters even had to apologize in interviews and say that they have great respect for the Aborigines and their culture. But the sediment still remained. Perhaps this negative background around Domnina and Shabalin became one of the factors that prevented them from rising above third place at the Games.
It's not just our skaters who get copyright for allegedly violating copyright. In 2018, Canadian singles skater Kevin Reynolds changed his free program a week before the Grand Prix stage. The fact is that he was banned from using the song by the Japanese composer Jo Hisaishi. This same Hisaishi once drank the blood of a compatriot. Takahiko Kozuka took his music without permission in 2011, for which he received several months of headaches and legal proceedings. Even when two-time Olympic champion and Japanese idol Yuzuru Hanyu decided to use fragments of Hisaishi’s works for the program, his managers had to bow to the ground more than once to the composer. And even after that they were not sure of a successful outcome.
There is also a very recent example. While we are upset about how Bean Man was treated, they are trying to control us from overseas. The authors of the blog The Skating Lesson on social networks are outraged that several programs of Russian figure skaters are set to the music of Michael Jackson. He is now in a state of «semi-cancellation» in the West — he is accused of conflicting attitudes towards racial identity and controversial relationships with minors. And our athletes, according to the authors of the blog, seem to popularize the personality with their musical choice.
Let's leave aside the issue of separating Jackson the man and Jackson the artist — it is clear that this is too complicated for the modern «black and white» world. But it's worth at least keeping in mind that in a season when the International Skating Union (ISU) has ordered dancers to skate to '80s rhythms, Jackson will be everywhere. Including socially responsible Canadian and American teams. But so far no one seems to have criticized them for their musical choice — specks in the distance can be seen much better.
Quite often it happens that athletes and coaches urgently make adjustments to programs without denunciations, as Gumennik had to do. This has never happened to any of the top skaters. Evgenia Medvedeva and Anna Shcherbakova changed the music right during the Olympic season. Ekaterina Bobrova and Dmitry Solovyov did the same on the eve of the Games in Sochi. Having come up with a truly unusual dance to the music of Dmitry Malikov, coach Alexander Zhulin first changed the musical composition, and then completely removed the innovative program from the table, returning to last year’s proven one. Creativity is creativity, but then it seemed to him that the chamber Malikov’s pair would not bypass the fundamental “Swan Lake” of its closest competitors.
In general, the story of an attempt to somehow influence the self-expression of skaters is not new. Figure skating has always been and remains subject to censorship in all its forms, including the basic one — self-censorship.
It's all about the subjectivity of the sport. There are rules that you need to follow, otherwise you will get low scores and will not be able to qualify for high places. There is a taste of judges and spectators who need to be liked, otherwise success will not be achieved. Finally, there is a situation — that is why for the Olympics in Japan or China many try to select music on the theme of samurai and martial arts. And during the Olympics in Sochi, foreigners considered it an honor to skate to Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov. There is, of course, a political situation as well.
It turns out that figure skaters and directors have to endlessly look back at how their choice will be perceived by the public. They are squeezed into the tight framework of the regulations of elements and difficulty levels. Quite often they deny themselves the choice of the music they like in order to please those in power who distribute medals.
The case with Gumennik looks so bad, first of all, because of the very fact of denunciation — an unsightly manifestation of the face of society , which does not want to accept someone else's otherness. And this, it seems, will only progress with us.
The author’s opinion may not coincide with the position of the editors