It seems only appropriate on this day of the 2010 Olympic ice dancing Original Dance event that Toepick! present its own gold, silver and bronze medals for skaters who, in its eyes, take the prizes in the All-Time Figure Skating Political Incorrectness Olympics. Not necessarily for things they did in an Olympics, but for things they did, period.
To heighten suspense, of course, we’ll introduce the winners in reverse order of finish.
The Bronze: To German ice dancers Kati Winkler & Rene Lohse, whose competitive career spanned the ’90s and early aughts. I’m sure Kati and Rene are both really nice folks, despite their predilection for some truly bizarre costumes over the years. Here’s just one example:
And if you think that’s good, you should have seen them as drippy Salvador Dali watches. Or the daytime and the nighttime. Anyway, for the 2000-2001 season, they decided their free dance would be set to gospel music. Nothing wrong with the idea, but the costumes they used initially caused quite a stir:
This is actually how they looked toward the end of the season, and it doesn’t seem there’s all that much to fuss about. I mean, they seem to be attempting to look like poor sharecroppers or something, perhaps recently freed slaves (they must have knotted ropes around their waists to symbolize something). But none of this was the real issue.
The real issue was that in the first incarnation of these costumes, Kati was also wearing a kerchief on her head. A hair-covering kerchief, tied in front, with the tie ends sticking way out on the front of her head. She looked like a clueless white version of every stereotype of the African American slave ever seen. All she needed was an apron and a spatula, and she would’ve been all ready to make some pancakes.
For their future competitive appearances, Kati ditched the kerchief. And once she did that, the program became 100% less absurd and 100% smarter and more respectful. We can only thankful Rene didn’t choose to wear his hair like he did when they were portraying robots.
The Silver: As much as we hate to knock another nice guy, we have to do it when someone else appears to have whacked him with the culturally clueless stick. In 1996, as he was a teenager just making the upward career trajectory that would end in his 2002 Olympic gold medal, Russia’s Alexei Yagudin gave this exhibition, set to music titled “One Banana”:
This example, amateur video from a Spanish summer camp, is used here because the banana in it is so obvious. In this performance from the 1997 Worlds exhibition, it’s hard to see what he’s holding (looks almost like an ear of maize), but it gives you an even better idea of the general offensiveness of the whole thing:
Yep, he’s attempting to portray an African by wearing a grass skirt and headdress, a bare chest with absurdly exaggeratedly painted nipples, and swiveling his hips around girlishly while brandishing a banana. Oh no he d’in’t? Oh yeah, he did. Luckily, he grew up a bit, broke with Alexei Mishin (coincidence? You be the judge) and left this kind of thing behind.
The Gold: Yep, she wins the gold here too, as she did in so many other things. While figure skating owes Norway’s three-time Olympic champion and 10-time world titlist Sonja Henie a lot, there’s no way around the fact that this was a woman who admired Adolf Hitler and went so far as to salute him at the 1936 Olympics (as, admittedly, many of the athletes did). Which is more than merely gauche or politically incorrect; it’s stomach-curdling, and really not laughable at all. So let’s turn away from Sonja’s politics to a cheerier subject: namely, her skating. Toepick! offers this video as a bit of a palate cleanser to prepare you for whatever weirdness the original dance has in store for us tonight. It’s a tropical South American scene, only with ice and skating. Now that’s funny.
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