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Ice dancing. Why?
OK, the Impressionist admits to an occasional sideways glance at this soap opera of subzero spectacle oft confused with 'pairs skating'. Ice Dancing was introduced to the Olympics in 1976 (according to the BBC website) and contrives to generate at least one major controversy during each competition. Bad luck? Not on your pink sequinned leotard, mate.
Ice Dancing is one of a growing number of 'sports' in the Olympics in which merit is determined by the opinions of people loosely described as judges. The Olympic Ideal of athletes straining every last muscle and fibre in competition is buried in there somewhere but is too easily usurped by the arbitrary, the whimsical and the political.
Even the recent changes in the coding failed to prevent another controversial result in this year's competition.
One view is that sport is a modern replacement for warfare. The theory is that aggression is channelled into (usually) non-fatal activity and the winners and their supporters feel good for a while. Real battles were never decided by a committee.
Ice Dancing seems to be about as far away from a battle as one can imagine.
Will the continual atrophying of the purity of competition lead to the cultural demise of the Olympics? Almost certainly. The Arts provide a good model of how things might go, the ludicrous Turner Prize Show routinely providing a spectacle of breathtakingly asinine self-delusionals championing the trite and the tripe.
The Impressionist will however continue to sneak a peek at those lissome young athletes making the impossible look effortless.
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