Perspective: Russians make figure skating better, but Putin has turned the sport into a battleground
, an influential figure who heads up state-sponsored Channel One ice shows that skaters count on for post-Olympic work.If you still believe in the truce myth, consider Viktor Petrenko’s situation. Petrenko, the 1992 men’s Olympic champion, was born in Odessa, reared in the Soviet system and became the first Olympic flag-bearer for an independent Ukraine at the Lillehammer Games. This past winter, he accepted an invitation to skate in one of Navka’s ice productions.
Skating is such a small and enclosed world, so heavily populated at the top with Russians and Ukrainians, with so many relationships, rivalries and affections, that the Kremlin’s slaughterous invasion has detonated on an intensely personal level. Some of the entanglements date from the 1990s, when a number of Russian coaches and athletes moved to the United States to train after the collapse of their economy.
But there is also near-universal resentment of the grief caused to Ukrainian peers. “I can’t generalize and say everyone in skating is a cultured person who knows better, but I can say the skating world stands with Ukraine and I certainly do,” says Weir, who has set his latest ice show routines to Ukrainian music and is conducting a subversive campaign on social media, trying to break through censorship with news items about the war.
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