The TV magic of the Russian figure skating duel
Alina Zagitova won the gold medal in the women’s singles figure skating competition at the Olympics on Thursday. That gave Russia its first gold of the 2018 Winter Games. Except Russia doesn’t really have a team at these Olympics. The country was banned from proper participation after a doping scandal — arguably the most Bond Villain-ish headline Vladimir Putin produced last year, since all the best Bond villains are winter sports-adjacent.
No secret we live in strange times, of course, and the American relationship with Russia has never been stranger. A Cold War is one thing, but the hacking, the bots, the “13 Russians,” the “interference”? You imagine that the Americans who are Zagitova’s age aren’t growing up with too many rosy ideas about the Russian Federation — unless they’re binging The Americans and they think Oleg is dreamy.
Some of Russia’s Olympians were allowed to compete at the 2018 Olympics. They have been competing under the team name “Olympic Athletes from Russia,” which should be a garage band if there are still garage bands. On Thursday, Zagitova was facing off against her countrywoman and training mate Evgenia Medvedeva, a relative veteran at 18, favored for gold and doomed for silver.
Savvier sports-loving friends of mine complain about NBC’s fixation on the USA athletes. But I don’t really mind NBC’s coverage at all. I enjoy the old nostalgic falsehood that everything important happens in prime. And I like the commercial-break repetition of the Olympic anthem, despite or maybe because the macho triumphalism is starting to feel satiric.
And yet, on an intellectual level, I recognize that the commentators are probably too U.S.-centric, ignoring fascinating stories about foreign athletes on the shaky principle that American viewers want to root for American people. I’m not sure that’s true: Athletes aren’t speaking any language when they’re competing, except, like, the language of physicality, or whatever.
Many of the athletes mentioned in that last paragraph had a disappointing Olympics. (Wagner didn’t even compete.) So their constant presence in the commercials was… kind of charming? Because, who cares! More to life than winning. For a lot of people, Kenworthy will always be world-historic because he kissed his boyfriend on international television. You can’t measure the financial worth of a perfect moment like that — but Kenworthy at least deserves whatever United was paying. And America is a victory-obsessed country, so there’s something rather sweet in the persistence of these non-gold-winning athletes on NBC’s ad time. Why should they suffer for being merely stupendous? The best things in life don’t need to be the best.
And yet… why tune into the Olympics if not to witness complete, total, absolute greatness? And so you felt heartbeats drumming as Zagitova took the ice, delivering what looked to my untrained eyes like a flawless performance, and proof that humanity isn’t finished just yet. Fifteen years old! Younger than we ever were, better than we ever were! She looked untroubled by her own greatness. I know that’s part of the performance, that nobody wins without a struggle. But she went from teething to Olympics glory in the time it takes James Cameron to make a single Avatar movie, so you imagine it’s all been a thrill for Zagitova, a youth of horizons discovered and then achieved.
The camera cut to Medvedeva, preparing for her time on the ice. She had an air of Bogart cool, earphones and a turquoise prepvest. She looked dead certain about her impending skate, more certain than you’ve ever been about anything.
When she took the ice, her program had an Anna Karenina theme. And she’s more of an actress than Zagitova, so she actually seemed to become Tolstoy’s doomed socialite, between marvelous Superman Ascending flights and Superman Turning Earth Backwards spins. At the end of the performance, she was crying, and holy hell, was I tearing up a little bit? I never read Anna Karenina, just sat through that horrible Keira Knightley movie. But I remember someone in Russia telling me that every Russian schoolkid has to read lots of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. So, did Medvedeva read Anna Karenina? Was her brilliant performance charged with the power of history, personal and national? For just one moment it felt like she had stitched together a century and a half into one single performance, from tsarist aristocrats to flagless “Olympic Athletes from Russia” and everything in between. Was she crying because she thought she won? Was she crying because she knew she lost? Was she crying because she knew she’d done her absolute best? Was she just crying because it was, finally, all over?
There was a lot to love at the Olympics this year, women’s hockey, the curling guy’s mustache, Adam Rippon, the whole thing, what fun! And you heard a lot about the Olympics as a way to take the temperature of globopolitics: North Korea, South Korea, the Vice President, the possibility that there is still an international community.
