Olympic Figure Skating and Fairytale Sorrow

Within one week, Eteri Tutberidze becomes this century's Joan Crawford

Upon Joan Crawford’s cultural death, a near-equal figure emerges. She is Russian figure skating coach Eteri Tutberidze, and she is the new human embodiment of the Crawford-Dunaway whisper legacy. The world thirsts for a real female villain and suddenly one appears in full force, crafted perfectly in the snowy shadows of America’s most hated land. As her star pupil fails a drug test, she gets a Mommie Dearest moment. There is hysteria and notoriety. 

The ice rink, with its background of perpetual white, is the ideal arena for a camp revival - see the snow in Losey’s The Servant, the falling creams and powders in Mommie Dearest. Every emaciation and tear is magnified against this glassy backdrop. Female enmity is thrust from warm womb to to sub-zero. 

Crawford collected children with C-initials, and Tutberidze collects As - Anna Shcherbakova, Alena Kostornaia, Alexandra Trusova. Her skaters are powerful not because they are strong but because they are starved, and light enough to spin into the air with multiple rotations. They retire mostly before adulthood with complaints of serious injury, or fade into obscurity after falling out with their coach (she communicates in Marina Tsvetaeva poems, and scorns them for never bringing her flowers).

Anna, Alexandra and Kamila wait behind the Olympic ice and clutch stuffed toys, a cartoonish reminder that they are fairytale victims - dancing girls in pretty dresses oppressed by looming, evil mother figure. ‘You knew everything! I hate all of you!’ screamed Trusova after the Olympic final, at the apex of a hallucinatory storyline, a last bid (as viewers imagined) to be freed from the witch’s castle. Shcherbakova, who won gold, cradled her teddy bear in a back room alone (the despondent miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, or Danae in her tower). Kamila Valieva wept and wept. On all accounts this backstage scene, framed in bright blue, could have been a Grimm low point, the beginning of a glorious, dove-ridden rise to heaven. It was not so and never will be. 

Viewers condemn these eternal parades of sorrow and abuse and simultaneously cling to every detail like a talisman. We love Judy Garland’s dramatic decline and the Tutberidze and Karolyi controversies and the Flowers in the Attic series and bloody fairytales of all description because they transport us to the Hellenic and then Biblical original sins - Pandora’s box, Eve’s apple. Female suffering is beautiful, poetic, and lasts forever. Christianity is supposed to be patriarchal and yet its most memorable and arresting construction is Eve, the woman doomed to bleed forever. Valieva came fourth with a sequinned serpent around her left shoulder. 

[Valieva’s previous Short Programme was based on Picasso’s ‘Girl on a Ball’, painted in the first year of his carnivalesque Rose Period. In this edit, we do not see the enormous man hunched in Picasso’s foreground, shadowing the girl in a contrast of shape and size (‘exaggeration and attenuation…’)]