CROWDED ICE

A few years from now, an event like the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, which ended a week ago in Providence, Rhode Island, may seem dated. A couple of hundred young people who have prevailed in regional contests slug it out for a national medal, with no monetary reward-how quaint. The nationals have always had pride of place, the only event in the sport to be regularly televised and, for an American skater, the imprimatur of success. Yes, there is a world championship, and every four years the perihelion of the Olympics. But to be national champ has meant being at the top of the game.

This year’s contest had much of that homegrown intimacy, a family gathering where old hands reminisce and look over the crop of new talent. A saucy 17-year-old, Nicole Bobek, was crowned ladies champion; Todd Eldredge, 23, the top male skater. Their victories should give them a toehold on a brilliant future. At least that’s the way it used to be.

The 1994 Olympics, with its melodramatic, widely followed confrontation between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, changed the sport dramatically. TV suddenly woke up to skating’s telegenic grace, and the number of staged competitions-produced primarily for TV and lacking the strict rules that have governed amateur meets in the past-has multiplied. As a result, young skating stars today must not only beat back competition from the amateur ranks. They must also confront a new kind of rival: the pro skater. The stars who emerged from the past two Olympics have not faded into the half-life of touring ice shows. Instead, they are right there on the TV screen.

The championship in Providence offered an exciting competition among closely matched athletes, but the level of performance was only mediocre. In the post-Kerrigan era, Bobek would appear to have an advantage because she is a true show skater who makes a big, jazzy impression whether or not the details fall into place. Last week they did; she made fewer mistakes than Michelle Kwan, 14, who was favored to win.

Bobek has sexy good looks, a smile that reaches the rafters and a playful way with music. She choreographs her own material-sort of. “I get the idea of what she does, memorize it and then teach it back to her,” says Richard Callaghan, her eighth coach in as many years. A tantalizing combination of child and woman, Bobek can bat her eyelashes like a vamp and then screw up her face like a self-conscious kid. Her devil-may-care approach to training has blocked her progress for years. But with the Detroit-based Callaghan, she has settled down, losing weight and working diligently.

This has been Callaghan’s dream year because he also trains Eldredge, the men’s champion. With a no-nonsense, arrowy skating style, Eldredge is intensely competitive, drilling hard all the time. At the nationals he performed to a Civil War medley that worked well when he was marching up and down the ice. But when it came to interpreting Dixie to a very slow beat, his lack of musicality was all too apparent.

In fact, there was almost no inventive or flattering choreography in the competition, and the reason is easy to spot: too many jumps. As commentator Dick Button, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, notes, “This is really becoming a jumping competition.” No sooner has a skater landed one triple than he or she must begin preparing for the next, with little room for variety in between. The elaborate tracings that make a program bubble along with humor and zest, as well as the spins and spirals that lend it grace, have all been slighted. When Bobek showed off her long, lyrical spiral, the crowd gasped in admiration. It was really a blast from her own past. Nicole gave credit for the move to her mother, who insisted that she practice it as a child. At the time the little girl hated it.

But jumps are here to stay, and one reason is the new prominence of skating on television. The wonder is that TV did not exploit its possibilities earlier. But it took the enormous attention focused on the sport last year after the attack on Kerrigan-plotted by associates of her rival, Harding-to engage TV moguls fully. The Olympic face-off between the two skaters drew the sixth highest rating in TV history.

No wonder CBS, after it lost N.F.L. football games to the Fox network, opted for skating coverage to help fill its vacant Sunday afternoons. The other networks have added skating coverage as well. NBC this Saturday will broadcast Skates of Gold, starring former Olympic gold medalists; ABC will carry the 1996 World Championships; and CBS last week put on a lavish prime-time production, Dreams on Ice, featuring Nancy Kerrigan decked out as a fairy-tale ice princess. Says ABC Sports executive producer Jack O’Hara: “Skating continues to be very successful because it is sport and entertainment and beauty and music and glamour.” And, he might have added, money.

For post-Olympic pros, the new media attention has been a windfall. Kerrigan herself, who tours competitively and has product-endorsement contracts with Disney, Revlon and Reebok, is a millionaire several times over. Katarina Witt, the 1984 and 1988 Olympic winner, says her skating is “finally paying off after 10 years.” Paul Wylie, the U.S. and Olympic silver medalist in 1992, was accepted by Harvard Law School but postponed his entry one year to cash in on his prize. Now, after a second postponement, he must give up his law-school place. He isn’t sorry; the money is too good.

For a show-biz whiz like Scott Hamilton, TV competitions are a new incentive. He has penciled in three months this summer with coach Kathie Casey in Colorado Springs to learn a triple Axel-the ultimate competition jump-at age 36. Some coaches think all jumps must be essentially “in the body,” or the musculature, by the skater’s mid-teens, but if Hamilton can loft a dependable triple, he could earn as much as a million a year in additional prize money for his effort.

The United States Figure Skating Association and its parent group, the International Skating Union, have watched this boom with mixed feelings. Traditionally, one or the other group has run nearly all competitions-with a few exceptions, such as the World Pro Figure Skating Championship in Landover, Maryland, designed for pros only. Now skating producers are setting up their own tournaments that ignore most traditional rules regarding qualifications of judges, drug tests and credentials of entrants.

Some events, like Tom Collins’ Tour of World Figure Skating Champions, a 70-city extravaganza from which a top skater can earn $750,000, are sanctioned because they meet USFSA standards. But pros-and TV networks-are thriving on their own innovations, such as Ice Wars (CBS) and Rock and Roll on Ice (Fox), which have scored big in the ratings. Right now, an amateur who enters one of these contests is barred from USFSA events, including the Olympics. Few observers, however, think these rules can last much longer.

The USFSA has relaxed its vigilance somewhat. President Claire Ferguson insists that the organization welcomes TV participation and wants skaters to have more opportunities to perform and defray the enormous cost of training. But she points out that show-biz promoters contribute nothing to the development of a skater; that is accomplished in the amateur ranks by USFSA funds and its appeals to private and corporate backers.

Like tennis, figure skating seems to be leaving behind such niceties as the distinction between amateurs and pros. It will be several years before the sport’s new profile is defined. For one thing, the pros must develop more variety and new routines if they are to maintain viewer enthusiasm. How many times can Witt get away with her trademark red dress, no matter how sexy? Can amateurs continue merely to be jumping beans? Perhaps not, but for now, the sport is making leaps in more ways than one. As coach Callaghan instructed Bobek just before her victory, “Just get out there and jump, jump, jump!”

–With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York