...This is a two-tape set, consisting of the 1992 Winter Olympics Highlights (hosted by Tim McCarver and Paula Zahn) and the 1992 Winter Olympics Figure Skating Highlights (hosted by Verne Ludquist, Scott Hamilton, Katarina Witt and Tracy Wilson). The run time of each tape is approximately 65 minutes.Skating fans have long complained about figure skating commentators, but the recent 2002 Olympics were a new low. I could only shake my head in disgust when Scott Hamilton proclaimed that Alexei Yagudin seemed to be conceding the free skate to Yevgeny Plushenko, only to have the judges award four perfect scores to Yagudin for presentation--and he received not a single mark lower than 5.9 out of a 6.0 scale. Prospective purchasers of this video will be happy to know that the performances run commentary-free! The hosts simply provide some set-up and analysis between the performances.
The promotional copy on the clamshell says, "The overall highlights tape captures all the moments of triumph and glory in hockey, speed skating, figure skating and skiing; including the gutsy performance of Italian playboy Alberto Tomba; the surprise medal-winning performances of Kerrin Lee-Gartner and Hilary Lindh; ski jumping's yougest gold medalist Toni Nieminen from Finland; freestyle skiing gold medalist Donna Weinbrecht; Team USA's semi-final finish in hockey, featuring the outstanding goaltending of Ray LeBlanc, and much more."
The figure skating highlight tape begins with the men's competition. It includes gold medalist Victor Petrenko's (Unified Team) complete original program and free skate, silver medalist Paul Wylie's (USA) complete original program and free skate, an excerpt of Christopher Bowman's (USA) free skate, along with brief highlight clips of other skaters. The men's competition was on the sloppy side. The favorite going into the event was Kurt Browning (Canada), who failed to medal. Petrenko and Browning both went on to successful professional careers.
The pairs portion of the tape includes only a brief look at the top American pair, Paula Urbanski and Rocky Marval. But, there's a complete performance by Christine Hough and Doug Ladret of Canada in the original program. For me, the highlight of the tape is the complete gold medal winning skate to "Dreams of Love" by Natalia Mishkutenok and Artur Dmitriev (Unified Team). They were known of their passion and originality. Natalia has extremely flexible legs and back, which are put to good use in many innovative positions. She makes a couple of mistakes on the side-by-side jumps, two footing her landing on a triple toe loop and singling what was intended to be a double axel--but the rest of her performance is filled with gorgeous elements. There's an interesting lift, many unique examples of her flexibility, and two impressive throw triple jumps landed with a soft knee. The climax of the routine contains my favorite forward death spiral ever. Artur takes her around twice, then she releases out of his hold into a split on the ice. She does a couple of flourishes with her arms and upper body while Artur skates around her. He takes her hand again, and assists her back into the forward death spiral again. What style! For me, it's the definitive Olympic pair skate of the nineties.
The ice dance competition comes next. The tape includes the complete free skates of Isabell and Paul Duchesnay (France), as well as Marina Klimova & Sergei Ponomarenko (Unified Team).
The women's competition contains a specially-edited version of Nancy Kerrigan's (USA) lovely original program. One of the highlights is a back shoot-the-duck entrance into a double lutz with her hands behind her head while rotating in the air and landed with her hands on her hips. There's also see an example of her beautiful catch-leg spiral to admire. There's also a short excerpt of Midori Ito (Japan) landing a triple axel. She's got some serious power in her jumps!
The tape also includes the complete performances of both Kristi Yamaguchi's (USA)original program and free skate. Kristi demonstrated how versatile she is by skating to two very different types of music. The first was the "Blue Danube" waltz--graceful, flowing, easy, and gentle--but in her free program, she skated to Spanish music requiring a lot of flair. She did remarkably well in both of them, earning her the gold medal. Highlights of her performances include a triple lutz - triple toe jump combination, a fantastic flying sit spin, a beautiful layback spin, and a Tano double flip. As we all know, Kristi went on to a distinguished professional career, skating beautifully to a wide variety of music in ice shows and professional competitions.
The tape ends with an excerpt of Paul Wylie's skating set to different music. There's also an excerpt of Paul Wylie skating pairs with Nancy Kerrigan in the exhibition skate, which was held after the competition was completed. Many of the newer Olympic figure skating tape sets include the full exhibitions, but not this offering.
The Olympic games only come around every four years. Occasionally, skaters will pay lip service to the world championships by saying that they're the most important, but nobody really believes them. The Olympics are the moment of truth, and this tape includes the most important skates of the early nineties. I'm taking one star off because the tapes should be longer, including more competitive performances, as well as the full exhibition performances.