Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker try to beat skating’s system

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I spent several hours earlier this season with Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker, the most promising young U.S. pairs skating team since Kristi Yamaguchi and Rudy Galindo more than two decades ago.

(Yamaguchi and Galindo won two world junior titles and two national senior titles before splitting up. She chose to concentrate on singles and became the Olympic women’s champion and two-time world champion. He also excelled at singles, winning a national senior title and a world bronze medal.)

As happens during any lengthy conversation with skaters, we eventually got around to the new judging system that I think has turned the sport into a paint-by-numbers exercise.

McLaughlin, of Los Angeles, and Brubaker, of Algonquin, Ill., will defend their U.S. title next week in Cleveland. They had similar feelings about the system implemented after the pairs judging scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Their candid answers, which emerged in the form of a progressive call and antiphon during an interview at their training base in Colorado Springs, resonated even more because their partnership has prospered competitively during the new judging era.

‘The judging system started off in such a good direction,’ Brubaker said, ‘and

now it just seems there are so many rules that ... ‘

‘ ... You are so limited on what you can do,’ McLaughlin chimed in, ‘so everyone is just going to wind up doing the same thing because there is no room for creativity....’

‘They have really narrowed it down because it’s all about levels,’ he added. ‘To get the highest level, there are only one or two ways. Then there’s like the rules of ... ‘

‘ ... Holding your spiral [on one edge] for six seconds, like how boring is that,’ she responded. ‘How can you interpret the music if you’re just holding the spiral ... ‘

‘ ... Six seconds, and then you have to add this position to that,’ he continued with a shrug. ‘And it has taken away from the interpretation of the programs.’

Instead of thinking about a head position or an arm movement or feeling the music, the skaters must concentrate on the clock.

‘We count,’ Brubaker said. ‘We’re in spins, we count. We’re saying numbers to each other. We’re sitting there holding a position, like the spiral, and I’m in my head going, ‘Zero, one, two, three, four’ ... all the way up to six.’

It seems almost ironic that, like almost anyone who admires pairs skating, McLaughlin and Brubaker lionize the 1988 and 1994 Olympic champion pair, Ekaterina Gordeeva and the late Sergei Grinkov of Russia, whose skating was positively ethereal.

As I wrote in 1994: ‘Their movements are in such perfect harmony that the watcher imagines this must be what the music of the spheres would sound like.’

As athletically and artistically talented as they were, it is unlikely G&G would have been able to produce the same quality of skating if they had to worry about all the counting and ungainly contortions that generate points in the new system.

‘They had the ability and the time, and they didn’t have the restrictions that eliminated some of the possibilities as far as creativity,’ Brubaker said.

For all that, Brubaker is wise enough to play the hand the new system has dealt.

‘It is what it is, unfortunately,’ he said. ‘That’s the judging system for our sport. There are times when it does benefit you. The only thing you can try to do is play to it and follow the rules and skate the best you can -- and hope it works in your favor.’

-- Philip Hersh