Starr Andrews remembers the stares she received in locker
rooms at her earliest figure skating competitions. She remembers the requests
to touch her coiled, textured hair.
اضافة اعلان
“The first thing that popped into my mind is, ‘It’s because
I’m Black,’” Andrews, 19, said in a recent interview. “And I wouldn’t want that
to be the first thing that popped into my head, but I couldn’t help but think
that.”
Andrews, the lone Black member of the US national figure
skating team, sometimes still encounters that unwelcome thought on and off the
ice: that she might be seen as different from her peers in a sport she has
loved since she was a little girl watching her mother take lessons.
Eventually, though, the ice became a place where Andrews
would celebrate that difference.
She did it most emphatically last summer, at a time when
many prominent athletes were staring down a “shut up and play” backlash after
walking off a court or a field in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
For Andrews, though, competing was the best way to speak up.
For a virtual event in July, she skated to Mickey Guyton’s
“Black Like Me,” a country song about racial inequality that was released after
the police killing of George Floyd. Andrews ended her program with a smile and
her right fist raised in the Black Power salute.
Videos of her performance have received more than 200,000
views online. Fans include Guyton and Michelle Obama, who shared one of the
videos and wrote: “To all the Black kids out there striving for excellence in
the face of those who doubt you: Keep going.”
Andrews fully intends to do that. So do other Black skaters
who have stretched creatively, gaining support and recognition in a sport where
they have often felt excluded.
Take, for example, Elladj Baldé, a 30-year-old Canadian
skater who was touring the world with ice shows until the pandemic forced him
back home. He soon co-founded a foundation to help diversify the sport, and
became a social media superstar after posting videos of himself joyously
skating in the wild outdoors, wearing casual clothing and doing routines that
barely resembled the formal Olympic programs.
Then there is Joel Savary, a 34-year-old coach in
Washington, DC, who has his own diversity foundation and a self-published book,
“Why Black and Brown Kids Don’t Ice Skate.”
One of Savary’s pupils is Kaitlyn Saunders, who briefly
traded her ice skates for a rolling pair last summer and performed at
Washington’s Black Lives Matter Plaza to a recording of Andra Day’s “Rise Up,”
a 2015 song about perseverance. Kaitlyn, now 10, repeated the performance as
part of the Inauguration Day celebration, this time accompanied live by Day.
These efforts have been widely acclaimed, but whether the
sport becomes more inclusive depends on its ability to make concrete changes.
To funding. To the training and selection of judges. (Baldé, Savary and Andrews
say they can’t remember ever seeing another Black person assessing their
performances.) And ultimately, to the core of what it means to be a figure
skater.
A Breakthrough and Then a Halt
In 1986, Debi Thomas of the United States became the first
Black skater to win a singles world championship. It happened seven years after
Tai Babilonia, the daughter of a Black woman and a man with Hopi and Filipino
roots, won a pairs world title with Randy Gardner.
At the 1988 Calgary Olympics, Thomas finished third to claim
the first Olympic medal for any Black athlete at a Winter Games.
Since then, though, only one other skater of African descent
has won an Olympic medal — Robin Szolkowy of Germany, who got the bronze in
pairs in 2010 and 2014.
Dominated for generations by white European and North
American skaters, the elite levels of the sport have been diversified primarily
through the arrival of East Asian and East Asian American stars. At the 2018
Olympics, half of the athletes in the US figure skating delegation were of Asian
descent.
At the world championships in Stockholm this week, the top contenders
for the men’s title will be Nathan Chen of the United States, whose parents
emigrated from China, and Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, who won gold at the last two
Olympics.
The reception for a new demographic was not always warm.
Tiffany Chin, who in 1985 became the first nonwhite skater
to win a US senior singles title, recalled in a 2018 Huffington Post
interview that early in her career, “a little girl told me: ‘You’re really
good, but you know you’ll never be a champion. Figure skating champions have
blond hair and blue eyes, and you don’t have either.’”
After the native Californian Michelle Kwan, the gold medal
favorite at the 1998 Olympics, was upset by Tara Lipinski, her US teammate, an
MSNBC digital headline declared: “American Beats Out Kwan.”
Until very recently, leaders of the sport in the United
States did not formally monitor the racial composition of competitors, judges
and other officials. But after the Black Lives Matter movement took shape last
year, US Figure Skating started collecting such data and established a working
group and then a task force to address diversity, equity and inclusion.
US Figure Skating appointed Savary, the Washington coach and
author, to both committees, because of his book and his work with Diversify
Ice, the nonprofit organization he started in 2017.
The skating association, Savary said, seemed especially
impressed by the part of his book in which he discussed going into neighborhoods
and knocking on doors to see if families would welcome an introduction to the
sport.
Diversify Ice’s leadership includes Pooja Kalyan, the only skater of
Indian descent on the US team, and Eliot Halverson, a winner of junior and
novice national titles who identifies as Latinx.
“While I was on the ground working on these issues every day
through Diversify Ice, others didn’t see the value in trying to make ice
skating more equitable for skaters of color,” Savary said. “This was a complete
180.”
One recommendation from the task force involved setting up a
fund to support promising competitors in memory of Mabel Fairbanks, a Black and
Indigenous skater who became a prominent coach after discrimination led to her
being barred from competition in the 1930s. Her protégés included Babilonia and
Gardner in their early years together and Atoy Wilson, whose 1966 victory in
the novice division made him the first Black US skating champion.
The first award from the fund, $25,000, went to Andrews in
January.
The costs of figure skating — Savary estimated that some
people spend more than $50,000 a year to try to reach the elite level — and the
limited access to rinks deter many people, regardless of race, from pursuing it
as a competitive sport. Savary has made affordability part of Diversify Ice’s
mission, in the hopes that increased participation will create a comfort zone
for skaters of color, who often feel isolated.
But he and Baldé both say that the rigid culture of the
sport has deterred Black participation as much as the price tag. The narrow
range of favored music, body types, costumes and dance moves creates a sense of
claustrophobia.
The subjective elements of the scoring system, which
includes points based on personal interpretation of music and emotional
translation of choreography, create a delicate predicament for Black figure
skaters. Many say they feel compelled to conform to the traditional mold of
stars in a sport that does not reflect or represent their identities and
cultures.
Baldé, who was the Canadian junior national champion in
2008, performed primarily to the classical music that is common in the sport.
But in his final five years of competing, he started incorporating more funk
and hip-hop songs by Black and brown artists — like James Brown, Bruno Mars and
T-Pain — into his programs.
Embracing the Next Generation
Like Kaitlyn, Starr Andrews gained a huge following at age
9, when she did an exhibition performance, choreographed by her mother, to
Willow Smith’s girl-power anthem, “Whip My Hair.” A YouTube video of the
routine has more than 56 million views, and it remained Andrews’ most
celebrated moment on the ice until last summer.
The “Black Like Me” program, however, has become Andrews’
favorite.
It didn’t matter to her that when she used it in competition
she finished 13th out of 17 skaters.
“The scores are disappointing, but that wasn’t the point of
the program,” Andrews said. “The point of the program was to get out that it’s
hard to be in the sport being one of the very few Black people.”
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