One of the good things about the Olympics is that they're always changing, adapting to the times. The Olympics are so hidebound and conservative and downright weird in other areas that they're a great candidate to be hidebound and out of touch on the field of play, but they're actually pretty good at staying current and reflecting the sporting landscape by discontinuing some sports and bringing in new ones.

The problem is the sporting landscape. The world's new sports tend to be of the TV-inspired "X Games" variety. These are, for the most part, sports in which people perform feats of acrobatic skill on some device -- a skateboard, a snowboard, a bicycle, etc. -- and are judged subjectively on things like artistic merit. Again, no direct competition, no defense.

I blame society. We aren't interested in doing things if someone's trying to stop us. We just want to do our thing, individually, be left alone, shine in the spotlight. Teamwork and overcoming resistance -- the things that make great sports great -- are not valued. It doesn't bother me that this is leading to some kind of breakdown in the social fabric. It does bother me that it leads to dull sporting events where we're forced to watch one competitor after another do pretty much the same thing, over and over and over.

On Monday night we got a little glimpse of what defense might look like in the sport that is the Olympics' signature event and their worst: figure skating. Jamie Sale, the female half of the Canadian pair, and Anton Sikharulidze, the male half of the Russian pair, smacked into each other at full speed during the warmup before their free skate. It was a pretty good center-ice collision. Both of them fell, and Sale looked shaken up. But they both shrugged off any discomfort and skated their programs.

I decided I was a fan of the Canadian pair, Sale and David Pelletier, when I saw their outfits. She wore a charcoal miniskirt and a gray, clingy sweater that somehow made her -- all 5-foot-1, 103-pound world-class athlete of her -- look dumpy. He wore gray slacks, a gray shirt and a gray sleeveless sweater. She looked like the new temp in accounts payable and he looked like an assistant manager over at the J.C. Penney, but at least they didn't look like a hooker working a Tinkerbell angle and David Copperfield, as most skating pairs do, and I found it endearing.

Sale and Pelletier skated a routine to the theme from "Love Story" that looked to these unschooled eyes -- and to the NBC commentators -- to be pretty mistake free while showing signs of life and charisma. Sikharulidze and his partner, Yelena Berezhnaya, favorites to make it 11 straight golds for Soviet or Russian pairs, had skated a routine that had some flaws, but received high scores. It was a more difficult routine, NBC's Scott Hamilton reminded us.

Sale and Pelletier's response to the wildly enthusiastic crowd was one of those moments you tune in to the Olympics for. Sale's icy, dramatic facial expression slowly melted as she saw the crowd rise, cheering. Pelletier clenched his fists toward his partner in celebration, then bent down and kissed the ice. Just before one of their leaps, Hamilton, a 1984 men's gold medalist, had said, "Throw triple loop, and the gold is theirs." The jump was perfect. NBC crowned them champs.

Then the scores were revealed. The Canadians were second. The crowd rained boos on the judges, an odd-looking assortment of schoolmarms who sat stone-faced. Sale broke down. The NBC announcers were beside themselves. After a commercial, Sale, who had pulled herself together, told a reporter, simply, "We skated absolutely perfect."

Sandra Bezic, a former Canadian pairs champion working the Olympics for NBC, said, "I'm embarrassed for our sport right now," and you had to wonder if this was where the bar was, if this seemingly blown call was the first thing that had embarrassed her, whether she hadn't been embarrassed by all the Tonya Harding nonsense, or the fact that hers is a sport where the competitors are judged by how they practice, by whether they smile, by whether their outfits please the schoolmarms, by whether they skate early in the evening or later. It's a crazy, corrupt, cockamamie sport, but now that her homeboy and her homegirl got dissed, Bezic was finally embarrassed.

Well, whatever it takes.

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