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READING, Pa. --Good luck to any Canadian seeking information from the Skate America international Grand Prix competition this week in Reading, Pa.
There are many reasons why it will be difficult to find out the fate of the Canadian entrants in the first of six Grand Prix qualifying events of the season: Canadian pair champions Jessica Dube of Drummondville, Que., and Bryce Davison of Cambridge, Ont., world junior silver medalist Patrick Chan of Toronto and Kevin Reynolds of Vancouver, B.C. and Canadian silver medalist Mira Leung of Vancouver.
Forget Canadian television coverage. No Canadian network has the rights to cover the Grand Prix events, other than the domestic Skate Canada next week in Quebec City. The Grand Prix television rights are offered by the International Skating Union, which also holds the rights to the world championships. Right now, no Canadian network has the rights to the world figure skating championships next March in Sweden, either. The price demanded by the ISU is, apparently too high and their demands too costly.
Currently, for the first time in many years, CBC holds the domestic rights to the Canadian championships and Skate Canada next week.
There’s a new thing this year called icenetwork.com, an on-demand online linkup to skating events. It’s a subsidiary of the U.S. Figure Skating Association, and it operates the site in a joint venture with a company called MLB Advanced Media. Pay a $29.95 subscription fee and you can watch every spiral and throw triple loop live at Skate America this week, as well as the U.S. championships. And fans get to listen to Nancy Kerrigan doing play by play commentary. However, Canadians are out of luck here, too. The feed is blocked to Canadian servers, because of rights issues.
Only NBC is showing anything. That would be their two-hour show that attempts to cover everything from 4 to 6 p.m. on Sunday, with the women’s final being live.
And the print media? Judging by the setup here, fuhgeddaboudit. It couldn’t be any more difficult for the media to get the word out. The constellation of the rink – in an out-of-the-way town not serviced by international airlines – prohibits a media room on the ground floor. (This arena is only about 11 years old, but it seems that people are building arenas these days without taking into consideration the space needed on the ground floor to service broadcast and print media. The Hershey Centre is Mississauga is a nightmare, and the Labatt Centre in London, Ont. is similar, too, although its design was constrained by its tight building site. The design of Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ont. is one of the best).
Here, media are in the press box, high above the action. That’s never a good thing. Any media covering this event had better be marathon-fit. Media aren’t famous for being marathon-fit.
The mixed zone is as far away as it could possibly be from this press box, because of where organizers allow us to go. This means it will probably be impossible to see any skater perform live. The way it’s working now, unless officials change things, print media have to sprint two, perhaps three times around the ends of the rink, in opposite directions to get to the mixed zone. There are plenty of volunteers to tell you where not to go.
The mixed zone is another story. Currently, it’s far too small, especially with the droves of Japanese media people, who drag their television cameras into this tiny zone, too narrow for anybody else to pass behind them. And the fence separating the media from skater is too short, not allowing the maximum number of people to do a scrum. As it is now, polite behaviour will go out the window very quickly.
These problems are the tip of the iceberg. Electrical outlets? Count them on one hand. Wireless service? Sometimes achingly slow. Deadlines, anyone?
