Requiem for Two Ice Birds: the Choreography of Exclusion in Soviet Figure Skating and the Construction of the World Sports’ Great Power

Abstract

The objective is to examine the factors responsible for the construction of the hegemony of Soviet pair figure skating athletes and ice dancing competitions at major international events since the sixties and its effects on the image of the Soviet Union as a world sports’ power. The use of the performance of figure skating pairs in competitions was a powerful vehicle for international communication of successes of the communist regime in technical preparation of its population. The discourse created around the figure skating pairs and ice dancers in the Soviet Union was imbued with a heteronormative political bias, which naturalized hierarchies in which women were situated in a position of dependence on men and contributed to the exclusion of sociocultural practices and policies that pointed to the questioning of the patriarchal order built by the communist regime.