Figure Skating

The United States will send its strongest ice dance contingent in Olympic history to Vancouver next month, determined to put two teams on the podium for the first time.

The Americans have never been dance powerhouses, but have medals contenders in Meryl Davis and Charlie White, and Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto.

Davis and White head to the 2010 Games on a high after winning the U.S. championship on the weekend here with a dizzying display of lifts in the free dance. Their total score of 222.29 gave them a margin of victory of 3.78 points over Belbin and Agosto, the 2006 Olympic silver medalists.

"It's important in your home country to come out on top going to an Olympics or world championships," White said. "What we want to do to at the Olympics is win."

The United States has been a consistent power in figure skating over the past 50 years, delivering much of its star power in pairs, men's and women's events. But when it came to ice dancing, it was a different matter altogether.

The Turin Olympics ended a 30-year American drought in ice dancing when Belbin and Agosto reached the podium, becoming the first Americans to capture a medal in the sport since Colleen O'Connor and Jim Millns took bronze in the first Olympic ice dance competition at Innsbruck, Austria, in 1976.

But, as was demonstrated as this weekend, American ice dancers are no longer the long shots in this sport. The win by Davis and White was their first over Belbin and Agosto, the 2008 national champions who missed last year's nationals because of an injury to Agosto.

Now both teams are primed to show the world what they can to on the sport's biggest stage in Vancouver.

"I think it will catch people by surprise because I think it's kind of caught the skating world as a whole by surprise the last couple of years," Davis said.

The strongest competition the Americans will face in Vancouver is likely to come from Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who train in Ann Arbor, Mich. with White and Davis.

"We've always thought there were many great North American dance teams to pave the way for this generation and perhaps didn't get their due from the judges," said Belbin, who was born and raised in Canada but moved to train in the United States in 1998 and adopted American citizenship just prior to the 2006 Olympics.

"It's very exciting time to be an American, or North American ice dancer and we're privileged to be part of an elite group of athletes leading the way."

There is no doubt that changes to dance following a series of judging scandals have played a part in the Americans' rise to prominence.

For one, the former judging environment appeared to make it difficult for athletes from countries without a tradition of success in ice dancing to make it to the podium. At least that was the perception of athletes.

"I really feel it's just the belief that American ice dancers can win with great skating and I think a decade ago it was really difficult to imagine that, just politically," Belbin said. "It was impossible to imagine that we would ever be allowed to get onto a podium."

Changes made to clean up judging have also opened the high end of the sport to different kinds of skaters, as there is a greater emphasis on athleticism through such skills as lifts and more complicated footwork. The top two American pairs are good examples of that.

"In the last three years the lifts have just become much, much more difficult," Agosto said. "And the strength that's required, not just for the guys but for the girls who have to flip themselves around and hold themselves in very difficult positions, it's really been a great challenge for us to get strong enough and to be able to be also be creative to come up with something that looks unique is also very difficult and fits in with all these rules we have to accommodate."

The other factor that has pushed U.S. ice dancing to the top is the influence of coaches from Russia, a country that was consistently at or near the top of the event for most of its first three decades as an Olympic sport.

The top three American ice dancing pairs, along with Canadians Virtue and Moir, are all coached by Russians. Igor Shpilband and Marina Zueva coach Davis and White, as well as Virtue and Moir, and are the former coaches of Belbin and Agosto. Belbin and Agosto are now trained by Natalia Linichuk and Gennadi Karpanosov, who won gold for the Soviet Union in 1980.

"The Soviet Union was so successful in ice dance," White said. "They've come and really given themselves to all these American skaters and along with the basic skills that go into American skating and all the technique that goes into it, it's been a great combination. At this point it's really peaked and it's got the artistry and the technical aspect."

Added Evan Bates, who along with partner Emily Samuelson secured the third U.S. Olympic ice dancing slot this weekend, "We have five of the top-10 teams in the world training in Michigan which is bizarre. . . . This is really the first generation of U.S. ice dancers who are cracking top-three in worlds and Olympics. I think there's really good things to come. We're dominating the junior ranks as well so we have a bright future."