Stellar marks for Blades’ final spin

Once it had been reduced to a popularity contest, was there really any other way it might end?

Jamie Salé and Craig Simpson were crowned Battle of the Blades champions Monday night during the uniquely Canadian and immensely popular reality/competition show's first finale.

Salé, who along with partner/husband David Pelletier won Olympic gold in Salt Lake City in 2002, is arguably this country's best-known and most-beloved female figure skater, so when the outcome of Battle of the Blades became solely a question of which team got the most public support, the ending became something of a foregone conclusion.

The hour-long wrap-up to the series, broadcast live from Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens, was filled with lifts, spins, nostalgia and heartstring tugs as Salé and Simpson, along with fellow finalists Shae-Lynn Bourne and Claude Lemieux and Marie-France Dubreuil and Stéphane Richer, waited for hosts Ron MacLean and Kurt Browning to deliver the final results.

Unlike the series' previous weeks, in which one of two pairs involved in a skate-off was eliminated by judges' votes, Monday's finale was strictly an exhibition, producers having wisely chosen to allow viewers' votes to determine the outcome.

(Clearly, they had been made aware of the controversy that followed the judges' unpopular pick of Kelly Monaco over John O'Hurley in the first season of Dancing With the Stars, which forced that show's producers to overhaul their format.)

Sunday night's final pairs skate-off was nothing short of a moist-eyed love-in, with all three pairs delivering solid performances and all three judges (including ex-NHLer Doug Gilmour) going over-the-top gushy and awarding across-the-board perfect 6.0 scores to each of the tandems.

Dapper judge Dick Button described Lemieux as "a satin-shirted, romantic lady-killer," and pretty much all centre-seat adjudicator Sandra Bezic could muster after Richer's final twirl was a breathless "I'm toast."

In other words, there wasn't much judging going on; rather, despite the serious efforts of the skaters, the final night of competition felt more like one of those fan-frenzied hugfests in which everyone who laces up a pair of skates is considered a winner. Which is fine, if flowers and smiles are all you're after -- but there was, on an admittedly friendly level, a contest taking place, and a winner was going to be crowned. A bit more discernment from the judges on the final night of serious skating would have been useful.

In the end, though, it was left completely to viewers' votes (somewhat disappointingly, MacLean failed to report how many votes were cast and how wide or narrow the margin of victory was), and Salé and Simpson took home the trophy.

Bourne and Lemieux, who finished second, were gracious in defeat, as were Dubreuil and Richer, who were eliminated earlier in the hour.

Monday's show also included a trio of skating exhibitions -- a sexy and dangerous routine by Salé and Pelletier, an elegant ice-dance by Dubreuil and partner/husband Patrice Lauzon, and a reunion of Barbara Underhill and Paul Martini, who skated to vocals by Underhill's daughter that surely left nary a dry eye in anybody's house.

As trite as it sounds, the real winner in the end was Canadian TV, for having concocted a homegrown, ice-bound hybrid of a familiar ballroom-floor format that turned out to be a huge winner, both creatively and commercially. There's no telling whether the show's popularity will endure, but the first spin turned out to be more delightful than anyone could have predicted.

It wasn't a foolproof format; Battle of the Blades could easily have fallen flat on its frozen backside. What made the series succeed was the seriousness with which the former NHLers approached the work, and the patience and utter fearlessness that their female partners demonstrated while letting the burly pucksters lift and spin them in truly terrifying directions.

As it turned out, Battle of the Blades was a seamless melding of two popular sports whose audiences reside at opposite ends of a spectrum, and the courage and determination of the combatants enticed both crowds to share space on the couch for the past few Sundays and Mondays.

Browning summed it up well Monday: "I got to step on the ice with some of these great hockey players that I had watched, and they're complimenting my sport so much by the effort they're putting in and the respect they've given it. And that really makes me feel good."

Battle of the Blades, it seems, made a whole lot of Canadians feel good.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 17, 2009 D3