In the spring of 1974, as the well-told story goes, the music critic Jon Landau saw Bruce Springsteen play for the first time. Thereafter, in Boston’s The Real Paper, Landau wrote these now-famous words: “I saw my rock ’n’ roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.”

To be clear, there is no attempt here to draw any parallel between this space and the success, literary or otherwise, of Jon Landau. All the same: in February of 2002, I saw the future of the Olympic Winter Games and its name was Ross Powers. 

The U.S. Figure Skating Championships are ongoing this week in San Jose, California. A certain (diminishing) percentage of people remain interested in figure skating. To be forthright once more, the U.S. team — men’s and women’s, women’s in particular — has not been all that good for years; there are a multitude of reasons for that; in part, it has to do with the Vancouver 2010 victory of Evan Lysacek. Not Lysacek himself. He is and always has been a first-rate champion. It’s that Vancouver gold medal and the style of skating it represents — a combination that, it can be argued, has stalled figure skating’s forward path in the United States.

Mostly, though, there is the development of the Winter Games themselves. Once, figure skating held center stage. Now the Winter Games essentially have become a snowboarding festival.