It's not real sport, let's hope it's not real life: Chris and Jayne and Nancy and Tonya - blades to the heart. Mark Lawson reports

The Winter Olympics - as perhaps befits the only sporting occasion to feature marks for 'artistic impression' - have always been strong on symbolism.

The wintry name used to encourage Cold War metaphors: the snow show staged in 1980 was the great example of sport as proxy politics: USA v USSR at ice hockey. As the presidential candidate Ronald Reagan began his campaign against the 'evil empire' of Communism, the Americans whupped the Russians 4-3 on the rink. 'Part of this win is showing them that our political system is better than theirs,' explained a US player helpfully afterwards.

After Communism went down to capitalism in the political arena, the Winter Olympics adjusted to the thaw by becoming associated with sporting stories to warm the heart. The incompetent British ski-jumper Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards and the Jamaican bobsleigh team both represented the victory of pluck and enthusiasm over such elusive attributes as talent, climate and finance. Eddie became a national celebrity; the Jamaicans became a Disney movie, Cool Runnings.

There were signs, though, that cuteness was not enough. It is worth recalling that the last Winter Games, in Albertville, France, were a critical disaster. 'Piste Off' read one British tabloid headline; 'The Winter Olympiczzzz', reported an American pundit.

Yet in the last few days, the Winter Olympics have produced two of the largest television viewing figures in the history of Britain and America (23 million and 80 million respectively). The audience was watching the sporting element - in each case, only about 10 per cent of the whole story - of two of the great media tales of of recent times. British newspapers have oohed and aahed to the glorious return, and then the awful denial, of the ice dancers Torvill and Dean. The American press has booed and hissed every twist of the bizarre saga of Tonya Harding and the baton attack on Nancy Kerrigan, her rival skater.

The Winter Olympics were back in the big time, though with the usual provisos. Both of these stories had little to do with sport, although they were all about games. The cold contest, with its talent for symbolism, had done it again. Each side of the Atlantic was offered a moral tale.

The comeback of Torvill and Dean is an exemplary legend of the foolishness of stars, the ludicrousness of competitive ice dancing, and the tendency to delusion of the British press and public.

We have been led to believe in recent days that the question 'Why?' applies only to the duo's defeat, but it might properly be asked about their appearance. Tarnishing the memory of a gold medal with a bronze, Torvill and Dean are the latest additions to the list of sports stars who have come back for a last bite, and been bitten.

George Best's pudgy, puffy dog days, the flabby catastrophes of late Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and the first-round roll-overs of Bjorn Borg's competitive return all provide evidence that sport is presided over by the god of the sell-by-date. In Torvill and Dean, there are two more scalps for his wall. That the skaters were seeking to top numerical perfection - after their score of nine times six in 1984 - is a particularly startling example of the phenomenon, and is testimony to either the tormented psychology of the retired performer or the terrible boredom of the professional circuit.

Torvill and Dean's supporters will say that they do not belong with this litany of failed comebacks; for, it is argued, their second Olympic performance was the equal of their first, and only the judges failed to see this. Yet to complain about subjectivity in a discipline where reward depends wholly on the prejudices of judges is illogical.

British reporting of the defeat for our whiz-kids has, however, persisted in seeing conspiracy: 'The Gold Robbery', thundered the Sun. Torvill and Dean's single six is presented as the objective standard from which other judges subjectively departed, and, yet this six was given to the British dancers by the British judge. Imagine what our lads in the press box would have made of a case in which foreign competitors received full marks only from a compatriot. Think what would have been written if another nation's skaters had taken a gold medal through the kind of bizarre marking quirk that gave T and D the gold in the European Championships, the first stage of their return, despite their apparent inferiority during competition.

But it suited us then to keep quiet and it suits us now to make noise. During the rise of Eddie 'the Eagle' Edwards much was read in to the willingness of the British to celebrate a no-hoper. This was seen as an admission of national weakness. Well, if so, it was perhaps a more palatable one than the wish to see corruption and conspiracy in an occurrence that might equally be accounted for by a miscalculation on behalf of the performers and a combination of patriotism and nostalgia from their supporters.

Faced with poor results in a sport scored more or less objectively - cricket - we blamed the one subjective element, umpires, or accused the opposition of doing something awful to the ball. On the wrong end of a result in an event scored subjectively - ice-skating - we suspect the judges of bias. In both cases, we are skating on thin ice.

The US's Olympic scandal is just as nationally emblematic. Metaphor did not leave American winter sport with the Cold War thaw. Lacking villains among the other countries, America managed in 1994 to provide a goodie and a baddie from within its own team.

If you were casting a mini-series - and at least four US companies are casting Kerrigan-Harding dramas - you would worry about providing quite such severe contrast between the central characters: rough, pudgy Tonya Harding, who skated her way out of poverty, and willowy, crisp Nancy Kerrigan, born with silver skates in her pram. If you were directing a mini-series, you might have doubts about, in the climactic skate-off, dressing Tonya up in scarlet. But all of these things this story had for real. Even beyond these national and class dynamics, wider significances hang from the Kerrigan-Harding case like stalactites. The last great extra-sporting drama - the on-court stabbing of Monica Seles by a Steffi Graf fan - was merely a revelation of the psychopathy of sports supporters. But, if Harding is shown to have known of or to have ordered the wounding of Kerrigan, we will have a terrifying example of the psychopathy of the sports performer.

It would be hard not to see it as a product of the win ethic in modern sport: a less socially acceptable manifestation of the sentiments of the US ice-hockey squad in 1980. In the same way, the weak decision of the American officials to delay an investigation into the Harding case until after Lillehammer betrays another American neurosis. Prevarication seems to have been motivated by fear of a huge law suit from Ms Harding were she to be excluded from the Olympics.

Apart from their respective national characteristics, the Torvill and Dean and Kerrigan/Harding affairs overlap only once, but, in sporting terms, importantly. If Ms Kerrigan holds on to her current first place and takes the gold medal today, it will always be suspected that her scores reflected sentimental as much as technical achievement. Her victory would be as arguable as T and D's defeat.

In a real sport, the progress of the competition can be measured by numbers or times. Ice-dancing and ice-skating are primarily theatrical. Torvill and Dean did more than any other skaters to edge their 'sport' towards the stage. Therefore, they should realise that objecting to defeat is like complaining about bad reviews.

The Tonya Harding affair, meanwhile, has moved skating not towards the theatre, but towards the movie studio. So the Lillehammer Winter Olympics may have reclaimed the games; at least for television and newspapers. But, once again, the great successes and fusses of the games had nothing at all to do with sport.

(Photographs omitted)