Ice Dancing

Nick Sinchak is a busy 18-year-old chasing an Olympic dream. The Harwood resident skates with Samantha Tomarchio in ice dancing competitions, and the pair are slowly becoming among the country's best. Both said they would watch the Olympics when they begin next week in Italy, but the pair is hoping to be there to compete in the future. They are moving up the ladder in the world of ice dancing. The pair recently took third place at U.S. nationals in St. Louis and is going to advance to the junior level - one below that of Olympic competitors.

Samantha Tomarchio will watch the Olympics when they begin next week in Italy. But the 15-year-old Ellicott City resident is going to have a lot more interest than most people. Tomarchio and partner Nick Sinchak are moving up the ladder in ice dancing competition. The pair recently took third place at the novice level at U.S. nationals in St. Louis and advanced to the junior level, one step below the Olympic level. And with four years to get ready, Tomarchio is hoping that she and Sinchak can find their way to the Olympics.

ST. LOUIS -- Appropriately enough, newly minted U.S. citizen Tanith Belbin and partner Ben Agosto yesterday began their march to the Olympic ice dancing competition to "Yankee Polka." Before a scant crowd at the Savvis Center, the two-time national champions and silver medalists at the 2005 world championships scored a 41.57 in the compulsory dance at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. The couple is overwhelmingly favored to win this event and to contend for the country's first Olympic ice dancing medal since 1976, the year the event was added to the Winter Games.

Pilar Bosley was a bundle of nerves, waiting for her name to be called to skate at the 2005 State Farm U.S. Figure Skating Championships. "At the first part of the competition, I looked out and I could see all these people," said 16-year-old Bosley, a junior at C. Milton Wright High School in Bel Air. "I started breathing heavy and pacing and wringing my hands together. I was so nervous. I was wondering if I could do it." When Bosley and her skating partner, John Corona, 16, were called, her jitters were forgotten, and the couple ice-danced their way to a fourth-place win in the novice dance category.

Kristie Zeiler - tall, slender and a student of ice dancing and figure skating for 10 years - swept in from the ice at the Mount Pleasant Ice Arena yesterday morning. Blades flashing, she glided gracefully up to the wall, threw first one leg, then the other across the barrier and rolled over like a lumberjack clambering over a downed spruce. It's not a move she learned in ice dancing. But then Zeiler, 19, of Rosedale, wasn't wearing her figure skates. She and her sisters Megan, 15, and Allissa, 13, and 25 other girls were competing against eight other teams in Baltimore Youth Hockey's first all-girl "PonyTail Tournament," played at three area rinks.

NEW YORK - An alleged Russian organized-crime figure was charged yesterday with conspiring to fix the pairs figure skating and ice dancing competitions at the recent Salt Lake Winter Olympics, which were dominated by a judging scandal in the pairs competition. Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov - who was arrested by Italian police at his resort home in Forte dei Marmi - appeared to have a singular motivation: getting a visa to return to France, where he once lived. The U.S. attorney in Manhattan alleged in an unsealed criminal complaint that Tokhtakhounov conceived and directed a scheme with a second Russian mobster and a member of the Russian Skating Federation to secure a gold medal for the Russian pairs skaters and for the French ice dancers, one of whom is Russian.

SHE IS 16. He is 14. She's been skating 13 years, since she was 3 - simply fell in love, her mother recalls, with what she saw inside after insistently asking what "that building" was, meaning the Columbia Ice Rink. He's been skating only four years - hockey was the draw, but now, he has no time for sticks and pucks. Barely seven months ago, Amanda Buckler and Justin Thelen were hardly aware of one another. They were two young skaters from different counties working on different things on ice mostly at different times, although for the same coach in the Columbia Figure Skating Club.

The Columbia Festival of the Arts has become one of the premiere showcases for dance in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Since its modest beginnings in 1988, when the festival's featured companies were Kinetics Dance Theatre of Ellicott City and the Garth Fagan Dance Company, dance has become an integral player in the 10-day event. The 2000 festival, which wrapped up yesterday, included performances by such renowned international artists as Marcel Marceau, companies as groundbreaking as `The Next Ice Age" and an announcement of a company in residence for future festivals - the well-respected Washington Ballet.

The Next Ice Age has come home. The innovative ice dancing troupe is practicing at the Columbia Ice Rink for its performances June 16 and 17 at the Columbia Festival of the Arts. The company began its unusual blend of ensemble skating 12 years ago with a performance at the rink. "We are so excited," said Nathan Birch, artistic director for the company. "We started in Columbia, and to be presented in this festival really helps to legitimize us in our minds." Based in Baltimore, the Next Ice Age began with an ending.