What would professional figure skating look like if all of the athletes competing in the sport were undeniably heterosexual? According to this week’s Saturday Night Live, the answer would be: absolutely ridiculous.
For the episode’s cold open, skating announcers Scott Hamilton and Tara Lipinski — played by Taran Killam and Cecily Strong, respectively — revealed that the U.S. Olympic Committee put together a team of “less talented, but clearly heterosexual figure skaters” to compete in Sochi should Russia’s restrictions on homosexuality present any last-minute problems.
The unlikely B-squad of Olympic hopefuls, played by Bobby Moynihan, Jay Pharoah, Kate McKinnon and Beck Bennett — weren’t exactly Olympics material. Moynihan wore a Jets jersey and cargo pants, and his only combos were of the snack variety. Pharoah was Nate Dog and Warren G fan from Long Beach, Calif., who did not want to be on the ice in the slightest. In the pairs division, Bennett was a horny AutoZone employee chasing around his favorite server at Applebees, played by McKinnon.
Needing a heterosexual B-squad of figure skaters for the Olympics does seem unlikely, but the growing anxiety towards the treatment of homosexuals in Russia gave SNL the perfect opportunity to ridicule Russian anti-gay social policies, while poking fun at the flamboyance and flare of a sport that, according to SNL, would be ruined without homosexuals.
SNL’s criticism of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is apparent in the sketch, and the implication that the president is single-handedly ruining the Olympics for everyone is quite clear as well. To Saturday Night Live‘s writers, figure skating without homosexuals would be like hockey without fights or Nascar without crashes. Sure, it would still be entertaining, but something would definitely be missing overall.
Watch the cold open here:
