The Second Mark: Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold (by Joy Goodwin)

Published in 2004, this book is about the pairs skating scandal at the 2002 Olympic games, and more specifically about three pairs - from Canada, Russia, and China - and their journey to the Olympic games.

I enjoy following figure skating and remember this year, and the book was an interesting read. I was hoping it would delve much further into the actual corruption - Goodwin seemed to just give up on digging particularly far, just reporting straightforwardly on the outcomes, after which the book ends. It's really more about the skaters themselves - growing up in communist China, the Soviet system, and the "free market" of Canada, and how different their paths were. 

I wasn't a particular fan of any of these skaters, but it definitely made me feel a lot of admiration for Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, who had an extremely difficult path to become Olympic contenders. It also kind of reinforced that Salé and Pelletier were slightly annoying, which was also my impression at the time. The Russians won the short program, Canada's silver was not a huge injustice, and it came off like bad sportsmanship to me then, and still kind of does. 

Anyway, fun to dig back into all of this drama! And rewatch all the skating on YouTube, of course.