Russian dancers` coach says root-causes of claims to music obvious.

VANCOUVER, February 17 (Itar-Tass) - Root-causes of the sudden problem
around the soundtrack of the Russian dancers Oksana Domnina and Maksim
Shabalin are obvious, as they are the candidates for getting the 2010
Olympic gold in dancing, believes their coach Gennady Karponosov.
Karponosov, who won gold in 1980 in Lake Pacid performing with Natalya
Linichuk, believes the scandal around the music of Domnina and Shabalin's
Aboriginal Dance has been fanned quite purposefully.
Lawyers of the British pop singer of Indian origin, Sheila Chandra,
sent a letter to the Russian dancers on the eve of the Olympics accusing
them of encroachment on Chandra's copyright.
Although Russian lawyers settled the problem before the Olympics, many
media have been adding fuels to the fire in the past few days.
"Nothing of this kind has ever happened in figure skating in the
past," Karponosov said. "The figure-skaters would take the music to their
liking and nobody would be dismayed by it. On the contrary, everyone would
be glad to hear it."
He recalled that Linichuk and he danced to the songs of the popular
French pop singer and composer of the 1970's, Joe Dassin.
"When he saw the dance for the first time, he got very glad and I
still remembers he told us then, well, I didn't suspect anyone could dance
so nicely on the ice to my music," Karponosov said.
"I have a different question to ask, namely why is this happening
right now?" he asked. "And why have claims emerged to particularly these
dancers?"
"If you ask me, it's obvious -- they are the main aspirants to gold
medals," Karponosov said.
Oksana Domnina and Maksim Shabalin removed a dubious passage from the
soundtrack of their free dance before the Olympic Games and that is why
the claims against their music are overly late and inconsistent, Valentin
Piseyev, the president of Russia's Figure Skating Federation said in an
interview with Itar-Tass in a comment on the stir around the music.
"It was true that the issue /regarding the music/ was on the agenda
and it was resolved at the level of the legal department of Russia's
Olympic Committee," Piseyev said. "We have all the documents confirming
this."
"The fragment was cut out and this was done before the Games and
that's why it's unclear why the harping on it has surfaced again right
during the Games," he said. "The information is overly late and
inconsistent and it's all the more so surprising that it's mostly peddled
by the Russian media."
-0-kle