Despite the fact that everybody seems to hate NBC's coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, there have still been compelling television moments. Take Monday night (February 22) for example: In the midst of hypnotic images of ski jumping and freestyle aerials, the focus of the evening was on ice dancing. It's an event that has been dominated by Russia ever since joining the Olympics ranks in 1976, but Monday's competition saw the rise of Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue, the Canadian pair who surged to the top and took the gold medal. Meryl Davis and Charlie White, an American team who have been partnered up for 13 years, took the silver medal, while Russia's Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin -- the reigning world champions -- settled for bronze.

Unlike plain old figure skating, ice dancing focuses more on storytelling, coordination, lifts and holds rather than jumps and twists. There's also a heavy focus on music -- in fact, one of the reasons why the American pair grabbed such a big score in their final skate was because they managed to meld their choreography so well with the music (sadly, said music was a series of tunes from "Phantom of the Opera" -- apparently, some aspects of ice dancing are still stuck in 1988).

In fact, most of the musical selections were pretty safe, as a majority of the teams stuck to well-worn classical pieces. However, there was at least one truly bold choice during the skating last night. Brits Sinead and John Kerr gave something of a retirement performance (they declared that this would be their last Olympics) set to a remix of Linkin Park's "Crawling" (they used "Krwlng," from LP's 2002 remix album Reanimation). The commentators noted that it was a big chance, and while their scores didn't put them on the medal podium (they finished in 20th place), they deserve a thumbs up for injecting a little edge into the evening.

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