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AI music has come to the Olympics.
The competitors in ice dancing at this year’s Milano Cortina Olympics were required to incorporate “the music, dance styles, and feeling of the 1990s.” As Rodger Sherman’s SPORTS! newsletter points out, this led to a hilarious and/or depressing chain of events involving the New Radicals’ “Get What You Give.”
Most ice dancing pairs skated to actual songs from the ’90s, a list including tracks by Eiffel 65, Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Will Smith, Lenny Kravitz, and Bell Biv Devoe. Three separate pairs skated to a medley of Ricky Martin’s “The Cup Of Life” (wrong global sporting event!) and “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Two more each skated to Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting For Tonight.” One duo even moved to a medley of the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)” and Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills.” Surprisingly, no maudlin nu-metal!
The regulations were strict but kind of confusing. Copyright claims factored in, a variable that doesn’t often come up when ice dancers are skating to centuries-old classical or ballroom dance music, so Canadian husband-and-wife team Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac had to swap out their Prince song for Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb” when the Purple One’s famously restrictive estate denied them, even though, as Lauriault put it, Tom Jones and Prince “are not the same vibe!” Songs technically released in 1989 were not eligible even if they were included on an album released in 1990, which meant Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” was a no-go for French teammates Guillaume Cizeron and Laurence Fournier Beaudry.
There were also BPM restrictions, which forbade British ice dancer Phebe Bekker from using Oasis. She explained her struggle in this video:
For some reason, despite all the red tape, AI music designed to evoke the ’90s was completely acceptable to the International Olympic Committee. That was the path taken by Czech siblings Daniel Mrázek and Katerina Mrázeková, who were presumably trying to avoid copyright snags. However, as Sherman notes, the strategy led them directly into a different intellectual property quagmire.
At the Skate Canada competition in November, Mrázek and Mrázeková ice-danced to an artificially generated track called “One Two by AI” paired with AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” The problem — besides the queasy, corny sensations elicited by the disreputable use of AI music — is that the song directly plagiarized the lyrics from the New Radicals’ 1998 classic “You Get What You Give.” Shana Bartels’ figure skating account, which broke the story back in November, offered this lyric transcription:
Every night we smash a Mercedes-Benz
Yow! Yow!
Wake up, kids
We got the dreamer’s disease
Every night we smash a Mercedes-Benz
First we run and then we laugh ‘til we cry
Hey! Hey! Hey!
Yow!
Every single one of those lines was lifted directly from “You Get What You Give.” Even the title, “One Two by AI,” seems to reference New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander’s shouted countdown from the beginning of the song. The fact that AI rendered the music in the style of Bon Jovi does not disguise the obvious plagiarism. Check out this handy breakdown video from the Czech team’s Skate Canada routine:
When the obvious ripoff came to light, the Czech duo replaced it with a different AI-generated track for Olympic competition. NBC has seemingly done a good job of scrubbing any unofficial video of their routine from the internet (look for it on Peacock), but I am heartened to report that the siblings have faced widespread backlash for using AI, including from Sports Illustrated Olympics correspondent Mitch Goldich.
Sherman is digging up lots of amazing stories like this in his daily report, so I recommend subscribing if you’re looking for the best Winter Olympics coverage.