The trouble actually started late last summer, when the International Skating Union abruptly yanked the championships from their originally planned venue of Brisbane, Australia, in a dispute over TV rights. The Australian federation appealed the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but the case has dragged on for months, with one postponement after another and no decision yet announced.

In the meantime, the ISU made hasty arrangements with the French federation to put on the competition in Nice, on a temporary ice sheet set up with temporary seating in a convention hall.

Welcome to the weird world of sports. Some fans even wondered if all the organization problems, accidents and other wild happenings at this year's Worlds were a form of divine retribution for the ISU taking the competition away from Australia. Or perhaps it was just Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

Skaters complained about the poor quality of the ice and lack of privacy and quiet in the backstage areas. Fans complained about uncomfortable hard plastic seats, poor sight lines, and inadequate restrooms and food service at the competition venue.

From the perspective of U.S. skating fans, the surreal atmosphere of these championships was even further emphasized by the pitiful TV coverage being given to the event this year. Not only have the ridiculous tape delays been giving the sense that the competition has been held in a kind of time warp, but there's less broadcast time than in previous years, and it's being filled with far too much fluff and repetitive coverage.

For example, while ABC had a two-hour time slot for coverage of the ladies' free skate, in that time they managed to show only six four-minute programs. The remaining time was filled with such things as repeats of short programs that had already been shown twice on ABC's cable partner ESPN, and at least the fourth broadcast this season of a taped feature showing Michelle Kwan at the beach.

Similarly, U.S. viewers only got to see only the men's free skates three days after the event took place. The World Championships is by far the most important competition of the year, but you'd never know it from the way U.S. television has been treating it.

Some of the spectators who were present in the arena didn't seem to know it, either. In the qualifying rounds, the stands were packed with noisy schoolchildren who jeered rudely at skaters who fell. Unfortunately, there were a lot of skaters who fell in the qualifying rounds.

There were equally ugly displays by the crowd at the conclusion of the pairs event, with the strongly nationalistic mob booing the competitors who placed ahead of the French team and then disrupting the medal ceremony by booing the competition officials. It didn't help that the competition organizers also somehow misplaced the flags of the medalists. At least they managed to play the right anthem.

Who would have guessed that the two-time pair champions Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze would have been disqualified before the competition even began because of a doping violation? The ISU issued a press release the day of the starting draw stating that Berezhnaya had tested positive for a banned stimulant at the European championships.

According to coach Tamara Moskvina, the culprit was a cough medication Berezhnaya had been taking on the advice of a doctor, but it seems incredible that nobody -- skater, coach, physician, or team leader -- thought to compare the ingredients to the list of banned substances. The ISU Council has taken no formal action on the matter yet, but it seems all but certain that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze will be stripped of their European title and receive the three-month suspension mandated by the rules for a first offense of this nature.

If that weren't bizarre enough, French pair skater Stephane Bernadis reported that he had been attacked in his hotel room by an unknown assailant armed with a knife or razor -- and the press promptly began to question whether he had made the whole story up as a publicity stunt. Move over, Tonya Harding.

And there was drama on the ice as well. Ukrainian skaters Julia Obertas and Dmitri Palamarchuk suffered a terrible fall on a lift at the end of their program that left Palamarchuk sprawled senseless after hitting his head and back hard on the ice. Onlookers watched in horror as he was literally dragged off the ice before trained medical personnel could check him out for possible head, neck, or back injuries. The next team to skate, Canadians Kristy Sargeant and Kris Wirtz, were so upset by the accident that they had to interrupt their skate to ask the referee for additional time to compose themselves.

The pairs didn't have a monopoly on gory accidents, either. In one of the dance practices, a collision with another couple left Bulgarian dancer Albena Denkova with a deep gash in her leg that required emergency surgery to repair sliced muscles. And Italian dancer Luciano Milo was carried out of the arena on a stretcher after apparently breaking his ankle during the actual competition.

Who would have guessed that French dancers Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat, who were more heavily favored to win their event than any other competitors in Nice, would enter the final phase of their competition in only second place following a stumble by Peizerat in the original dance? One hates to think of what the partisan crowd would have done to the judges had a similar mistake in the free dance cost the French team the overall title.

U.S. television commentator Terry Gannon probably breathed a sigh of relief over Anissina and Peizerat's eventual victory, too -- prior to the competition, he had vowed to swim back to America if they failed to win.

In the men's event, who would have guessed that Evgeny Plushenko, who had looked all but invincible all through the season prior to Worlds would completely crumble in his free skate and come away without any medal at all? And this after all of his competitors had each made major mistakes in their own programs, so that the door was wide open for him to claim the title. Meanwhile, Elvis Stojko, who only a few years ago was virtually the only skater landing quadruple jumps with any degree of consistency, came away with a silver medal in spite of being the only one of the top five finishers in Nice not to land a quad in any phase of the competition.

And who would have guessed that Michelle Kwan, after being criticized all season long for allowing her technical skills to slip compared to her competitors, would wind up presenting the most technically accomplished performance in the ladies event, including the only clean triple/triple combination in the competition? For Kwan, it was her best performance since the 1998 U.S. Championships, and quite possibly the best performance of her entire career.

It was a huge triumph -- not just a convincing victory against competitors Irina Slutskaya and Maria Butyrskaya, but also against the nay-sayers who have criticized Kwan for being over the hill at 19, for pursuing an education and a life outside of the rink as well as skating, for her unusual choice of dark and "difficult" music for her long program, and for about a gazillion other imagined shortcomings.

If the weird happenings from earlier in the week seemed like the remnants of a bad dream, Kwan's free skate provided a welcome antidote: there was no doubt that this was the real thing, skating worthy of a world championship.