Czech Olympic Ice Dancers Swap In Another AI ’90s Song Because Their First Track Ripped Off New Radicals

AI music has come to the Olympics.

On Monday, competitors in ice dancing at this year's Milano Cortina games were required to incorporate "the music, dance styles, and feeling of the 1990s" for the rhythm dance segments of their routines. 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, "original" 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 both the CS Lombardia Trophy and the Skate Canada competitions last fall, Mrázek and Mrázeková ice-danced to an artificially generated track called "One Two" (credit to "AI" paired with an unknown remix AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" that is reportedly also AI-generated. 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 For Baseball Nerds, 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" seems to reference New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander's shouted countdown from the beginning of the song. The fact that an AI platform was instructed to render the music in the style of Bon Jovi does not disguise the obvious plagiarism.

Check out this handy breakdown video:

When the obvious ripoff came to light a few months ago, the Czech duo replaced it with a different AI-generated track. That one seemingly cribbed lyrics from Bon Jovi’s “Raise Your Hands” (not even a '90s song) but less so, and that's what they've been using since including in this week's competition. (On Monday, they placed 17th.)

NBC has seemingly done a good job of scrubbing any unofficial video of their Olympics 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.