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Born Slippy From The New Yorker
In Nashville, Kwan performed the first triple-jump combination perfectly, but slipped skating out of the second one, and, in a weird and utterly graceless loss of balance, she ended up in a "Christina's World"-like sprawl on the ice. "That was absolutely unnecessary and uncalled for!" the TV commentator and two-time Olympic champion Dick Button declared, his voice carrying a slightly schoolmarmish note of disapproval. Kwan got up, with ice shavings clinging to her skating dress, only to fall again, later in the program, which allowed Tara Lipinski to take the title away from her and to become, at fourteen, the youngest national champion ever. Afterward, the camera found Michelle gripping her face in shock. A month later, she stumbled in her short program at the World Championships, and Tara claimed that title, too, becoming the youngest world champion ever. Michelle was now the youngest ex-world champion ever. Why did Michelle fall? Kwan's entourage was reluctant to answer that question. "I can't talk about that," her choreographer, Lori Nichol, told me. "My understanding is that it was a simple technical thing, but you'll have to talk to Frank." Frank Carroll, Kwan's coach, said, "I think Michelle began to feel she had something to lose, and, as much as I wanted to change that notion, it was very difficult, getting into her head. At sixteen, they have their own things going on in their minds." Michelle's older sister Karen, who is also a top competitive skater and is now a sophomore at Boston University, told me, "Last year, Michelle would sometimes break down and cry for no reason. Like, she'd miss one jump and then she'd cry. I think it was just overwhelming to her, what she had to go out and do." The simplest explanation was that Michelle fell because she had grown up. Since 1993, when she arrived on the international stage at thirteen, a jumping phenom, she had gained thirty pounds and grown five inches. She now had breasts and hips, which is just about the worst thing that can happen to a skater, torquewise. "Once your body starts to develop, it's difficult to keep your jumps, because you start getting hips and become shapely," Dorothy Hamill, who won the gold in 1976, told me recently. "You can't remain compact." At the same time, all the doubt and uncertainty that are felt by any adolescent girl were visited on Michelle, and they showed in her skating. Fleming told me, "If you're feeling something, it will come out on the ice." Many athletes fetishize confidence and mental toughness, but this is especially true in skating, where there is a semimystical element to "getting" and "losing" one's triple jumps--the axel, the lutz, the flip, the loop, the salchow, and the toe loop, in descending order of difficulty. Oksana Baiul, who had just turned sixteen when she won the gold medal, told me, "As you get older, you start gaining weight, and you have a lot of things inside of you--especially inside of your head. You start thinking differently, seeing things differently. When you're young, you're just thinking about skating." The figure-skating world doesn't know quite what to think about the ever-younger girls who now dominate the sport. Skating is an inbred, hybrid culture that includes elements from the worlds of dance, sports, and theatre, and combines a new media focus on individuals and personalities with the old media world of ice spectaculars. No one wants the freakish gymnastics element to creep into the sport. Yet the TV audiences love to see triple jumps, and girlish bodies are better than womanly ones at doing triples. So at the same time that the sport has become more athletic it has become more theatrical: judges insist that the athletes have the "presentation" of mature women, and the girls comply by wearing lots of makeup and playing adult roles. But role-playing alone can't convey the grownup self-awareness that informs the best skating. For a teen-age girl, finding the balance between childhood fearlessness and adult vulnerability can be tougher than landing a triple axel.
On Friday, the Renaissance Center was filled with coaches, judges, agents, athletes, and United States Figure Skating Association officials. Surrounding the lobby was a labyrinth of hallways designed to take pedestrians past as many shops as possible, and the skating people were meandering through in an attempt to find the exit where the shuttle buses were to leave for the Joe Louis Arena. "Keep going past the Burger King, and when you see Winkelman's go right," one Skate America volunteer advised. The skaters paraded through the lobby in DKNY warmup tops and skin-tight leggings that delineated the amazing "glutes"--gluteus muscles--in their backsides. The tremendous strength in their adductors--the muscles on the inside of your thighs that ache after your annual trip to the rink--made them walk both bowlegged and stiff-kneed, as though they already had their skates on. Michelle was escorted by her mother, Estella, who was trundling a metal case that held Michelle's skates, and by her agent, Shep Goldberg, who also represents the gymnast Mary Lou Retton. Tara was accompanied by her agent, Mike Burg. Earlier, Tara had been seen tearing around the Renaissance Center with her friends (whom you can read about on Tara's Web site, www.taralipinski.com). She lives in nearby Bloomfield Hills and trains at the Detroit Skating Club, with Richard Callaghan, a well-known coach. Legions of eight-year-old girls were pursuing both skaters everywhere. Too young to have learned "Thrilled to meet you!" or other adult forms of flattery, the little girls just studied Tara and Michelle with hard dolls' eyes while waiting for their heroines to sign their autograph books. Michelle dotted the "i" in her name with a little heart. Michelle and Tara seem prepared for ice-princesshood in ways that Nancy Kerrigan and Oksana Baiul did not. Both are named after mass-culture commodities--Michelle for the Beatles song, Tara for the plantation in "Gone with the Wind"--and both learned to skate in malls before they were seven. Both sets of parents got their daughters into élite training centers when they were very young, and made great sacrifices to raise the sixty thousand dollars that a top skater can chew up in annual expenses. The Lipinskis mortgaged their home; the Kwans sold theirs. And both families had the girls home-schooled with private tutors. Tara trained at the University of Delaware's Ice Skating Science Development Center. Michelle spent her formative years living with her mother in what is known as "the Debi Thomas tepee"--a cabin next to the Ice Castle International Training Center in Lake Arrowhead, situated high in the San Bernardino Mountains. (She and her parents now live in a bigger house nearby.) Although Michelle is originally from Torrance, California, and Tara was born in Philadelphia, both actually grew up in Skatingland, a never-never land halfway between Mt. Olympus and Las Vegas, and not far from Disney. Skatingland is a world of faux Bavarian chalets and snow-frosted peaks that have perfectly frozen skating ponds nestled among them. Kris Kringle is in residence there, and Belgian waffles are served three times a day. It occupies the same space in the cultural mind as "The Sound of Music," Sonja Henie, and Sun Valley. It's the place that the mail-order catalogues like Coldwater Creek and Bridgehead come from. It smells strongly of scented candles and has an odd baroque sentimentality about it--the sentimentality of the movie "Ice Castles," in which a young girl from the Iowa hinterland (the actress Lynn-Holly Johnson) overcomes her lack of formal training and her gruff but sweet-hearted Dad (the young Tom Skerritt) to triumph over the snooty rich skaters at the championships, but then is blinded in a freak skating accident and becomes a basket case who never leaves the house until, with the loving support of her boyfriend (Robby Benson), she returns to the ice and, still blind, skates triumphantly at the Midwest Regionals to the schmalzy Marvin Hamlisch tune "Looking Through the Eyes of Love," sung by Melissa Manchester. But, while seventy years of kitsch and nostalgia cling to figure skating, modern skaters also live in the Jerry Maguire world of big-time sports marketing. Both Tara and Michelle have the weird savvy that develops when you get an agent at thirteen, write your autobiography a couple of years later (each girl has recently published her memoirs), earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in the sixty-odd-city Campbell's Soups Champions on Ice Tour (despite the girls' so-called amateur status), and play Truth or Dare on the tour bus with the more sexually experienced skaters. They're like sixteen-year-olds going on thirty-eight. At the same time, both girls are under enormous pressure not to grow up, since growing up makes it harder to do the triple jumps, and, as a result, they have preserved oddly undeveloped, childlike parts of themselves. Both collect Beanie Babies, and Michelle still has her childhood stuffed animals. In interviews this year, Michelle has been saying, "I want to get the joy back into my skating," as though at seventeen she were already too old, things were already too messy, and she needed to return to a more carefree period of her life. Part of the job of a skating champion these days is to enact in symbolic form a larger cultural transaction: we make available to certain children the wealth and authority formerly enjoyed only by adults, and in return we ask that they not become actual adults. Their end of the bargain is to preserve our fantasy of gifted childhood forever.
Tara's advisers refer to her as the Boss. Her confidence is terrifying. "A lot of skaters love to skate, but when they're out there competing they're like 'Just get me out of this!'" she told me now, sucking on a squirt bottle that was half full of a pink sports drink. "But I love to compete. Even as much as you hate the nervousness when you're out there, when you look back it's the best part of it--competing." Her agent has got Tara endorsement deals with Minute Maid orange juice and Campbell's soups, and has signed her up with DKNY to flog a line of kids' clothing and with Mattel to promote a new line of Barbie dolls on ice skates, which will be marketed around the time of the Olympics. Tara likes to warm up to "Barbie Girl," by the Danish group Aqua:"I'm a Barbie Girl/In a Barbie World/Life in plastic/It's fantastic!" I asked Tara whether she had any fear of winning. She looked at me like this was a funny joke. "Nope. I don't think about it," she said. "Do you ever doubt yourself?" "Oh, I think every skater has doubts. You'll go out there, and doubt will come in, and that's when you have to fight against it, and not hold back. Sometimes when I do my triple lutz in my short program, it's like 'Oh, my gosh, it's coming.' That's when you just have to let go and do it, and I think that's the hardest part of competing--keeping yourself strong like that. You just have to let the doubt come in and let it roll back out and do your thing. It's hard. And sometimes if you're tired, and your legs aren't perfect that day, that's when the doubt will get you."
At practice on Friday afternoon in the arena, the judges were sitting at their tables, chatting with some of the skaters who were seated behind them. The judges were, for the most part, older people with deep roots in the pre-athletic skating era; some had been volunteering for forty years. They are the ministers of Skatingland, whose authority as interpreters of beautiful skating is under siege from vulgar athleticism. Most amateur competitions are now largely a matter of counting the number of a skater's jumps and rotations rather than of assessing the skater's grace. Professional competitions are becoming the last refuge of "artistic merit." The skating establishment has also been slow to adopt the new bootmaking technologies that have revolutionized roller-skating. Dorothy Hamill told me, "The boots are all hand-lasted and custom-made, and the blades are steel, so they weigh a lot. If Brian Boitano were wearing a lightweight plastic boot and a titanium blade, he'd be able to do five rotations in the air tomorrow." Dick Button was holding court down below the platform where he would be seated with Peggy Fleming that night. The skating people in the stands talked about the height on the fourteen-year-old Russian Yevgeny Plushenko's triple axel: "And he does a Bielmann spin, the only man who does one!" And where was Nicole Bobek, the vixen, the current scarlet woman of U.S. skating, who has had to shoulder all the adult sexuality that Michelle and Tara have shrugged off? ("Nicole will eat you alive," I was told when I inquired about interviewing her.) Reporters from both the respectable and the tabloid media were combing the rows, searching for narratives to replace the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan mother lode of four years ago. The clean, cutting sound of blades on ice pleasantly filled the huge, empty arena, in which the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup last June. Tara's physique was the hot topic of the practice. Her rivals, looking hopefully for some sign of development in the bust or hips, were disappointed, but she was definitely longer in the body than she had been last winter--two inches, by some estimates, though Mike Burg, her agent, said she had grown only an inch. I sat with Burg for a while, about twenty rows behind the judges. Nearby, Tara was stretching her glutes. Photographers honeybeed around her. The camera loves Tara for some of the same reasons that the camera loved JonBenet Ramsey. That particular combination of woman and child is something you don't see every day. Tara and Michelle began working through their routines, gliding around three other skaters who were on the ice. It was amazing how none of them crashed into one another, but then near-misses are a good way of psyching out an opponent. Whether or not Surya Bonaly, from France, had intended to rattle the Japanese skater Midori Ito by doing a back flip near her in the 1992 Winter Olympics is the stuff of which skating lore is made. Most of the people I saw at the practice thought Kwan was the better skater. "I think Michelle is much more of an artist than Tara is ready to be," Peggy Fleming said, "so, if it turns out that both are skating really, really well, Michelle has it, hands down." Dick Button told me, "Tara doesn't yet know how to command you to understand what she's doing." To me it seemed that the difference between Michelle and Tara was not the jumps but the awareness of what a jump means. With Michelle, there is a moment of thought before the jump and then a delicious afterthought--a look back at the jump--when it's over, whereas Tara flings herself into her jumps without those little bits of embroidery that connect the airborne to the earthbound. Her jumps lack the awareness of what they overcome. But if the knowledge that one could fall was what made Michelle a more artistic skater than Tara it also increased the chances that Michelle would fall. The consensus among the skating press was that Tara had the psychological advantage. Michelle knew she had to make no mistakes, because Tara certainly wouldn't make any, and the pressure this knowledge placed on Michelle would cause a slip--some sixteenth of an inch off on her triple-loop combination--and a slip was all it would take for Tara to win.
The girls came out in their new skating outfits--each girl has one for the short program, one for the long--which they will wear throughout the season. Michelle's was a backless burnt-orange-and-cream number with flutters around the skirt; Tara's was sequinned around the shoulders, and was done in a style that Jere Longman, of the Times, described as conveying the message "I'm going to my First Communion and I intend to yodel." Both Michelle and Tara were heavily made up, and their hair was in elegantly coiffed buns on the top of their heads. Michelle looked awful in the warmup. She fell on her triple-lutz/double-toe, and then, incredibly, she missed a routine double axel. Frank Carroll, her coach, was standing in the skaters' box, called the Kiss and Cry, on the edge of the rink. Wearing a dark-blue pin-striped suit, with a camel overcoat draped over one arm, he watched as his best hope for an Olympic gold in a long and distinguished career--it had reached silver with Linda Fratianne, in 1980--started falling apart. After missing the axel, Michelle just stood there, her hands on her hips, looking down. Then she left the ice. "She's cracking," one of the reporters said. But both girls skated error-free short programs. Artistically, Michelle looked better. Technically, Tara's program was more difficult than Michelle's: it had a triple flip in it, whereas Michelle's had only the triple lutz. Even so, eight of the nine judges marked Michelle ahead of Tara on technical merit. At the press conference afterward, Tara seemed a little annoyed. "My jumps actually felt stronger than they did at Worlds," she said, "but I guess the judges didn't think so." Mike Burg later elaborated on Tara's remarks, explaining that in his view the judges, who were very old-fashioned, were simply biased against Tara. Having tolerated athleticism for the sake ofTV ratings, and unleashed these young triple-jumping demons, he said the judges were now trying to put a lid on it by marking the better athletes down. In other words, the judges were voting for Skatingland.
In the morning on the day of the ladies' long program, I ran into Frank Carroll in the Renaissance Burger King. We talked about Michelle's short. Carroll observed that it was a relief that the program seemed to have been well received by the judges. "I just wish Michelle had a little more confidence," he said before biting into his Croissan'wich. "She is the best, after all." That night, at the Joe Louis Arena, the crowd was dressier. Even the Zamboni driver had made an effort to spruce himself up. Peggy Fleming was wearing a startlingly low-cut black dress, her cleavage partly obscured by a chiffon modesty panel, which is very skating. Dick was in his usual blue blazer and conservative slacks. The flower girls--little girls who skate onto the ice and collect flowers and stuffed animals that fans have thrown to their idols--wore tartan skirts, white kneesocks, and blouses with Polish folk sleeves. As the awful, blinding pressure began to build, partisans of both the Tara and the Michelle camps could be found prowling the great old halls outside the Joe Louis Arena. "At least, it's not me out there," Lori Nichol, Michelle's choreographer, said. The concessions weren't doing much business: people seemed too nervous to eat. Only the eight-year-old-girl fans, practicing axels on the way to the ladies' room, seemed unfazed by the pressure. Michelle's father, Danny, went by, and disappeared into the recesses of the hall. When Michelle skates, he settles somewhere in the rafters to watch. He doesn't want the camera to find him. Like Venus Williams's dad and Tiger Woods's dad, Danny is Michelle's sports superego. He retired early from his job at Pacific Bell, and this summer he sold a family-owned Chinese restaurant in Torrance, the Golden Pheasant. He now lives in Lake Arrowhead with Michelle, and keeps a close eye on her, giving her few chances to slip up. "Have you ever made a huge mistake?" I once asked Michelle when we were having lunch with her mom and dad in Lake Arrowhead. "Done something really foolish?" "I don't know," Michelle said, thinking. "I'm not really good at lying, so..." She looked across the table at her father and said, laughing, "Why do you have that smirk on your face?" Danny said, "I'm thinking. I can't think of anything." "How about boys?" I asked Michelle. "You have a boyfriend?" Danny made a face, then smiled. "Dad always laughs," Michelle said. "No, I don't. It's Lake Arrowhead." "No suitable boys?" Michelle giggled. "Not in skating." Estella said, "She's still very young." "Asian parents..." Michelle grumbled. "I don't think it's Asian," Danny said, and leaned forward. "Let me try to go back to--" "Lecture No. 1,859," Michelle put in. "I never say you can't have a boyfriend. I don't. As I try to explain to her, you put three things together in life. What's No. 1 in priority for you? Your No. 1 priority is skating. And then you also have school. Then comes the fun part--like dating, or something else. So you put the three things together-- She always complains I analyze too much, but I say put these three things together, you make the decision. Dating, can it wait? Yes, it can wait. Can education wait? Yes and no. Can skating wait? No, it can't wait. You have to do it now." Michelle sighed. "I always look at my parents like they're so wise. But if they're so wise, how come they're not millionaires?" "Because I'm a loser," Danny said. "I lose too much."
The crowd stood and applauded for several minutes. Cellophane-wrapped bouquets rained down on the ice; the flower girls delivered them to Michelle in Kiss and Cry. The marks were very good: all 5.8s for technical merit, and all 5.9s for presentation. A cameraman found Danny, and the Jumbotron over the scoreboard showed him slapping someone a high five. "Representing the United States, Tara Lipinski..." As Tara skated to the center of the ice, eight-year-old girls' voices calling out "Go, Tara!" echoed in the otherwise silent arena. Tara's music began, the soundtrack for the movie "The Rainbow." She smoothly landed a double axel, then did a perfect triple flip. Now came her triple lutz. She kicked her right leg high, jumped, and--bang!--she hit the ice hard. A quick, shocked intake of crowd breath. Tara fell! Tara hadn't fallen since Germany in 1996. But there she was, sitting on her glutes, another fallen princess. She got up off the ice and skated the rest of the program cleanly, finishing second to Michelle. Afterward, both girls faced the skating press, sitting side by side on a raised dais. Michelle spoke first. "I can say that I came out of my coma," she said. "I feel different this year. The joy is back." She smiled her thrilled-little-girl smile. Tara sat there with her lips parted, a slightly haughty look on her face. When Michelle finished, she spoke curtly. "The mistake I made was not a big deal," she said, crossing her arms. "It was just a mistake." She paused, and looked over the heads of the press, perhaps catching a glimpse of her rapidly vanishing childhood, with its unself-conscious, ballerina-on-a-music-box rotations. You could hear in her voice a slight false note of confidence as she said, "I think I am still in a good spot."
Copyright © John Seabrook 2003. All rights reserved
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