I take it back about Michelle Kwan, all the nasty things I said about her not having a soul. She’s great, and I’m mean and bad. I’m having a crisis of conscience here in Godforsaken Saku, alone in my hotel room with the bottle of whisky Gary left me. I’m a malicious person who has nothing nice to say about anybody, particularly not legendary athletes. Even my friends are angry with me. Japan and the Winter Olympics have exposed me as misanthropic, with deep reserves of snideness.
Christ, I wouldn’t even talk to the desperately lonely middle-aged expatriate lady, some woman in a filthy pink coat who’d married a Tokyo businessman years ago and spoke at me in English all quickly and greedily like she was trying to score sex or crack off me. She kept following me around the train station and inviting me to take a public bath with her and inviting herself to look me up when she got to New York.
“Oh, we’ll have LOTS to talk about on the train. I’ll have to tell you all about my accident, in detail. I haven’t told many people about it, but I’m sure that YOU’LL understand,” she said, grasping my arm.
“Sit here,” I said, when I found an open seat on the full train.
“But … can’t we find seats closer together?”
“I’ll talk to you in Nagano,” I said. I lied. I ditched her at Nagano Station. I ran like hell. Although generally harmless, she scared the shit out of me. I am unavailable for such friendship. If I really loved mankind, wouldn’t I at least have given her my e-mail address?
You think that’s bad: In the rain, I tried to snake a nice Japanese guy’s taxi by running down the street and flagging it before it got to the taxi stand. I didn’t think the taxi stand mattered. I had been out there for a while and it was raining like hell. I was going to make the taxi stop for him, I told myself, and ask him if he wanted to go to Nagano Station. Everybody wants to go to Nagano Station. The taxi ended up passing me by and picking him up anyway. I ran back to the taxi stand, realizing that jumping the order was futile. At the taxi stand, an old lady tried to snake me out of the next cab by crowding it and edging toward the door.
“I was here first,” I said to an old lady in the rain. She peered at me through the water-streaked window after I got in, like I was some kind of purse-snatcher in the back of a squad car. Well, she wasn’t that old.
In any case, there’s nothing like spending a little time in Japan to make you feel like a rude, braying, amoral monster thoroughly undeserving of human kindness.
Two big things went down yesterday, besides my deep regrets: the big Czech-Canada hockey game and the big women’s ice skating finale.
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I had a great ticket to the hockey game, slightly to the left of the goal net on one end, so hockey guys were regularly ramrodding each other flat against the plexiglass right in front of me. The game was pretty exciting: It was scoreless until the end of the second period, when the Czechs finally scored and their whole battalion of singing, painted, flag-waving fans erupted into hysterics. I was sitting with a pack of Canadians and other Canada-supporters: Japanese guys with maple leafs painted on their faces and a girl from Baltimore who’d spent her vacation budget for the next three years just to be here. Everyone was very thrilled. I tried to get into the hockey spirit, sitting there with my hot wine and my Kirin Fish ‘n’ Cheese, the most hilarious bar snack ever because all of the no-necked mullet-styled sports fans considered it too icky to try. Naturally, this made it my favorite new food.
Canada dramatically scored the tying goal with one minute left in the game, which I knew would run it over into serious overtime. As fun as it was to hang out in the erupting chaos of sports fandomica, I wisely opted to get a jump on the back-to-the-station exodus and left the game early. All of the Canadians in my row looked at me leaving as if I had just thrown my severed thumb onto the ice.
I heard on the radio in the taxi (the one that came after the one I tried to steal) that Nagano had been prepared for several hundred thousand less fans than the number actually came. Can you blame me for avoiding the shuttle busses?
I tried to watch the rest of the game results on TV in a big hotel, but it was being broadcast about an hour late.
“Oh, Canada lost,” said a woman from the travel agency, who was in line with me at the noodle counter. I didn’t think I cared about Canada, but I felt a drop in my stomach like I do every time I hear about somebody dying. I thought of the girl from Baltimore, all decked out in red and white, covered with those goddamned little pins, waving a little Canadian flag. She’d be a good sport about it, but it was still sad. I took an early train back to Saku, feeling morbid.
I arrived at my room just in time to catch the women’s figure skating finals.
Irina Slutskaya. Funny, that’s EXACTLY what I’d name a Russian figure skater. See? There I go again. I blame my parents.
It seems to be the consensus with all of the spectators I’ve spoken to here that you get a much clearer picture of the overall Thing if you watch whatever sport it is on TV. Live, you miss all the subtleties and nuances. It was a much different experience watching the same skaters on TV that I saw live the other night: I had a much better understanding of what the judges were seeing. Everything they were looking at was very small.
There’s something about skating that rewards an undeveloped personality. Lipinski, Ichiban. OK, Lipinski isn’t as graceful as Kwan, but she cut the moves better. Lipinski is simple, because she’s a puppy; she’s a little kid: simple in that pure way that dolphins are simple. Her moves are unclouded by serious artistry or personality, because she doesn’t really have one yet. In an Olympics obsessed with animals and children, her gold medal only makes sense. I’m curious to see Lipinski when she has to reckon with herself. Wait until she menstruates, and has all that weird accompanying weight of personality that comes with female puberty, which is frighteningly electrical and upsetting and totally galvanizing. Lipinski is, as yet, totally unencumbered by the deep reserves of loss and ego-pain as felt by women like China’s Lu Chen, or even Kwan.
She’s still a lucky, two-dimensional Sanrio baby champion with a tiny body and a big head, who knows nothing but indoor ice rinks and flashcubes and worldly reward. You can see it in her face when she jumps: She treats her body like it’s a remarkable, expensive toy she can’t believe belongs to her. She’s always surprising herself with how great she is. Her potential just keeps unfolding and unfolding. She hasn’t hit any kind of plateau like the other girls. She’s never tasted any serious doubt, never felt her body do anything she hadn’t planned or radio-controlled like a hobby car. Wait until Lipinski grows. I’m not undermining her greatness, but look what puberty did to Oksana Baiul, or Nadia Comenici. They were like choir boys whose voices changed. It will be very interesting.
I felt a lot of compassion for the mature young women of skating, particularly the poor, beautiful Chen, who was so devastated by her performance she made her bronze medal look like an albatross. When she buckled her head to the ice and sobbed at the end of her program, it was a great and terrible moment. It was like opera. It was “Madame Butterfly,” only Chinese.
On TV, I could more clearly see the problems with France’s Surya Bonaly, but she’s still the all-time coolest. She even makes falling on her ass look suave and French. Even when she skates a crude, gracelessly aggressive program, she smiles openly and exotically, and laughs a sophisticated laugh to herself as she watches her low scores roll up. All the girls can learn from Bonaly: she is a truly Teflon glamour-puss, a great lover of the ironies of life and sport.
The other women, the also-rans, were at least sort of memorable for the way they were able to get up after a critical face plant and smile through the rest of their set. I saw many hard moments when I would have just said “fuck it” and bowed politely and slithered away into obscurity. I know they are trained to do that, but it looks so antithetical to the fundamentals of human nature, to keep going with plucky showmanship after you’ve already blown the whole deal. It’s both inspiring and awful to watch.
The flower presenting by the ladies in kimonos is so gorgeous and nifty, they ought to do it everywhere. At the Sydney Olympics. All of them. We all need more official kimonos in our lives.
NAGANO, Japan — To get into the figure skating short program, I had to go head to head with the scalpers. I had all these tickets to trade — excessive hockey, a bunch of slaloms, some biathlon and a pricey little admit for the Closing Ceremonies, where children with big animal heads and mittens would sing the goddamn Olympic song another 50,000 times, thereby sealing it in mankind’s mind forever. It was reported in the papers that the police were going to crack down on the scalpers starting yesterday, so I was foolishly worried that I would not be able to find one. But there they were just like always, loud and porn-theater hawker-esque as ever in the Nagano train station, giving large theatrical shrugs of “Wha’? Who, me?” whenever one of the small, ironed policemen politely approached them to knock it off.
These men are, without exception, the sleaziest, most wholly detestable pack of carrion-sucking hyenas that most Japanese people will ever lay eyes on. Since the Japanese mob, the Yakuza, is conspicuously absent from the Olympics, the scalpers are the only fishy criminal element in our midst here in scrupulously moral and honest Nagano, but they make up for that by being top-seeded crass, charmless motherfuckers. I wanted to see the ladies’ skating, preferably the long free skating program on Friday night, but when I told any of them this, they just started laughing at me. Those tickets are getting over 100,000 yen (about $800) now on the black market, they informed me, often up to $5,000. I tried to bargain and wheel and deal with the rangy, death-toothed young men, whose fathers must have sold and repossessed carpeting to immigrants with bad credit for a living. I tried to trade up my excellent hockey tickets, but they would have none of it. They called me “Rusty” or “Yankee,” and made sexist comments and tried to kiss me or pinch my cheeks. I jerked back like a cobra at one such swipe, and one of them said, “Watch out, she’s from New York, she’ll probably lay you out,” and I realized I was in some kind of red-eyed state of rage and a preliminary Kung-Fu stance. “You’re nauseating,” I murmured back at them, and they all laughed.
That was my reconnaissance mission. I was so infuriated, I decided I needed to go back several hours later and see if the guard had changed. I did find out some valuable information though; the 26,000 yen ($210) hockey ticket I had for tonight was now only worth about 10 bucks, because Canada would be playing Kazakhstan, and that would be a throw-away game, the best against the worse. The Canucks would just mercilessly worry the Kazakhs like so many chew-toys, and this was a foregone conclusion — nobody was terribly interested in viewing toddlers get skewered. My 5,600 yen ($45) men’s skiing ticket, however, had jumped up to 20,000, which made it a viable bargaining tool. I also found out that the women’s figure skating short program was that night, during the hockey game, and that the few remaining tickets were going for 40,000 yen. I hung out for a couple of hours, fuming. I figured that scalping zones must be a little like the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange: In a couple of hours, a ticket might be more important than it was previously.
As it turned out, I made another swipe at the one skunk, the most offensive, oily hair-coated dog boy, who had actually been holding the skating tickets. I leveled with him. I fanned out my tickets and said “Which of these?”
To my surprise, he wanted men’s skiing (great for me; I wasn’t exactly psyched to wake up at 6 a.m. and ludicrously hike up the mountain again) and my ticket to the Closing Ceremonies, for escaping which I cried tears of thanks to Jesus. The Up With People vibe is intolerable to me in any language, no matter how many tissue elves it may include. Besides, it was going to be held outdoors. Much better to view that fiasco on the TV of some nice alcoholic hotel lobby.
So I did it. I got into a figure skating event.
The shuttle bus was concentration campish. Everyone was shoulder-to-shoulder and clearly suffering for the half hour it took to get to the White Ring in Nagano (a name that will probably be changed to the White Elephant when the Olympics are over and nobody knows what to do with an ice rink that holds 25,000 spectators). But it was a big, bright venue with great sight lines, and I couldn’t believe I was there. It was like having bribed your way into backstage sports-world Valhalla.
I was especially infused with the delicious poison when they played Debbie Gibson’s 1989 hit “Electric Youth” over the loudspeakers. Oh yeah. It set the tone to a T — little girls backed by big money, contorted into flashy cash cows, complete with laser lights and synthesizers, rhinestones and television.
I was sitting next to some women in pin-covered sweat suits (the pins are another scary phenomenon: All the sponsor companies practically give them out at first, then people frenetically sell and trade them and they leap in value for the rest of the Games. An ugly little Coca-Cola jobby with Olympic rings on it, which was the kind of thing you’d leave in your empty paper cup a few days ago, is now worth $10 or more. People obsessively collect as many of the ghastly little things as their clothes will bear and wear them around like plate-mail). They were from Los Altos, Calif., and they “just loved figure-skating.” They were hip to all the nuances, most notably the malignant political rivalry between the international judges, a Cold War whose tensions are made clear through time-warped and biased scoring. “Since Russia broke up into all those little parts and pieces, they all gang up on everybody else. They wouldn’t even let there be a Canadian judge this year,” clucked the woman next to me scornfully. As paranoid as that might seem, it was obvious that something was going on with the judges, because of the bafflingly low scores given to certain skaters who, it was clear from their faces on the big TV monitor overhead, were savvily prepared to get screwed. France’s Surya Bonaly was one of the first of these.
Bonaly is a blazing star, but nobody can see her very clearly against the ice, I guess because she’s so black. Bonaly, wearing some fabulous lapis-colored Bob Mackie-type garment made of glass beads, kicked such preposterous amounts of ass she raised the consciousness of the whole stadium. She is Josephine Baker, and should be dragged around topless on her skates by a snow leopard to Perez Prado rhumbas. Her energy is fantastic: She’s sexy in a snazzy, retro kind of way. The judges hated her, and gave her marks barely above 5.0. The other clear case of political shoplifting by the judges involved the astonishing Lu Chen, who was like a beautiful Hong Kong movie star doing incredible stunts in a tight red dress, subtly emoting the whole time in a Ginger Rogers kind of way — a small eye-roll, a little chiffon hip-flounce. She was irresistible, and still got treated like a red-headed stepchild compared to some truly forgettable Russian kippys who could have looked safer on a cereal box. Sophisticated sexual consciousness, even when adorably tempered and retro-lite, louses it all up for the judges, for some reason. They’ll find any excuse to shut the girl down who looks comfortably female in the form. For example, some of the girls used great old music, burlesque-y brass numbers from the ’30s with oboes and castinets. “Ooh, they’ll take points off for that,” said the woman next to me. “You can hear that record popping. Sounds like a dirty needle.”
No such points were taken off the overwrought, totally digitally remastered, Spielbergian Happy Meal orchestrations accompanying good little girls like Tara Lipinski. Figure skating seems to embrace the ideology of the Grammy Awards: The biggest faceless corporate Uncle Toms are going to get the medals. Artists with personal style need not apply.
There were 28 girls in the program, most of whom were nervous and janky and fell down once or twice, then slunk off to joylessly watch their bad numbers roll up on the screen like people waiting for biopsy results. Nothing is more depressing than seeing a girl in a tiny dress fall on her ass really hard to a gluey George Winstonish New Age piano number. Everybody claps really hard at the end of such a program, because they know the girl wants to eat a bottle of pills.
OK. Tara and Michelle. Both extremely competent skaters. Both experts in exactly the kind of beauty pageant smiling and coloring-inside-the-lines rigid obeisance that the judges love. They both skate really well, particularly Michelle Kwan, who is very pretty and swanlike with her long, skinny arms. Both bore the fuck out of me, really.
Give me Oksana Baiul and her sloppy, drunken blubbering any day over these mechanized, kiss-ass, teen super-chicks. At least she had a soul, even if it was a little dirty.
PORTLAND, Ore. – Tonya Harding’s appearance on Fox television this Thursday will mark one of the few respites from a tawdry hell the 27-year-old former skating champion has been inhabiting for the past few years.
Mostly, it’s spent in the Sidelines sports bar, where Harding has staked a claim on the fourth bar stool in front of the video poker machines.
“Three, four, five days a week,” says the bartender.
Harding feeds fives, tens and twenties into the video poker machine for hours, often playing alone, sometimes accompanied by a middle-aged woman Harding has unofficially adopted as her mother. Burning through money that comes from Lord-knows-where, she puffs Marlboro Lights, drinks Baileys mixed with a chocolate liqueur and tries to ignore patrons who consider her the antichrist of American sports, Olympic integrity and clean-cut Oregon pride.
There is a poignancy in watching a brilliantly talented individual — the two-time Olympic contender and 1991 U.S. national and world champion could definitely skate — repeatedly slide back into to the seedy, lonely life from which world-class skating once promised to deliver her. Even in her tough-girl pose, Harding has a sweetness, and a vulnerable, I’ve-been-abused face. She makes people want to help her, and for years, many have tried.
These are patient people: coaches who’ve had a stake in her success, agents who want to cash in on her and co-dependent fans who believe they can offer the parental guidance she never received from her dysfunctional family. And almost to a person, she burns them out. The final goodbye is often delivered by Harding in a screaming fit.
Her 1994 entourage, some of whom served jail time, has been replaced by Linda Lewis, 51, a born-again Christian singer who now acts as Harding’s unofficial manager. Harding calls her “Mom” and moved to Vancouver, Wash., across the bridge from Portland, in part because that’s where Lewis lives.
When she isn’t gambling, smoking or drinking, Harding, in theory, is staging a comeback. “She’d like a future in skating professionally,” says Lewis. “We know America’s a forgiving nation and we hope things will turn around for her. She did her community service. She paid her fines. I think the double standard has to stop. There’s one set of rules for men and one for women.”
Ever since associates of Harding clubbed rival skater Nancy Kerrigan on the knee during the 1994 Olympic trials in Detroit, Harding has been the great untouchable of the figure-skating world. She still maintains she knew nothing of the attack until after it had occurred. She pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder the investigation, paid $110,000 in fines, contributed $50,000 to the Special Olympics fund and volunteered for 500 hours at a Portland area soup kitchen.
But redemption has never been hers. While the sports world is
littered with misbehaving, but forgiven, male athletes, who have beaten their wives, taken illegal drugs and bet against their own teams, Harding’s badge of shame seems indelible.
Banned for life by the U.S. Figure Skating Association, she’s barred from almost all skating events, including the local Christmas performance at the Clackamas Town Center. As a convicted felon, she can forget about going on the pro tour. Thursday’s television appearance, in which she skates with six other women as well as facing Kerrigan in an interview, will be her first nationally televised skating exhibition since the Lillehammer Games in 1994.
Not that Harding’s been entirely inactive. For a while she managed a professional wrestler. She appeared in a forgettable
B-movie, “Breakaway,” and recorded a demo tape of “Amazing Grace.” No recording contract followed.
Cash, when she has it, goes for cars, trucks and a boat. She sold her house to pay back taxes to the IRS and has had to rely on the kindness of the tabloids to maintain a livelihood — an “exclusive” appearance on “Inside Edition,” selling wedding pictures of her second marriage, then selling coverage of her ensuing divorce.
In the realm of the weird, Harding claimed last February that a man
tried to abduct her from her pickup truck. She also says she’s
been stalked by a pair of professional golfers. In 1996, she saved an elderly woman who was choking on a chicken bone by giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the floor of the Lost & Found saloon in suburban Milwaukie.
All of which, no doubt, will be broadcast to the patrons of the Sidelines bar as they watch this year’s Winter Olympic proceedings from Nagano, along with endless reruns of Harding’s teary face as she showed the judges her broken skate lace at Lillehammer, where she finished eighth.
But the main focus will be on the Michelle Kwan and the other young medal-bound skaters, who will reap the money and fame Harding wanted so badly.
“It’s got to be devastating,” says Deana Julka, assistant professor of social and behavioral science at the University of Portland. “It’s easier to assume the role of victim than to acknowledge: I actively brought this down on myself.”
With the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, just three weeks away, America’s best hopes for glory rest on the delicate shoulders of three young women — figure skaters Michelle Kwan, 17, Tara Lipinski, 15, and Nicole Bobek, 20. They placed first, second and third respectively at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Philadelphia last weekend, and some sports commentators suggest that they could sweep the figure skating medals in Nagano — a feat never before achieved in a single Winter Olympics event.
The excitement surrounding these athletes is spurred by more than the prospect of Olympic success. Figure skating has become one of America’s most popular spectator sports, commanding huge television audiences, lucrative endorsements and fame for its star performers. It also engenders personal rivalries whose ferocity can stand in sharp contrast to the fluid beauty of the sport. Some 45 million households — the sixth largest TV audience ever — tuned in to watch Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan battle each other at the 1994 Winter Olympics after the latter was clubbed on the knee by associates of Harding. This year, according to the media, the rivalry to watch is between Kwan and Lipinski — a contest that is expected to make the women’s figure skating competition the most watched event of the entire games.
Christine Brennan, a former sports writer for the Washington Post, takes a close look at the competitive world of Kwan and Lipinski in her forthcoming “Edge of Glory: The Quest for Figure Skating’s Olympic Gold Medals” (Scribner). Brennan also wrote the bestselling “Inside Edge: A Revealing Journey into the Secret World of Figure Skating,” and will be talking with Salon during the Nagano games.
Just how popular is figure skating today?
In terms of TV ratings, figure skating is No. 2, behind NFL football. Just to give you an example of how popular it is — in the women’s finals at the U.S. National Championships in 1995, when Nicole Bobek beat Michelle Kwan, more people watched that on television than the NBA All-Star Game, which was played the next day.
How do you account for this enormous appeal?
There’s a couple of reasons. One is the sheer beauty and grace of the sport. It goes right to the core of the dreams of women and girls. It carries them to a place far, far away. It’s the music, the gorgeous costumes that appeal so much; it’s a little bit of dress-up on the ice. And that’s 51 percent of the population right there.
And for the guys?
For the men who watch — and there are many — figure skating is raw, pure sport. There is no sport that has a more non-negotiable moment of decision than figure skating. Football has a fourth down. In basketball, you get a second free throw. In tennis, you get a second serve. In baseball you get a third strike. In figure skating, when Brian Boitano took off from the ice in Norway in 1994 to go into his triple axel combination jump, he was the gold medal favorite. One second later, when he came crashing down to the ice, falling and stumbling, it was over. Gone. There’s no other sport where an entire career can be wrapped up in just one second on the ice. That’s what keeps you on the edge of your seat and that’s what helps explain the ratings. Dramatically, it’s good stuff.
Now everyone is looking to Michelle Kwan, Tara Lipinski and Nicole Bobek for the drama in Nagano. How do you think they’ll do?
Let’s be clear on something. On the U.S. women’s team, there’s one legend, and that is Michelle Kwan. Then there are two other good skaters. It’s very, very, important to make that distinction. The media has built up this rivalry between Michelle and Tara Lipinski. There is no such rivalry. The rivalry is Michelle vs. Michelle. She may be the greatest skater who has ever lived. Last weekend in Philadelphia, she performed a set of programs greater than anyone in the history of the sport in the United States, male or female. No one has ever had two performances like that back-to-back. Ever. Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Dick Button, Brian Boitano, Scott Hamilton — no one. If Michelle Kwan skates at the Olympics the way she did in Philadelphia, her name will never be forgotten by sports fans. She will join the legends of the sport.
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What made her programs so exceptional?
First of all, they were skated to very difficult music. She chose two piano pieces by Rachmaninov for her short program, and “Lyra Angelica” by William Allwin performed by the London Philharmonic for her long program. No one has ever skated to these pieces before. The music was much more intricate than, say, a movie soundtrack or a Broadway show tune, and therefore much more difficult to skate to. Second, she was perfect in her jumps and her spins. And she did all that with a fractured toe! She’s like Michael Jordan on skates. One of the Philadelphia judges, who’s never given a perfect 6.0 score in his life — and he’s been judging for 25 years — gave Michelle Kwan two. He told me it was the greatest thing he had ever seen, that she brought tears to his eyes.
Yet last year, it was Lipinski who grabbed the glory at the World Championships and Kwan who fell.
Last year, Michelle’s body was changing — we’re watching girls go through puberty on national television — and she had some trouble dealing with that. Those mistakes created Tara. Tara walked through the door, but it was Michelle who opened the door. This year, Tara doesn’t seem to have the pizazz and the spark. She’s grown a little bit, but she’s still tiny. She doesn’t have the presence. That’s not her fault, but it makes you wonder whether last year should have happened for her. If it hadn’t happened, maybe she’d just be moving up nicely. But now she’s being scrutinized so much, and Michelle has come roaring back.
You think Lipinski is in over her head?
She’s still a very good skater. And given the volatile nature of this sport, if Michelle falls in the short program in Nagano, then Tara could win the gold medal. But only if Michelle makes a mistake. If she skates clean in the short and long programs, she’s the gold medalist. You can take that to the bank. In a way her loss last year was the best thing that ever could have happened to her. It fired her up incredibly. It forced her to think, to change things, to look at herself in a different way, and clearly she’s come back stronger than ever.
How does the third woman on the U.S. team, Nicole Bobek, rate?
She’s the ultimate showgirl on ice, the All-American blond bombshell. In Philadelphia, she looked great. Artistically, I believe she’s better than Lipinski. If she had trained properly and not moved from coach to coach — she’s had 10 so far — she could have been the greatest figure skater in the world. She’s got the looks, the ability. But she didn’t train. She’s the opposite of Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski, both of whom are dedicated workhorses. Nicole Bobek? Hey, a couple of cigarettes, hang out with the guys. This is her life. So the training isn’t there, and now she runs out of gas in the last half of her long program. Also the technical difficulty of her jumps is nowhere near those of Michelle and Tara, and I don’t think she can get them at this point. Still, if Nicole gets her act together between now and the Olympics, she could take a silver. With Bobek, you just don’t know. She could be great, or she could finish 10th.
There’s talk of a U.S. sweep of the women’s figure skating medals. How likely is that?
There’s always a chance, but I think in general international judges would prefer not to see three U.S. flags hoisted up in the international arena in Nagano. All things being equal, I think they’d like to see someone else get in there. The most likely person who could sneak in is Tanya Sheshenko of Germany, who is very good. But I can’t see her winning the gold, and if Tara is on, Tara should win the silver. So at this point I would say it’s Sheshenko and Bobek fighting it out for the bronze.
How much personal rivalry exists between Kwan and Lipinski, and how much is media hype?
The rivalry — if there is one at all — is purely a one-way affair. Michelle doesn’t even think about Tara. She’s on another wavelength. She’s thinking about her place in history. Tara, however, is obsessed by Michelle.
Speaking of rivalry, whatever happened to Tonya Harding?
The last I heard of her, she was living with some family, unemployed, no money. She had her truck repossessed. She got kidnapped a year ago by some bushy-haired man, although we’re not quite sure whether that was real or not. She got away, but of course the police never found him. And the kidnapping just happened to occur the same week as the U.S. National Figure Skating Championships. What a coincidence. This is why I love this sport so. It just doesn’t get any better — from the ridiculous Tonya to the sublime Michelle Kwan. There’s nothing like this sport. Nothing like it at all.
