The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Armstrong barreled across the finish line, six seconds before his rivals. He got off his bike and hobbled directly into a tent that had been set up for drug testing. When he emerged, he came over to say hello. I congratulated him on winning the stage. “It’s always fun to win,” he said, smiling broadly. “But, man, I am in such agony.”

  2002

  BORN SLIPPY

  JOHN SEABROOK

  A year ago, when Michelle Kwan launched herself into a triple-toe/triple-toe combination jump at the 1997 United States Figure Skating Championships, in Nashville, she was the favorite to win the next Olympic gold medal in ladies’ figure skating. The gold is a prize estimated to be worth five to ten million dollars in product endorsements, and the skating world, embarrassed by the scandals of the 1993–94 season, was looking for a champion who would conduct herself with dignity. Kwan, then sixteen and the defending national and world champion, seemed like a gift from heaven. Not only was she exceptionally talented, combining athleticism and artistry like no other skater in history, but she was also an intelligent, attractive, and well-behaved girl from a strong Asian American family, apparently free of the brattiness of Nancy Kerrigan or the Anna Karenina-meets-the-train theatrics of Oksana Baiul. “Michelle is a beautiful skater,” skating people would say of Kwan, with the same emphasis on the word beautiful that fashion people use to describe a certain model who radiates an ethereal loveliness that is greater than the sum of her parts. With her smooth features, bright eyes, and charmingly girlish smile, Kwan continues a tradition of lovely, levelheaded American girls, going back through Peggy Fleming, the 1968 ladies’ champion, to the Radcliffe graduate Tenley Albright, who won the gold medal in 1956.

  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 theater, 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 teenage girl, finding the balance between childhood fearlessness and adult vulnerability can be tougher than landing a triple axel.

  Kwan began the current season skating well, but she reinjured a stress fracture in one toe in November and canceled the rest of her competitions. Her only head-to-head competition with Lipinski prior to the 1998 National Championships, taking place this week in Philadelphia, was at Skate America, which was held in October, in Detroit. On that occasion, I spent a wintry weekend shuttling between the Westin Hotel Renaissance Center, where the skaters were staying, and the Joe Louis Arena, where the competition was held.

  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 skintight 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 website, 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 elite 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 exp
enses. The Lipinskis mortgaged their home; the Kwans sold theirs. And both families had the girls homeschooled 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 Mount 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 catalogs 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 schmaltzy 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.

  When I caught up with Tara, she was flopped on a couch under the Westin Hotel escalators, her long blond hair spread out over its cushion, her jewelled fingers—two rings on the right hand, three on the left—resting on the back of its seat. Tara has a wide, shapely mouth, which is usually slightly open. At four feet ten and a half and eighty-two pounds, her body looks like a Vanna White doll. (Richard Callaghan, her coach, looks unnervingly like Pat Sajak.) “I put my arms around her and I go, ‘Oh, gosh, it feels like my little boy,’” Peggy Fleming told me. “Those little, teeny shoulders and that little, teeny frame!” Kwan’s coach, Frank Carroll, explained, “As a skater, your strength-size ratio is at its highest when you’re a thirteen-year-old girl. With boys, that’s not true. Their backs aren’t strong enough yet at that age.” He also told me, “Tara rotates like a bat out of hell.”

  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.”

  Some skaters say that the top international skating events are often decided at the practice sessions on the afternoon of the day they take place. The skaters do their routines with no pressure on them, and it’s easy to tell who’s got the jumps and who hasn’t. Watching the girls practice gives the judges a good idea of who should win, and that will figure in the marks they give that night. Also, at practice the judges can mingle and meet the girls. In some ways, the campaign for the women’s gold medal remains a charm contest. The competition itself is only the last of a long series of opportunities the skaters have had to show themselves as happy, beautiful, and ladylike for the judges.

  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 boot-making technologies that have revolutionized rollerskating. 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 backflip 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.