Welcome to My World

by Johnny Weir

  Everything changed as I climbed the ranks of competitive skating. My body, my technique, my ability, my emotions, my surroundings, all in turmoil and flux. The one constant, however, was that I sucked at competing. People from around the world were saying the same thing: “Johnny’s wonderful. He can do triple axels and is great in practice. But in any contest, he falls apart.”

  Struggling with my mental stability, I asked myself, Can I do this?

  The Chinese skaters, in their government-issued costumes, accepted their scores grimly. This was the last place on earth I wanted to be. I had told the USFSA flat out I didn’t want to go to the Chinese Junior Grand Prix, but they sent me anyway. And when the federation says go, you go. They wanted me there because I was the only person from the States at the junior level who could do a triple axel. Like Russia’s junior skaters, the Chinese were a group that everyone feared because they could all do really difficult jumps. They were a bitch to contend with.

  Seven months after the Nationals, those embarrassing falls still hurt. I hadn’t forgotten what a rotten job I had done and still didn’t know how to beat down my nerves. And here I was, facing skaters who didn’t seem to have any emotions, only perfect technique. I was also a bit wobbly, having subsisted for the prior couple of days on nothing but black coffee and energy bars I had carried with me from home (I don’t do Chinese food).

  All I had going for me was the fact that this competition didn’t really matter. In all the years competing in the Junior Grand Prix circuit, I had never made the finals because of my terrible track record. Winning some competitions and losing others, I never gained enough points to make it all the way and this year was no different.

  So I hit the ice without inhibition despite it being the first time I chose to include two triple axels in my long program. No matter how many mistakes I made, Priscilla’s philosophy was to make everything harder. Never step back, always step forward, even if it hurts. But the pressure of hard programs never bothered me, only the pressure I put on myself, and that was completely gone in China. I skated perfectly in both programs and took second place to a Chinese boy, which exceeded everyone’s expectations, including my own.

  My personal victory in China set off a winning streak that restored my confidence and that of those around me—crucial since I was moving to the next and highest group in skating, the senior level. These are the skaters who are on TV and go to the Olympics; these are the ones who really count. Three weeks later, back in the States, I moved from the regional competition to the larger sectional, defeating everyone on the East Coast. People started to whisper about me doing well in the next National Championships, a totally unexpected rumor for a newly minted Olympic-level skater.

  I felt a new and odd sensation: calm. Even as the months flashed by quickly and I arrived in Boston for the 2001 National Championships, the event that dictated who went to the World Championships and the Junior World Championships (and helped define early favorites for the following year’s Olympic team), I remained comfortable in my skating. I didn’t know if I was learning or simply getting over a phobia, but I prayed my new Zen state stayed.

  I should have been scared. At sixteen, I was the youngest competitor in the senior level by four years. On top of that, the week before I had sustained a bad hip flexor injury, which required a cortisone shot three inches from my naughty bits that left me without much feeling in my hip while I skated. But being the underdog is where I flourished. On top, I needed to worry. I really didn’t think I was going to do anything but show up—maybe get tenth place if I was lucky. After my short program, to my astonishment, I placed sixth, which meant I was in the group of skaters who performed their free program live on ABC Sunday afternoon. For the first time, I was going to be on national TV.

  When I got on the ice to warm up the next day, I couldn’t believe the men skating around me. They were the best six skaters in the country, and I was part of it. Watching the big American champions like Timothy Goebel and Michael Weiss, whom I had followed for years on television, spin and stretch in the flesh didn’t feel real. What am I doing here? I thought before remembering that I had to stop staring and start practicing.

  Before I even touched the ice to compete, I had already won. As part of “the group,” the best six, I would get my pick of Grand Prix events that fall and a shot at the 2002 Olympics. After all my personal issues, I was so honored to be there and returned the honor by skating my ass off. The big tassels on my costume’s shoulders shook as I shimmied and danced to my raucous Hungarian music. I rocked it so hard and clean. Although I placed last in the group, I couldn’t have been happier: sixth in the country was not a bad place to be.

  Sofia, Bulgaria, in March is not pretty. I arrived in the Eastern European city as the highest-ranked U.S. skater competing in the Junior World Championships after my performance in Boston. Spring was nowhere to be found among the crumbling smog-stained buildings and empty streets. Even though morning was fully under way when the taxi spewing exhaust picked my mom, Priscilla, and me up from the airport, a gray mist filled the deserted vista. Occasionally a person, bundled head to toe from the cold, popped up looking like a walking cocoon.

  The Junior Grand Prix series takes skaters to really obscure places like Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, and Hamar, Norway, because it lacks the funding of the senior series. Although it’s a European capital, Sofia came as a shock to our little traveling band. I stared out the window of the taxi, marveling at the desolation. My anxiety mounted as the bleakness extended. I was a pretty finicky traveler who always felt uncomfortable abroad. Just dialing a different area code was enough to freak me out. Surveying the alien landscape, I knew I was going to feel very uncomfortable here.

  I was jolted out of my reverie by the taxi lurching to a halt in the middle of the street. There wasn’t another car or person on the road as far was we could see, so why had the driver stopped all of a sudden? My mom, clearly suspecting a scam, glared at the driver while Priscilla, as she was known to do in any uncomfortable situation, began laughing loudly like an overgrown kid.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the driver in my faltering Russian.

  Because of my interest in Russia, I had taught myself some simple phrases and figured he might understand me since Bulgarian is very close. Unfortunately, I had no idea what he said back to me. My mother was able to surmise his meaning when the driver jammed his finger at the windshield.

  “Johnny! Dogs!” she said.

  Right outside the cab, a pack of wild dogs snarled at us. The twenty or so mangy, wolflike canines bared their teeth and howled before taking off for a dowdy Soviet-style municipal building. Oh, no, I was definitely not comfortable here.

  My surroundings weren’t the only reason for my discomfort (although it didn’t help when the people at the hotel registration said, “You can turn right out of the hotel during the day, but only right; never go left. And at night, don’t leave the hotel at all.”) I had trained hard for the event and was skating well, but the pressure was on like never before. Every single person knew who I was.

  At the arena the day of the event, one of the USFSA officials came up to me, accompanied by a few of his foreign counterparts. The white-haired official, in a Brooks Brothers blue blazer and khaki pants that made him look like he had just stepped out of a Florida golf club, gave me a big scary smile.

  “This is our next great skater,” he announced as he patted me hard on the back. “Watch him now. Soon he’s going to be our next champion.”

  He might as well have jabbed a blade into my leg. I entered my short program with the needling sense that I was going to be a big failure. I blindly made my way through a routine, which included a triple axel–triple toe loop combination, the hardest thing that anybody was doing on the ice during the event. But that’s not where I fell. It was during my last jump, a triple flip, that I landed on the ground. A jump I had learned three years earlier! Trudging off to the kiss and cry box to await my scores, I was so disappoint
ed. The judges didn’t see it that way, though. They kept me in first place, despite my fall, firmly sticking behind their choice for the next generation of Olympic skater. One of the first things you learn as a figure skater is that the judges give special treatment to their favorites. Going into the competition, they always have an idea of who the best skaters are, and that guides them in their scoring.

  The weight of number one crushed me as I readied myself to compete in the long program the following day. It was more of an unraveling, really. When I looked in the mirror of my locker room, I saw a fraud. A big, ugly, stupid fraud. With bad hair. In the reflection, the short spikes were clearly crooked. Great, I hadn’t even done my hair well.

  As the second-to-last skater in the event, I was forced to sit backstage like a caged animal ready for the slaughter. Listening to the raucous audience reactions for the other skaters, like Evan, who was second to me after the short program, and the scores being read on the loudspeaker as they reverberated through the massive building, I was a dazed and crying mess.

  Panicking like never before, I couldn’t stop sobbing. Priscilla sat nearby, helplessly silent. While she was a good friend and a great coach, constantly pushing me past my limits and always expecting more, she wasn’t good at the raw emotion thing. So I just sat there and wept until she stood and said, “Okay. It’s time to go.”

  I got up and wiped my face. Chin up, jacket slung over my shoulders, I let Priscilla walk me out as the boy before me, who hadn’t done very well, finished his program to anemic applause. Junior-level competitions don’t draw a big crowd, so the stands were sparsely filled with random, glum-looking Bulgarians and American supporters in their various brightly colored windbreakers.

  When I stepped on the ice, the audience began a slow clap that steadily got faster and faster in anticipation of my performance. The increasing tempo made my heart race with terror. Shaking, I couldn’t look at the stands for fear that I’d faint and I couldn’t look at Priscilla, because I’d start crying again. So I just started skating around in little circles.

  I needed some kind of release. There was too much emotion coursing through me. The panic became physical discomfort, an illness corroding an otherwise healthy body. I needed to snap out of it, but I didn’t know how.

  “Next on the ice, representing the United States: Johnny Weir,” the announcer said over the loudspeaker.

  Nothing was right. The fans were strangers and the rink decrepit. I hadn’t eaten properly in this Eastern Bloc country for an entire week. Everything around me was foreign and uncomfortable.

  And then I heard the first few bars of my music, a synthesizer’s ominous imitation of balalaika accordion music.

  An amazing thing happened: the rink dropped away and the faces receded as “The Heart of Budapest” enveloped me like an old friend. The only thing that I knew in that building at that moment was my music, and I let myself fly upon the normalcy offered up by its folk harmonies. That song and I had spent a lot of time together.

  It guided me through my program perfectly. I got off the ice to excited screams from the crowd and hugged Priscilla. After the judges read my scores and named me the new Junior World Champion, I started crying and so did Priscilla. Looking up into the stands, I found my mom and she was tear-streaked, too.

  The pain of fear had given way to a burst of accomplishment. The first time in my career that I relied on my muscle memory and let my body do what it was trained to do, the moment marked a huge milestone in my life as an athlete. Music’s ability to move me, something that had alleviated my fear of the dark as a child, inspired me to become an artist and then returned to teach me how to become a competitor.

  4

  Enfant Terrible

  Adrenaline coursed through my body as I pushed across the ice. And this was only practice. My first time in Russia—Moscow, no less—marked a homecoming of sorts. Ever since my earliest connections tracing the Cyrillic alphabet and finding a kindred spirit in Yuri the dance teacher at my rink in Delaware, I had continued to develop a love for the country and its dramatic skating style. No matter that my Russia was a mythical one of sable furs, vodka shots, and tsars that had little to do with secret police, bread lines, and bureaucracy. It got to the point where the Russians came to think of me as one of their own, making this a golden place for me to skate.

  The pressure was on during my first trip to the real country in the fall of 2002 to compete in the Cup of Russia, the Russian Grand Prix. The judges, officials, and coaches eagerly anticipated my arrival: they had been waiting to see this American who skated like a Russian since I had won the Junior World Championships a year and a half before. “Johnny looks like a Russian on the ice, so we’re excited for him to compete,” an official told Priscilla and me on our arrival. “He’ll be accepted well.”

  The high expectations of how I would do (something I never felt comfortable absorbing) wasn’t the only thing making me nervous. Despite the way I entered the ice like I owned the place, the deep dark truth was I had no idea whether I could get through my whole program. My condition wasn’t where it should have been because my training wasn’t what it should have been. I just needed some space. Eighteen years old, I was entering my adolescent rebellion on the late side. In truth, I was completely sick of hanging out with Priscilla and my mom.

  But this wasn’t the time to start doubting myself. I had a big competition tomorrow and right now I was practicing . . . in Moscow . . . for the Russian Grand Prix . . . in my beautiful new costume. I couldn’t wait to warm up the sparkly onesie since it was the very first I ever designed. Performing to music from Cirque du Soleil, I had been going for a deranged circus look. The black velvet pants traveled up into a turquoise Lycra top layered with black fishnet (I’m a sucker for netting). To show off my lithe but fully mature body, a turquoise string snaked up my sides and around my waist, ending in a rip at one of the shoulders. I looked like I had just fallen off a trapeze and was very proud of the overall effect.

  The American judges walked into the arena and over to my coach while I ran through my program to see what this tight little number could do. I was deep into my impression of a tragic Weimar circus performer when one of the judges ordered me over to him with an angry wave of his hand. As I skated closer, I saw Priscilla’s face had gone white and she had the awkward smile she always had when we were in trouble.

  “What is that?” the judge said as he pointed at my outfit. “This is totally a slap in the face to us.”

  “He looks like one of them, a Russian!” another judge said. “We can’t let him go out there like that.”

  I couldn’t believe what the U.S. skating officials were saying about my perfect costume. Yes, I preferred the more form-fitting, one-piece costumes favored by male Russian skaters to the big pirate blouses and cheap tuxedo pants that the American men wore. But this was a completely original design created by me. They hadn’t seen anything like it before.

  “You are going to have to change your costume,” the first judge ordered.

  I started to make my way off the ice as my tears turned the arena into one big blurry white prison. I couldn’t simply “change my costume.” My costume, like my choice of music, helped create the mood and character of the program. It offered another dimension to consider, aside from landing all the jumps and completing all the spins. In short, it helped me compete.

  Much like A-List actresses who won’t hit the red carpet unless they’re dripping in five million dollars’ worth of diamonds, I can’t skate unless I feel beautiful. When I perform, my hair and makeup have to be done and I need a costume with a story. That’s why I’ve always had a big say in what I wear on the ice, even when I was younger and wanted things that were unrealistic for my size. Skating to classic Russian balalaika music when I was thirteen, I had demanded a full Cossack costume with big, billowing pants, boots, and a little vest. But because I was so tiny I looked like a child survivor of a pogrom wearing a dead soldier’s uniform and had to admit I could
n’t really pull it off.

  Still, I always had an opinion. When I moved from junior level to senior level skating, Stephanie Handler, my faithful costume designer, put in shoulder pads to chunk me up a little bit because I was a wispy fifteen-year-old kid competing against guys who were in their mid- to late twenties. I freaked out, finding the padding not only cheesy but also distracting since they sort of flew around in the wind when I was skating.

  Once I went through my growth spurt around seventeen and got my man body, I was ready to act like a man—and design my own costume. After seeing the Cirque du Soleil show in Philadelphia, I was inspired to sit down and sketch different silhouettes and color schemes. I knew I wanted a Russian-style skating costume: they all wore one-piece catsuits with the whole story of their performance written out on the design. Flamboyant and over the top, Russian men weren’t afraid to wear really tight things that showed off their line.

  Stephanie said yes to my sexy circus freak immediately. She had been waiting for me to have that moment when I was old and big enough to wear something crazy. My mom and Priscilla approved, knowing that I needed some freedom in my life and preferring it be through costume than other, more destructive venues that tempted me.

  When Stephanie finally translated my drawing into the actual costume, I felt a deep thrill wearing it on the ice. I knew I had done something special, something unique.

  As it turned out, though—according to the officials from my country telling me I couldn’t wear it—the costume was a little too unique. Before I could make my dramatic exit off the ice, the first judge caught me by the arm. “One more thing,” he said. “Your hair is also disrespectful. Please change it before tomorrow.”