by Johnny Weir
I tore out of his grip, out of my costume and skates, and out of the arena. Back in my room, I flopped on my bed, sobbing my eyes out and listening to Christina Aguilera on my earphones. The singer had been the inspiration for my hair, which I had dyed pieces of white blond and fire-engine red, just little pieces. Mostly it was brown. I thought I was making a statement, like Christina, and that it looked good (which, of course, looking back, it did not).
I had been planning on changing it before I went to the competition, but the geezers from the federation had been so insulting by adding my hair on top of the awful things they said about my costume. Now there was no way I was going to change—my hair, my costume, anything. Maybe they could push me around when I was sixteen but not anymore.
I was ready to leave the quiet Johnny of the Junior World Championships behind and go out on a limb. My new out-there, artistic side clearly came as a shock to some people in skating because they hadn’t seen that aspect of me (no one had except my closest friends). But my federation saw my costume, my program, and maybe even me as an affront to American skating tradition.
I was in a jam: if I wore my costume, it would be a big fuck-you to my country. But if I didn’t wear it, I wasn’t being true to myself. So I did what any self-respecting artist would do—I lied.
I pretended I was sick and withdrew from the competition. I lied to my mother, Priscilla, everyone. Each time a doctor tried to get into my hotel room to check me out, I feigned sleep. I was so terrified—knowing somewhere deep down that my duplicity was costing people a lot of money and possibly also my career if caught—that I practically made myself sick. Despite the fear of lying on all fronts, I couldn’t go through with the competition. Who were these people to tell me what to do? No American skater had been accepted in Russia the way I had been and they wanted to ruin it. In the countless hours of hard work I put into creating my costume and program, all they could find was something twisted. Well, I refused to be suppressed.
How did I go from a sweet, skating child to a crazy bitch who tells lies because he can’t wear what he wants? My transformation was a gradual one, but my burgeoning divadom had started as soon as I’d returned home from Sofia a year and a half earlier. My ego grew a couple of sizes when I walked into the rink in Delaware to find a huge banner that read “Johnny Weir: Junior World Champion. Congratulations!” and a crowd that began cheering upon my arrival. The skating community crowned me the next big thing, and I was ready for the title. This year Junior World Champion, next the Olympic team. I was finally headed in the right direction. Or so I thought.
The federation treated me like royalty, sending me to the Goodwill Games in Australia in August of 2001, a huge televised event where I competed against the top ten skaters in the world. I was paid ten thousand dollars just to show up—incredible, considering I would have probably shelled out to be in the company of my idols like Irina Slutskaya, Michelle Kwan, Evgeni Plushenko, and Alexei Yagudin. Initially overwhelmed to be part of such an elite group, I skated well enough to earn ninth place and back pats from the rest of the men. I wasn’t yet the best, but I belonged.
My becoming a celebrity (at least in the skating world) had the unfortunate timing of coinciding with my late-bloomer’s adolescence. Although I was nearly eighteen, I displayed all the signs of rebellion that kids who lead less sheltered lives than a competitive skater go through much earlier. Now that I was a star, I decided I had to dress the part. I tossed the timid polos and practical track pants of my youth, taking my fashion cues from the boy bands popular at the time. *NSYNC had it going on as far as I was concerned. I waltzed into my ice rink in a thin tank top with “Rock Star” blazoned across it in sparkles and my hair colored with various shades of store-bought dye.
I didn’t experiment with drugs but rather my identity. My new favorite catchphrase was “Fabulous!” and absolutely everyone in the world became “honey” as I became freer with my personality. Now that I was a grown-up, I wanted to do as I pleased (although looking back, there is nothing more immature than declaring yourself a grown-up, and no life less free than that of a competitive skater). While before it would have been rare for me to stay out past dark, now I began spending a lot of time away from home with friends from the rink. We would watch movies late at night at a friend’s house and then head to a diner afterward. When that got boring, we would sit in one of our cars and watch drunk people make fools of themselves outside the 7-Eleven. Either way, I often didn’t get home until 2 a.m. But hanging out—that’s what adults did! However tame my rebellion sounds, it was pretty unusual behavior for a training athlete.
The only people not giving me the respect I deserved were my mom and Priscilla. They weren’t treating me like a man, or a star, but rather like a big baby. Was I eating properly? Did I get enough sleep? Where had I been so late the night before? These were questions for a kid, not a champion skater about to turn eighteen years old.
Yes, I started to enjoy having a drink with friends on occasion and I didn’t watch my diet as closely as I should (meaning I ate more than a tomato for dinner). Other American skaters might have been horrified: that wasn’t top athlete behavior. But it wasn’t like I was skipping practice or anything. I showed up, on time, for every session.
Priscilla and my mom might have been on my ass about my new “bad” attitude, but I wasn’t too worried. I had gotten this far without paying too much attention to what other people had to say and I intended to keep it that way. My whole career up until this point had come easy—well, except for competing. So what if I wasn’t inspired to work hard? My success would continue to happen, just like it always had.
Like most teens and authority figures, Priscilla and I fought constantly. Our biggest battle was over my doing run-throughs, practicing the program with all the elements from the beginning to the end. She wanted me to do them to prepare mentally and physically for competitions. I felt that doing lots of jumps for stamina and conditioning was plenty. “The Russians don’t do run-throughs,” I told her with a dismissive wave of my hand. “So I’m not going to do run-throughs, either.”
I had dedicated the previous six years of my life to catching up to skaters my own age. Having caught up and passed most of them by, I thought I had earned the right to glide on talent for a little while.
However, figure skating is an unforgiving sport where no one gets a pass for talent alone. After I withdrew from the Grand Prix in Russia in a big-time diva fit over my costume, the USFSA dealt a harsh blow by withdrawing me from my other Grand Prix event in Japan. I wouldn’t have enough points to make it to the Grand Prix Final, even if I won the event, the federation reasoned, so they didn’t want to waste the money sending me there.
Even though it was of my own doing—I had made an incredibly stupid mistake by lying to get out of the event—I was angry at the world for mistreating me. Everyone was so busy putting me in my place when all I wanted was to be an adult, which I thought meant the freedom to do whatever I wished.
I was still fuming over the federation’s decision the following day when I showed up for practice. Priscilla, in her snowsuit, stood with her arms crossed like two fat cigars battling each other. I could tell something was up because she normally greeted me with an overly cheerful hello that irritated the hell out of me.
“What’s with you?” I asked, lacing up my skates.
Silence.
“I’m not happy about the Grand Prix thing, either. In fact, I’m sure I’m more upset than you,” I said.
“That’s not what’s bothering me,” she said.
“Well, out with it.”
“You smoked a cigarette!”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s not important who told me.”
“Then I’ll tell you it’s not true.”
“Kristi told her mom that you were at a party smoking a cigarette. And Sara told Jeff, who told me yesterday while he was coaching.”
“Snitch!”
“So it’s true
.”
I just glared at Priscilla in her stupid snowsuit. God, I hated that thing. It was summer, for heaven’s sake.
“You’re the only student I have who’s going to go someplace, and you don’t even care about it,” she said. “So I’m going to quit teaching, and you may as well quit skating.”
Her version of a scared straight speech needed a lot of work. If she wanted to quit teaching, she should go ahead and be my guest. I would find another coach. I didn’t need her or anybody else for that matter.
“Fuck you,” I said, and left.
I apologized to Priscilla eventually. My mother made me do it (“Tell her you’ll never smoke again and it will be fine,” she said) after a long week of not speaking to each other. But I didn’t fall in line. I continued to practice as I saw fit, running roughshod over my coach’s demands, and having fun with my friends at night.
When I arrived in Dallas in January of 2003 for the National Championships, the cracks in my plan of doing things only my way grew instantaneously from tiny fractures to huge fault lines. Because I had withdrawn from the last couple of competitions, nobody had seen me skate practically all year. My condition remained shrouded in mystery, which allowed the skating world’s imagination to fill in the question marks with big expectations. A few of the top skaters had withdrawn from the event because of injuries and people predicted I would do great things. They needed at least one showstopper and I fit the bill.
God, was I in bad shape. I had trained every day but I was nowhere near showstopper condition. At least I looked good, I tried to tell myself. For my short program to the Cirque du Soleil music, I decided to wear the deranged trapeze artist costume the officials had demanded off my back in Russia. “Screw everyone,” I said. “I’m going to wear what I want.” Priscilla, normally a total conformist, was so terrified of me by this point, she didn’t argue.
Waiting to go on the ice, I put all my confidence into that costume, as if it could carry me through the program instead of the other way around. I also put a little in a higher power. And apparently He listened. Through some act of God I skated a perfect short program. A private miracle, unbeknownst to the judges and audience, landed me in second place and a shot at competing in the World Championships. No one was more surprised than me.
But a short program is only two and a half minutes long. A long program is four and a half minutes, and facing those two extra minutes the next day brought me to my knees. It’s a long exertion time for skaters in the best condition. My mind ran to black as it had so many times before. Why hadn’t I done my run-throughs? Right before I was set to compete, I faced the bleak fact: I wasn’t prepared. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this,” I murmured softly to myself.
With every TV camera trained on me, I put myself on the ice and delivered a half-hearted pep talk: you are going to try. My music from Dr. Zhivago started, and I began skating. But hope didn’t last long; ten seconds into the program my blade got stuck in between the wall and the ice while I was doing a simple crossover.
I went tumbling onto the ice in a tangle of confusion and embarrassment. It was so crazy I didn’t know what to do with myself. I got up very quickly, and then, even though I wasn’t injured, put my hand on my back, pretending that there was something wrong. Lying seemed to have become my default.
Now what should I do? Out of instinct, I had pretended to be hurt. There was nothing to do but go through with it. I stopped my program and skated over to the referee.
“Ugh, I hurt my back so bad,” I said.
“Well, can you continue?” the referee asked.
Could I? “Yes, I can continue.”
Okay, Johnny. Get your shit together. Let’s go.
I started skating again and I could feel my audience, the collective anticipation, as I went up into the air. It’s the same sensation as when somebody’s staring at you from across the room and you can feel it before you even turn around. When you’re on the ice, you feel all of these eyes, and you can feel, through their eyes, their emotions. At that moment, it was pure hope.
I landed the first jump. Excited that I wasn’t injured, the audience cheered me on. I did the first jumping pass through their slow, rhythmic claps . . . good. The second jumping pass . . . great. I had another triple axel planned and went into the air. It was huge. I felt this is my shot to really rock. My last thought before I came down was God’s going to help me again.
Then I came down very hard, literally. On my landing, I popped my kneecap out of place and couldn’t get up. Finally, this was no lie. After what seemed like an eternity, I rose from the ice and hobbled over to the boards. “I can’t continue,” I said, and withdrew from the competition.
People’s genuine concern for me after the fall made me feel worse because I knew I had brought this on myself. I had wanted to be treated like an adult, but instead had acted like a child. I had wasted the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities presented me and thrown away what should have been the most important season in my career. Now truly injured, I had no idea what it would take for me to get back on track.
A few minutes after I withdrew from the National Championships, an elderly woman, Helen McLoraine, who helped fund my skating career and had traveled from Colorado to watch me compete, fell while she was getting up to leave the rink. I found out a few days later that my benefactress—the lady who had sent my mother money here and there through the years to help with a costume or some extra for music editing simply because she loved my skating—had passed away in the hospital.
Up until that point, I had been the next golden child of U.S. figure skating, and now it was done after I completely ruined the whole season in which I was supposed to make a name for myself. After the event in Dallas, the federation took me out of Envelope A, which assured the top-tier athletes consideration for international events and a little bit of money for training. I could no longer compete at the biggest senior level events such as the World Championships or in the Grand Prix series. My stupidity and hubris had landed me in skating purgatory, cast out from the mainstream and any kind of official track. I knew I had earned my karma and deserved everything that was happening, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
I don’t do things halfway. As spectacularly as I had risen up the skating ladder, I fell just as hard and fast. In one quick year, I went from an alternate for the Olympics, Goodwill Games athlete, and the next favorite of U.S. figure skating to a complete and utter write-off.
5
Embracing the Starving Artist
My ankles swelled into a war zone of black, blue, and bloody red from the countless footwork passes I’d run through. My hip flexors were slack with overuse from millions of jumps and difficult spins. Every muscle in my body ached. Even my brain throbbed from an entire day of having directives in Russian hurled at me as rapidly and forcefully as machine-gun fire. In a temporary break from my regular training with Priscilla, I spent the summer of 2003 in a program with one of the world’s best Olympic coaches. During the insane, grueling summer camp for skaters, I subsisted on coffee and slept in a stranger’s extra bedroom—and I had never felt luckier.
I had been so disheartened by the fiasco at the National Championships in Dallas and my subsequent relegation to a skater’s no-man’s-land by the USFSA that I briefly considered quitting the sport altogether. I didn’t think I had the head for it anymore. Resting on talent alone, I had turned last season (when I should have proved myself Olympic-level material) into a total disaster. The skating world didn’t believe I had what it took to be a serious competitor, proving that with my new low ranking.
Their harsh voices berated me in my head until I came to my senses. I had never listened to those people before, so why would I now? I wanted to keep skating. I needed to. After all my family had sacrificed, personally and financially, for me to pursue this dream, I couldn’t give up after encountering a bump in the road (even if the bump was the size of Mount Everest). Plus, I hated when people told me what to do.
If the entire federation signaled that I should quit, then I would do the opposite—even if it killed me.
But if I planned on reviving my career after taking a blowtorch to it, a real change of pace was in order. Last year had been a failed experiment in stretching my wings, but the original impetus hadn’t been totally wrong. I did need to be away from Priscilla and my mom so that I could learn how to stand on my own two skates. I needed to be inspired.
That inspiration came in the form of a fur-swathed, Dior-toting Russian woman named Tatiana Tarasova. In the obscure town of Simsbury, Connecticut, the world-famous skating coach and choreographer spent summers training an elite group of athletes including Olympic champions such as Alexei Yagudin and Ilia Kulik and my friend, the skating star Sasha Cohen. After Sasha helped me get a foot in the door, I skated for Tarasova. Her only comment, to my mother, was, “Yes, I will take Johnny.” Normally she charged in the double-digit thousands for one program, but Tarasova let me train with her all summer for free since I didn’t have a penny to my name. Waiving her fee proved she believed in me and offered encouragement before I took even a single lesson. I had been given a second chance and resolved not to blow it.
At the International Skating Center of Connecticut, we skated for about six hours a day, so much more than I was used to, after which I would fall, practically paralyzed, into the bed in the bedroom I rented from a random woman. No matter how stiff or sore I felt, I hit the ice the next morning with the kind of energy fueled by inspiration. Unlike the University of Delaware’s crowded rink, here only five truly great skaters trained together.
In the classic Russian style, Tarasova taught us in groups, as opposed to one-on-one, so that we fought each other to be the best. The dynamic brought out the competitive spark still smoldering from my childhood. I definitely responded to all the skaters trying to one-up each other as we vied for Tarasova’s attention. The edge of my footwork got sharper and my jump technique stronger.