by Johnny Weir
And mine did not total up to world champion material. Skating on what felt like knives plunging into my left foot, I made some sad mistakes (like falling on my ass during a triple axel) during the short program. Though I tried to claw my way back during the free skate, with the entire Soviet stadium clapping along to the beat of my music, I couldn’t pull off a world medal. Evan bumped me out of third place.
As fourth in the world, I was still able to perform my exhibition number conceived as a thank-you to the Russian people for all their support and kindness. I had decided to skate to Russian music, a radical choice since even Russian athletes wouldn’t skate to their own country’s music, preferring to bow to the English-speaking world in this one regard.
I chose the famous song “Ya Tebya Ne Kogda, Ne Zabudu” from Russia’s first rock musical, Yunona I Avos, which told the story of Conchita, a Mexican princess, and Nikolai, a Russian naval officer who falls in love with her. Although Conchita has an arranged marriage planned, the two people from very different worlds enter into a crazy love affair. Nikolai, eventually choosing duty over love, returns to the navy, where he promptly dies in a storm, and his soul enters the body of a seagull. A hopeless romantic, I love these sad stories where one lover dies and the other one never gets over it.
The packed crowd was already in a great mood when I got on the ice, screaming and clapping for the terrific skating that made them love the sport in the first place. Their boisterous energy invigorated me: it was time to put on a show.
A hush descended while the first few melancholy chords of the sad slow song started up, and I could tell nobody grasped what the music was. They never expected an American to skate to a Russian song, so even though they had heard the song a million times, in those beginning seconds, they didn’t get it.
Then the first word of the song floated over the stadium.
“Tiy.”
As soon as the audience comprehended the Russian word for “you,” the entire building erupted.
They loved it. Hundreds of Russian people were on fire—on their feet, screaming, cheering, crying, yelling “Bravo!” I had wanted to make a connection but the emotion was far more than I could have ever anticipated. What I didn’t know at the time was the singer, Nikolai Karachentsov, a really famous artist in Russia, had just been in a bad car accident and lay in a coma at the hospital while I skated. The tragedy gave meaning and pathos to my performance.
For me, the moment had meaning of an entirely different sort. With goose bumps traveling the length of my body, I no longer cared that I was fourth. I felt so good on the ice, because people related to what I was saying with my music and movements. “Ya tebya ne kogda, ne zabudu,” Karachintsev sang, “I will never forget you.” The reaction from the audience—which understood my artistry on the ice and desire to bridge cultural divides—was worth gold to me.
8
Birdbrain
Harp chords, gentle as raindrops on a placid pond, and a lofting soulful cello resonated over the tinny loudspeakers of a nowheresville ice arena. A Russian legend sang “tak krasivo, moy lebed” (“so beautiful, my swan,” as a young American skater soared and spiraled across a giant sheet of mirrored ice, re-imagining the iconic performance of Maya Plisetskaya as the Dying Swan.
I was back in Simsbury, Connecticut, that June, creating programs with Tatiana Tarasova for my first Olympic season as an actual contender, the dream I’d had since stepping on the ice at age twelve. I finally agreed to a radical idea she had been proposing since the first year we started working together. I would skate a short program to “The Swan,” by Saint-Saëns, a classical piece traditionally reserved for women.
A strict and aggressive coach, Tarasova is an artist before she’s anything else and sees things in a very different light than most other coaches. She relishes the over-the-top and theatrical in everything from choreography to costuming. Driven by an idealized art form in her head, she comes up with concepts that are off-the-chart crazy for skating. And my skating to “The Swan” was one of them. To her, it made perfect aesthetic sense; my naturally quiet and delicate way on the ice mirrored the mellow cello piece.
Before, I had hesitated to play the part of a dancing female swan. My public image at that point, while not exactly that of a choirboy, still retained a purity and classiness. I was a young, fragile, porcelain-looking American who stood out because I skated more like a ballet dancer. But that’s where it ended. Gender bending would take me into a whole new and very taboo arena, where I would stand totally alone.
It’s kind of funny, but although everyone on the outside thinks of figure skating as the gayest sport in the universe, those who wield power within it rail against that image. Female or male, skaters are supposed to represent a sanitized ideal, like a figurine atop a child’s birthday cake. The result is that homosexual skaters are terrified of announcing or showing any signs of their sexual orientation since the judges, many of whom are gay themselves, will hold it against them. No American skaters were out, in public anyway, and hadn’t been since U.S. champion Rudy Galindo came out publicly in 1996 after intense media pressure. The U.S. Figure Skating Association wanted it to stay that way, and even skating in a “feminine” way was tantamount in their rule book to declaring yourself gay. One had to act like a man. On skates and in sparkles.
When Tarasova initially broached the subject, I worried that skating to a piece of music traditionally reserved for women might hurt my reputation with the judges. For the Olympics, I had to release something great and memorable, so when she brought up the idea again, I reconsidered: the short program would be subtle and at the same time shocking. Four years before, Tarasova had created revolutionary programs that helped Alexei Yagudin win the Olympics. This woman knows how to make an Olympic moment, I thought. Putting my future in her bejeweled hands, I dove into the part of a lady swan.
As soon as we started to choreograph The Swan, I knew I had made the right decision. The experience was complete magic. There were times where I seemed to be running across the ice for hours on my toe picks, my arms fluttering like the feathers of a wounded swan. Tarasova stripped me down to the basest, most animalistic elements of a bird, and on that freeing journey, we were so pleased with ourselves we began calling the program a “masterpiece.” Perhaps a little cocky, but swans aren’t known for their humility.
I spent all summer preening my new feathers and giving interviews in which I talked about The Swan’s great beauty and originality. By its debut at my first Grand Prix event of the year in Canada that October, however, I had shed a lot of my initial certainty. There was big pressure at Skate Canada, the first real international event of the Olympic season, and The Swan had gone through drastic choreography changes from the original to conform to new amendments to the judging system the International Skating Union had voted on late that summer. They altered the parameters of acceptable spins and step sequences in a way that forced skaters to jam in more technique (and leave behind any art) in order to rack up points. My poor swan aside, the season leading up to the Olympics was a pretty stressful time to be changing the rules.
At the practice for the Grand Prix, I could already feel the first blush of Olympic fever. In Canada, they’re crazy about skating, and fans, who had paid for tickets just to watch the practices, packed the building. I wore my swan costume (I always like to warm up in my costume before the real event) under a jacket but was unabashedly excited to let this beauty free. Feathers delicately etched from sequins and stitching extended across my torso, a few floating freely and dramatically down my black pant leg. One arm, representing the long neck of a swan, cleverly ended in a red glove that looked like a swan’s beak. The other arm, covered in sparkling netting, was an avant-garde nod to the under layer in the construction of a swan costume and the deep ballet tradition of this piece.
Before I had a chance to ditch the jacket, a few of the Russian officials came up to Priscilla and me, kissing us warmly on both our cheeks and slapping our backs with lovi
ng roughness. They were especially keen on seeing me do well at the Grand Prix.
“Everyone’s looking to you to carry America at the Olympics,” they said. “Evgeni Plushenko, Stéphane Lambiel, and you are the favorites.”
Their words thrilled like a juicy piece of surprising gossip. But then their high praise was quickly supplanted with an opposite reaction. Was my country looking to meto carry our men’s team at the Olympics? The news came as a shock since my federation had never shown me anything close to that sentiment. It was confusing. But no matter my federation’s plan for the future, the Russians had jolted me back into excitement to show in this moment what I could do as The Swan.
I took off my warm-up jacket with hundreds of pairs of eyes watching my every move and cast my glance downward to get deep into the mind-set of a demure and sensitive bird. The audience had no idea what a treat they were in for—a real artiste on the ice. But just then I heard a strange sound, which I didn’t recognize at first. It was the crowd laughing at me.
A gaggle of reporters crowded around me after an event, waiting for a famous Weir sound bite and, well, I aimed to please. Still in my swan costume, one of them asked about my one red hand. When addressing the press, I always tried to avoid the obvious and add a little something unexpected. So I didn’t want to simply answer, “It’s the swan’s beak, dummy.” Then it hit me, out of nowhere, true inspiration.
“Well, his name is Camille—two l’s,” I said, thinking about the music’s genius composer Camille Saint-Saëns. “I think he’s my evil side. When I skate poorly, I blame it on my glove.”
I thought it was funny, and so did the reporters. They thought a lot of stuff I said those days was funny. Since I first performed The Swan at Skate Canada, something in me had shifted. The moment I appeared on the ice in my swan costume was a near catastrophe that wound up spinning into a huge success. I pushed past the snickering and skated The Swan so well the crowd went crazy. People were initially uncomfortable with the spectacle, but the intense emotion that built and unfurled slowly, just like emotions in real life, really resonated. It foreshadowed the reality that The Swan would become one of my most popular programs and completely change the world’s perception of me.
Unfortunately, the rest of the event didn’t go nearly as well. During the free skate, I made a long series of mistakes that ended with me badly spraining my ankle. They pulled me off the ice and put my leg in a cast as I watched the hideous scores that put me in a humiliating seventh place.
Still, it was as if the bird’s spirit had untethered me from my last remaining inhibitions. Both my personality and persona were in serious flux. The Swan took my natural inclination for poetic license and launched it into the realm of pure camp. Freeing my artistic side in a way that flew in the face of my federation’s ideals transformed me from the innocent to seriously sassy in what I had to say.
I stood out all the more because most skaters limit themselves to a very boring script in the hopes of not offending anyone. In sports, there’s a clear line of what you can and can’t discuss. While you’re supposed to bring attention to your sport, it should be in a very rah-rah American way that won’t offend a Republican or Christian rights group. The federation wants little robots that all spout the same message. And I was anything but that. I refused to stick to the script: “I hope I skate well. I just want to do my best, and I’ve worked really hard with my coach.” This boosted my popularity with people outside skating’s microcosm. Regular kids watching at home adored me because I clearly didn’t give a shit about what others thought. That’s universal appeal.
The one irritating by-product of my liberation, however, was the media’s new moniker for me: flamboyant. Whereas before they had described me as artistic and elegant, now I was “over-the-top” and, of course, “flamboyant.” The sexual connotations of the word annoyed me because sex, as much as I might enjoy it, has nothing to do with how I skate. But even more than that, it implied a lack of seriousness and I was as serious as any skater out there, just not as boring. Still, there wasn’t a single article about me that didn’t use the f-word, and there were a lot of articles about me.
I couldn’t complain too much since I was complicit in my new “flamboyant” image. It was like a drug: the more outrageous I sounded, the more attention I got. I gave the people what they wanted with loose comments like:
—declaring myself a “country bumpkin”
—describing my outfit as a “Care Bear on acid”
—calling skating judges “furry old women sitting there with grimaces on their faces”
My colorful language made me the clear press, and public, favorite. But my federation was not pleased. The Loose Cannon had become a fey loose cannon. I was basically their worst nightmare.
By the National Championships in January (the biggest deciding event of my career to that point because of its direct impact on the Olympic team), they let it be known that Evan Lysacek, my main American rival, was the favorite of U.S. Figure Skating Association officials. They spread the word at the event held in Saint Louis that it was Evan’s time to win. Their claim wasn’t baseless; his Grand Prix season had been stellar, whereas mine had not. But his skating was less of a factor than his persona. For figure skating people, he was easier to get their heads around. Straitlaced, he did everything they told him to. Meanwhile, I was out there wearing a swan carcass.
Although the press loved me because I was open and entertaining, and the public was ready to crown me the star of the upcoming Olympics, as the federation promoted Evan as skating’s newest angel, I could feel myself getting pushed out. And I didn’t like it.
My only weapon in the war for the halo was a performance that nobody could quibble with. Fueled by the fire of a scorned skater, I performed one of the best programs of my career. My Swan at the Nationals was stunning, with not one move or element out of place, earning me a personal best score of 83.28, the highest recorded for a short program in the United States under the new judging system at that time. Evan and Michael Weiss both fell, so I finished the night with a huge lead ahead of second place.
I celebrated by making a really off-color drug reference to the crowd of reporters waiting for me when I got off the ice that compared my performance to another skater’s speedier program.
“For [mine], they kind of sat back and had their cognac and their cigarettes and they were relaxing and watching,” I said. “His was like a vodka-shot-let’s-snort-coke kind of thing.”
The federation was fuming the next morning when my comment popped up in countless newspaper articles and Internet postings. While I practiced in the day off between the short and long program, one of the federation’s biggest bosses pulled me aside.
“The other skater’s mother is very upset and wants you to make a public apology to him,” he said. “You have completely disrespected U.S. figure skating, and you need to fix it.”
“Really?”
Of course, I didn’t fix it. I didn’t care. I mean, it was just a little comment, not a big life-or-death issue. This wasn’t a communist country; I was free to say what I liked.
Going into my long program with that defiant, and naive, stance, I quickly lost my eleven-point lead to a bunch of technicalities (and my big mouth). Although I had the crowd on its feet, I had done too many combinations according to the new rules, so I received no points for one jumping pass.
After a few nail-biting moments of watching the guys behind me skate, I won the National Championship for the third year in a row, something nobody had done since Brian Boitano in the ’80s. But I considered the win tarnished by what I saw as an unjustly small margin. Still, no one outside the skating world cares about points, only winners and losers. With three national titles under my belt and a direct pass to the Olympics, it appeared to the public like I was forever dominant over U.S. figure skating. Far from the truth, I was more than happy to let that image prevail.
My win at the Nationals immediately launched me into the frenzy of t
he Olympic season, when the whole world, which hasn’t paid attention to skating for four years, suddenly tunes in. My name was everywhere, and everyone started calling and coming out of the woodwork. Suddenly we needed a security guard at the front of my rink (which blacked out all of its windows because of the attention) because people were sneaking in to watch me or get on-ice interviews. In between training every day, I was on the phone with different media outlets like Sports Illustrated and the New York Times so that when people discussed U.S. figure skating at the Olympics, it wasn’t the great ice dancers Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto they talked about, or even Sasha Cohen. It was Johnny Weir. Despite what my federation thought, the press and public had crowned me the next princess of the Olympic Games.
9
Golden Boy
Priscilla and I prepared to go through a third security checkpoint to get into the Olympic Village in Torino, which was more secure than an army base. I hoisted my enormous Rimowa suitcases onto a table for an Italian policeman to inspect. He dexterously maneuvered around the cases and started rifling through the furs, black jeans, boots, and colorful scarves I had brought for my first trip to the Olympics.
When he finished, a few national police waved us forward with their large machine guns. Then we boarded a bus that would finally take us into the Village, but not before the policemen checked underneath, using long sticks with mirrors on the ends, to make sure there were no bombs. Because of the atrocity against the Israeli team by Black September, a Palestinian terrorist organization back during the Munich games of 1972, the Olympics had become something of a militarized zone.