CHAPTER ONE THE CURTAIN RISES IN SUN VALLEY The Learjet was little more than a dot in the clear night sky, the tiniest point of light over the imposing Idaho mountains, as two tired young men sat waiting in a dark van. The lights of the tiny airstrip were off; the airport was officially closed. The air traffic controller could have been dozing; nobody would have known. It was almost two in the morning on a black, chilly October night--an unusual time, the two men agreed, for a flight to be landing in Sun Valley. A bellman and a security guard had been dispatched by the Sun Valley Lodge for a pickup in the middle of the night at Friedman Memorial Airport in nearby Hailey. They had punched a four-digit security code to enter the airport through a locked gate, pulled up beside the runway, turned off the engine, and waited. They knew it wouldn't be long. Without warning, the slumbering airfield began to awaken. The white runway lights, the airport's electronic welcome mat, popped on. The two men shifted in their seats and peered into the sky. The bright light coming from the south grew larger. Within minutes, it was upon them. At 2:02 A.M. mountain daylight time, Saturday, October 8, 1994, a cream-colored private jet with a green stripe touched down on the concrete slab wedged between the menacing peaks of the Sawtooth Range. It taxied and came to a stop a few steps from the van. The jet's door opened and a little man in blue jeans, sneakers, and a black letter-style jacket poked his face out and flashed a wrinkled, weary grin. He breathed deeply and gulped down the cool mountain air. Six hours earlier, he had been skating in an ice show in Atlanta. Now, after a police escort to the airport there, a commercial flight from Atlanta to Salt Lake City, and a late-night rendezvous with the corporate jet that would bring him to Idaho, the most charismatic figure skater in the world had been delivered safely to his destination. Scott Hamilton had landed in Sun Valley. The figure-skating season could officially begin. "I can't beat Boitano in the wind and the sun at altitude." It was 9 A.M. The sun already was beaming down on the perfect patch of ice beside the veranda at the Lodge. Hamilton had had four hours of sleep. His thirty-six-year-old body felt stiff and his mind felt stale. He was complaining--with a smile on his face. Hamilton always wore a smile. He was living a charmed life and he knew it. "How could anyone top Boitano in these conditions?" he wondered. When they were amateurs, Hamilton beat Brian Boitano all the time. Hamilton was the anointed one, all the way through 1984, when he won his Olympic gold medal and turned pro, leaving the ice to Boitano. Boitano quickly rose to the top, winning the next Olympic gold medal. As a professional, Boitano, thirty-one, had become better than Hamilton, who juggled a three-month skating tour with countless hours in the CBS broadcast booth. But who was better than whom was inconsequential at this stage of their careers. Figure-skating people didn't compare Hamilton and Boitano; they simply revered them both for the different things they brought to their sport. Hamilton credits Boitano's superb jumping ability with making "the sport a sport." He said Boitano's favorite time is "in the air." Hamilton's respect for Boitano is immense. Boitano is one of the most powerful skaters ever, and the most particular. What and how he practices, how he laces up his skates, when he goes to the bathroom before he skates--it is all fastidiously regimented. Boitano's attention to detail has served him well in a sport where a man moving at twenty miles per hour must land a three-revolution jump precisely on a one-quarter-inch blade while sliding on ice. Hamilton, on the other hand, has more sheer fun on the ice. He has the fastest feet in the sport. He skims along the ice, playing to the crowd with reckless abandon. He measures his skating with an applause meter. The crowd means everything. For instance, Hamilton does a backflip in most of his performances; Boitano never has tried one. The backflip is one of the easiest tricks in the sport and the crowd's absolute favorite move. It's skating's cheap thrill. Boitano would rather not waste the time. Hamilton lives for the roar from the crowd when he lands it. Hamilton and Boitano have skating styles determined by their size. Boitano is massive by skating standards at five feet eleven and 170 pounds. Hamilton is five feet three and a half and 120. Hamilton skates blithely on top of the ice, while Boitano digs in. If Hamilton rents the ice, Boitano owns it. Hamilton selects light music, funny stuff. It is a show to him. Boitano is grander and majestic. For him, it is serious athleticism. In the classic figure-skating argument--Is it art? Is it sport?--these men give different correct answers. Neither man had expected to be in Sun Valley the weekend of October 8-9, 1994. Hamilton had his show in Atlanta; Boitano thought he would spend the days at home in San Francisco, practicing for the start of a new professional season that was scheduled to begin later in the month. But then the phone call came. The voice on the other end of the line was sounding rather nervous. It had happened again. Another woman figure skater. Another knee. Could they please get to Sun Valley? The plan, formulated in the mind of a thirty-six-year-old North Carolina television executive named Mike Burg, had been simple. He wanted to stage a professional women's event, followed by an amateur women's event. The outdoor rink in the mountains at Sun Valley would be the site of both competitions. It was perfect, Burg thought. Sonja Henie, the most beautiful figure skater of all, had made a movie there, although, truth be told, she actually did her skating scenes in a Hollywood studio. Now, Burg would bring Henie's present-day successor, the magical Oksana Baiul, onto the Sun Valley ice to start her professional career. The sixteen-year-old Ukrainian orphan who had won the 1994 Olympic gold medal had signed a $1.5-million deal with Burg to skate in ten made-for-TV events in the next year and a half; Sun Valley would be the first. Burg sold the idea of a series of figure-skating competitions to CBS. Television executives who had watched ratings soar at the 1994 Winter Olympics wanted more of this sport. This was especially true at CBS, where Fox had swooped in and stole the NFL, leaving the network with just about nothing on Sunday afternoons. The Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan night of skating at the Norway Olympics was the sixth-highest-rated television program of all time, behind the last M*A*S*H, Dallas's "Who Shot J.R.?", an episode of Roots, and two Super Bowls. Other figure-skating events--even stale, months-old exhibitions--garnered too-good-to-be-true ratings. CBS Sports saw a chance for salvation: figure skating, figure skating, and more figure skating. Baiul came to Sun Valley several days early to practice. Just as she finished a number, she dislocated her left kneecap and tore a piece of cartilage. While curtsying. In football, players blow out their knees when being tackled. In basketball or baseball, knees are injured in collisions or falls or when an athlete is running or jumping. In figure skating, the knee goes during a curtsy. It's just that kind of a sport. A knee had been the catalyst for the strangest sports competition story in U.S. history, the Tonya-Nancy saga, precipitated, of course, by the Whack Heard Round the World--the attack on Kerrigan's knee. Now, another incident with another woman's knee was threatening to postpone the start of figure skating's newest and most unpredictable season. Burg was frantic. CBS trucks were parked beside the rink and workers were laying cable and setting up cameras at the moment Baiul went down. She had arthroscopic surgery at a nearby hospital and was back practicing within two days. But the women's pro event was scrapped; Baiul would not be ready in time. With CBS crews stopping in their tracks, Burg came up with another idea: a men's professional event. He scrambled to the telephone and began dialing numbers. He called Linda Leaver, Brian Boitano's coach and manager in Los Altos, California. He was wondering if Boitano would like to compete in a professional men's event in Sun Valley in a week. Leaver said no, he wasn't yet quite ready for a competition. He was gearing up for late October. Burg called Hamilton. Hamilton said the same thing. No. Burg had to have them. He just had to. Hamilton was the best "people" person in the sport, and Boitano was the Master of the Ice. So he changed the offer: it would be an artistic competition, much easier than a strict jumping contest. No one would be counting triple jumps. Coaches and ex-skaters who were their friends would be the judges. Burg could offer thousands of dollars up front, a $40,000 first-place prize, a nice weekend in the mountains. Boitano agreed and flew over from San Francisco the day before the event. Hamilton, who was CBS's skating analyst, knew his obligation. Although he had the commitment in Atlanta the night before, the people who ran Sun Valley would personally see to it that their corporate jet got him there. Burg stopped and sighed. He called skating's new season "the Wild West," and he fashioned himself as Jesse James. Lawlessness prevailed. Competitions were beginning to pop up on the landscape. If you could get a network interested and sign some skaters, you had yourself an event. You made up the rules as you went along. Burg had never been a major player in running the sport. Until now. He had represented Katarina Witt from 1991 to 1993, working with the crafty former East German on endorsements and made-for-TV skating shows. That was his start. Now, with television interest high and sponsors wanting to jump on the bandwagon, Burg gladly leaped into the fray. He controlled Baiul, and he had deals with Kerrigan and Boitano, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Paul Wylie. The old guard, led by skating icon Dick Button and the sports-marketing giant International Management Group, still had its foothold in professional events and marketing and managing skaters, but Burg was coming on fast. His empire, he was convinced, would mark time from Sun Valley. In addition to Hamilton and Boitano, Burg rounded up a third Olympic gold medalist, Ukrainian Viktor Petrenko, who already was in Sun Valley with Baiul. Wherever Bainl went, Petrenko followed. They were a team; Petrenko had encouraged his coach and mother-in-law, Galina Zmievskaia, to take in Baiul two years earlier. The whole gang had moved from the Ukraine to Simsbury, Connecticut, after the Olympics. They lived next door to one another in an apartment complex. Burg filled out the roster for the men's event with three other skaters--Mark Mitchell, Petr Barna, and Gary Beacom, a show skater who doesn't do triple axels, but does wear sunglasses and perform headstands. Burg was putting three Hall of Famers with two Triple-A ballplayers and--in Beacom--a class clown. But what did Burg care? Figure-skating fans never complained. They were thrilled to see anyone skate on TV. CBS had an event that would get fine afternoon ratings when it ran on Thanksgiving weekend. The skaters had work and exposure. Everyone was happy. At the former-women's-now-men's pro event, the competitors did two programs each. Unlike an amateur event, there was not a short and long program. This was show and show: one show program, followed by another. And outdoors, no less. Skaters never competed outdoors anymore, unless they were in Sun Valley. Jumping from sunlight into shade was difficult; finding the ice on the way down was tricky, like trying to hit a baseball thrown from sunshine into darkness. For the first number, Hamilton wore purple pants and a multicolored vest to accompany his fancy footwork to the rock song "Walk This Way," blowing kisses and winking at the sun-splashed gathering of 2,300 along the hotel veranda. Boitano was all business, performing to Pavarotti's "Nessun Dorma." He did this in pain. His feet were scrunched into black skate boots that were too tight. This was a typical skater's lament. The boots were new, worn for just one week, and he was furiously trying to break them in. If he ran into a problem, he said with a smile, he would "just do what Tonya did"--prop his skate on the judges' table and plead for mercy. For a second number, Hamilton did "In the Mood," and Boitano brought a red folding chair out on the ice with him to sit on, jump over, and fold up as "Missing You" played over the loudspeakers. Boitano thought up the number on his own, without a choreographer, after watching a ballerina use a chair as a prop during a performance he attended. Boitano felt a bit silly bringing a chair onto the ice with him. Everyone else came up with crazy stuff, but he was reluctant to push the envelope artistically, to threaten his own high standards. He didn't want people to think him stupid out there. He laughed as he took the red chair to the ice to practice, saying, "It's my new partner; a really, really thin Katarina." The chair had a life of its own. At a skating event in Ohio, Boitano set the chair backstage, and when it was his turn to skate, he couldn't find it. He anxiously approached a group of fellow skaters sitting around a TV set watching the closed-circuit feed. "Anyone seen my red chair?" They all looked around and shook their heads. But Robin Cousins, the 1980 Olympic gold medalist, turned around on his folding chair. "Ah, Brian?" Boitano looked at him. Cousins was sitting on Boitano's irreplaceable prop. Petrenko, the 1992 Olympic gold medalist, was the artistic opposite of Boitano. They played against all the stereotypes; Boitano the Californian was an arch conservative on the ice; Petrenko, the quiet Ukrainian, loved the outrageous. In Sun Valley, he skated to a number he liked to do on the show circuit. He pinned a piece of paper with a No. 21 to his back and skated as if he were competing in a ballroom-dancing contest--without a partner. His music was "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White," something men like Boitano and Hamilton never would skate to. But Petrenko's world was entirely different from the Americans'. Petrenko was sitting around one day at home in Connecticut, fascinated by the offerings of cable television, when a commercial for great music of the forties and fifties came on. He called the 800 number, and in a few weeks twelve compact discs arrived. That was one of the songs. No matter what music was playing, Petrenko was a master of flirting with the judges. He camped out at center ice and winked and smiled at them at the beginning, middle, and end of almost every program. Some of his programs featured more winks of the eye than revolutions in his jumps. Spectators on the other side got to see a lot of his back. He did that with the ballroom number, and he did it in his second effort, a rap number, of all things. A blond Ukrainian with a baseball cap on backward swiveling his hips and preening to rap music caught the audience by complete surprise. Among the seven judges were four coaches who had women skating in a so-called amateur event the next day on this ice. One of them, judge No. 7, sitting in the shade wearing sunglasses, was Evy Scotvold. Scotvold is the self-assured, silver-haired coach who, with his choreographer wife, Mary, led Paul Wylie and Nancy Kerrigan to Olympic silver medals. He was coaching seventeen-year-old Lisa Ervin at this event and had kept the whole weekend in complete perspective. When the men's event was over, he announced, "We're now going to have a judges' meeting--in the bar." Scotvold gave Boitano lessons during the summer a long time ago and was a great friend and former coach of Hamilton's. Scotvold helped both of them along their way. Petrenko was another matter. Scotvold had no allegiance to him. The Cold War is alive and well in figure skating. There are two different schools in the sport: the American school stresses jumping. The Eastern European school emphasizes ballet. U.S. skaters and coaches roll their eyes at their European counterparts, but that style goes over well with the European judges who dominate Olympic and world judging. In skating, the Iron Curtain lives a glorious afterlife. Big skating decisions, like Baiul's five judges to four Olympic victory over Kerrigan, still break down exactly along old East-West lines. Scotvold had seen Wylie skate the performance of his life and lose to Petrenko at the 1992 Albertville Olympics. Two years later, he watched Kerrigan skate the performance of her life and lose to Baiul. The score was Team Zmievskaia 2, Team Scotvold 0. Evy Scotvold said he spent no time worrying about it, but he was not the kind of guy to take too kindly to a man on skates winking at him. Scotvold gave Petrenko the lowest marks he received from any of the judges: 5.5 and 5.4. Boitano won the event easily, with Hamilton second, Mitchell third, and Petrenko fourth. Hamilton gamely tried to make it close by attempting a triple lutz, the second hardest of the triple jumps, in his second number. He pushed off the ice with a vengeance, believing that the wind swirling around the rink would hold him back. It didn't. He overrotated and went crashing to the ice. Not that it mattered. This wasn't exactly cutthroat competition; professional skating rarely got that serious. The Olympic or world championship medal was what a skater lived and died for. Professional events were fluff and everyone who was in them knew it. The skaters' pride was on the line, but, at the end of the day, no matter how they did, they still had their Olympic medals. It was rather anticlimactic: there were no make-or-break moments remaining in their careers. As a boy, Hamilton had a mysterious intestinal malabsorption condition. It caused him to stop growing for a few years. Doctors didn't know what was wrong and eventually prescribed special diets and exercises, including skating. The condition eventually vanished, and Hamilton grew up to become the stud of the sport. Now that was an oxymoron; a five-foot-three-and-a-half-inch figure-skating hunk, the sport's macho man. Hamilton's friends and colleagues at CBS joked that over the years, with his penchant for associating with beautiful women, Hamilton had tried--single-handedly--to alter the sissy image of the male side of figure skating. It wasn't just his girlfriends. There was the wardrobe, too. When he was competing in the 1984 Olympics, he eschewed sequins and wore plain, one-piece jumpsuits. He was trying to be as nondescript as a skater could be. The last thing Hamilton wanted to do was sparkle. But no figure skater could completely extricate himself from the trappings of this peculiar, delightful sport. "Are you wearing makeup?" Boitano asked Hamilton behind the curtain separating the rink from backstage. "Do I look like I have makeup on?" Hamilton replied. "No, but you should. You've got to wear makeup, but you never would, so you always look like a corpse." Hamilton laughed. "Nah, nah, it's not for me." "You should wear it, just Pan-Cake though, nothing else," Boitano said. Jamie Isley, a female choreographer who came to Sun Valley to assist Mark Mitchell, chimed in, "I took Scott to buy his first makeup, at a mall in Florida, remember, Scott?" Chagrined, Hamilton shrugged. "Oh, yeah. But I'm au naturel now." Not entirely. Hamilton uses brown eye shadow religiously--to hide the bald spot on the top of his head. The next day, Hamilton was in the CBS booth, wearing a tuxedo and talking into a microphone. On the ice were other skaters, a handful of women and girls who had received the coveted invitation to come to Sun Valley. Michelle Kwan, Nicole Bobek, Tonia Kwiatkowski, Kyoko Ina, and Lisa Ervin knew it meant that they were in America's goldmedal pipeline, which would carry the chosen few to the Winter Olympic Games in 1998 in Nagano, Japan. It has been said that an Olympic gold medal in women's figure skating can be worth $10 million to the skater who wins it, especially if that woman is an American. For organizers to think that these five women were good enough to someday be that skater, to be invited to the coming-out party on the most famous outdoor rink in the world--that was really something. None of them would have missed it. But there were drawbacks. It was too early in the Olympic cycle for anyone to know who they were. While the men's event was sold-out, organizers had to give away tickets to the competition between the five unknown women. Then again, no one would have come to see Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding in 1990, either. For the women's competition, the judges were real judges. There were no meetings in the bar. Backflips were disallowed. So were sunglasses. In a deal worked out by Burg and the U.S. Figure Skating Association, the governing body for the sport, Burg would give the organization Baiul for one of its pro-am events in the 1994-95 skating season if the USFSA sanctioned Burg's women's amateur event. Burg needed the sanctioning or he could not have held the amateur women's event. The USFSA needed the competition as well to begin to publicize its future stars. The organization was battling the professional events for sponsors and fan support. Everyone wanted TV time. In figure skating, there are two different competitive divisions. There is the so-called amateur, or Olympic-style competition, known officially in figure skating as the "eligible" style. This is the division of Kwan, Bobek, and the other young women and men. It is the career maker or breaker. It's the kind of skating that leads fathers to drive Zamboni machines at 6 A.M. to clear the ice for their sons' end daughters' practices; that breaks up families and takes children out of school; that consumes the lives of an entire family for a decade. Although the families of eligible skaters always complain about money, those at the top of the eligible heap can now earn more than $100,000 a year from competitions and shows. That's why the term amateur is dated for the country's top skaters. Olympic division is the accurate term. The so-called professional, or exhibition-style, competition is for those who already have an Olympic medal tucked away in a safe-deposit box, like Boitano, Hamilton, and Petrenko. Skaters in this category are called, in figure-skating jargon, ineligible, meaning they are not able to compete in the Olympic-style or "eligible" events, such as the annual U.S. national championships and world championships, or the quadrennial Olympic Games. This is the victory tour of skating, with judging by celebrities, ax-skaters, and coaches, occasional world-class performances, and phenomenal TV ratings. Some of these skaters are millionaires. The proper title for their skating is professional division. Because professionals never had many competitive opportunities, they used to fade into oblivion in ice shows, leaving the spotlight to the new, up-and-coming stars. Now, they were sticking around--and there was a huge market for them. This development did not make the USFSA happy. It was too early in the season to make any judgments about the next crop of American women skaters. An Olympic-division figure skater's season isn't a calendar of competitions; it's a series of practices with a couple big events thrown in. A skater's season lurches like a car with gear trouble--it lulls, it jerks, it stops, it starts up again. There's not a game a night; there's not even an event a month. It's basically practice interrupted by the national championships. A qualifying event or invitational trip can also break the monotony. There were two teenagers to watch in Sun Valley: tiny fourteen-year-old Michelle Kwan and streetwise seventeen-year-old Nicole Bobek, who were second and third at the 1994 Nationals behind Harding, who won and later was stripped of her title for hindering the prosecution in the Kerrigan attack. Tonia Kwiatkowski, Kyoko Ina, and Lisa Ervin filled out the roster. Ina, nearly twenty-two, had been to the 1994 Olympics as a pairs skater; Kwiatkowski, a twenty-three-year-old college graduate, and Ervin made the world championship team in 1993, but had not done much since then. With Kerrigan gone, someone would rise to the top and win her first title at the national championships in Providence, Rhode Island, in February. Kwan was the early favorite. But she was growing, and height and weight on a little girl can wreak havoc on her jumps. In less than two years, Kwan had grown seven inches and gained nineteen pounds to five feet two and ninety-six pounds. While most girls would be thrilled with that kind of natural progression, her coach, Frank Carroll, knew it could be a problem. He worried that an extra pound or two on her hips would throw off the triple jumps they had worked so hard to master at their mountain retreat east of Los Angeles. He was looking at her as a skater, not a young lady. He was paid handsomely--the top coaches in the country can make $150,000-$200,000 a year--to think that way. Michelle Kwan was a skater in a hurry. She zipped through the ranks from novice to junior to senior (the top category) much faster than most. With the elimination of the compulsory school figures in 1991, it was easy to rush. A decade ago, a little jumping bean would have been stopped in her tracks by the school figures, the painstaking tracings of variations of figure eights that required patience and maturity and gave the sport its name. Future stars were mired in juniors for several years, stalled by those confounded compulsories. Now, there was nothing holding the little girls back--except for the judges. They still were looking for grace and style, however that was defined. Often, the older girls and women were the most poised and artistic. That played a big role in determining a winner. The subjectivity of judging, then, could place a heavy hand on a tiny girl's progress. Kwan, however, was rising quicker than even her coach knew. There are skating tests that are required to move up from one level to the next. Carroll wasn't aware that Kwan was going to take the test to move up to seniors when he went out of town one weekend in May 1992. Carroll was shocked, but knew there was no going back. "Okay," he told Kwan, "we're going to have to work our butts off because you are going to make a dismal showing unless you develop some maturity and presence and discipline." Danny Kwan, Michelle's father, was not unhappy with this turn of events. His aggressive attitude toward the sport had pushed Michelle and her older sister, Karen, also a strong national skater. One day, leaving their rink in Torrance, California, he got so angry with his daughters' performances that he flung their skates into the parking lot. "The way you skate, don't skate!" he yelled. Karen ran over and picked up the skates. Michelle just stared at him. Another time, Danny Kwan overheard Michelle talking in her sleep. "This is nothing," she was repeating over and over. "This is nothing." Kwan recognized the words. They were what he and Carroll were saying to calm Michelle about her senior debut at the 1993 Nationals. "I got a tear in my eye," her father said. Danny Kwan said he began to calm down about skating, but Michelle did not become a recreational skater. She and her sister moved to Lake Arrowhead, a two-hour drive from Los Angeles into the mountains, to train. The first year, her father drove "up the hill," as they call it, every night to sleep in his daughters' tiny cabin. For the 1994-95 year, their mother, Estella, moved into the cabin to live with both girls. They took Michelle out of school--she was an eighth-grader--and hired a tutor. The family also signed an agent--Mary Lou Retton's representative, Shep Goldberg-which sent the purists reeling. Thirteen years old and already signed up. The Kwans said they did it to keep reporters away during the Tonya-Nancy saga, when their daughter was besieged for interviews as the Olympic alternate. But a media packet on Michelle was readily available in the fall of 1994. For all the upheaval in their lives, the Kwans were seen in skating circles as a model of how to raise a daughter in the sport. The USFSA sent out-of-control parents to talk to the Kwans. And little Michelle was a joy to be around. She was respected and treated as an equal; Hamilton walked by her at the side of the rink in Sun Valley and yelled out, "Michelle, don't still be skating when you're thirty-six, okay?" With her immense talent, her quiet, polite demeanor, and a close-knit family willing to do anything for her, there was no telling how far she could go. If Kwan was America's most balanced little skater, Bobek was its greatest wild card. The daughter of a single mother, Bobek traveled the country with her mother and her mother's female companion in search of figure-skating nirvana. Every coach who ever taught her--eight in all, three in 1994 alone--knew she could be something if she ever decided to work at it. She loved making up her own dazzling skating moves to music. But Bobek often loafed at practice, rarely saw the inside of a school, liked to smoke, and had been known to sneak out of her hotel room on a skating trip. Most of the greats had coached her, including Carroll, the legendary Carlo Fassi, Colorado Springs' Kathy Casey, and Scotvold. A strict disciplinarian, Scotvold had tried to tame her for a few weeks earlier in the summer at his rink on Cape Cod. He quickly washed his hands of her--and her mother and her mother's friend, whom everyone called her "aunt." "Every little horny dude on Cape Cod was there within four days," Scotvold said. "But she was funny and sweet. We got along really well. We kept the mother and the aunt away. She just doesn't have any discipline." The Bobek gang left Scotvold when Nicole wanted to go to the Goodwill Games to make a few thousand dollars, while he strongly suggested she stay home and practice. She landed in the suburbs north of Detroit, at the rink of Richard Callaghan, known throughout the sport as a coach who closely monitored the lives--and training habits--of his skaters. Slowly, Callaghan said, he started to see progress. Bobek was carrying a few extra pounds on her hips when he brought her to Sun Valley to see where she ranked with Kwan. While Kwan looked polished and sharp, Bobek was erratic and immediately announced to CBS reporter Tracy Wilson that she was competing with a fractured hip. Word of the interview got back to Callaghan. "A fractured hip?" Callaghan said. "She had a bad fall on Wednesday, but nothing is broken." After the event, Wilson pulled Bobek aside for another interview. This time, Callaghan was in eavesdropping position. But Wilson then said she didn't need Bobek after all, and let her go. "That was one of my best interviews," Bobek said with a naughty laugh and a twinkle in her eye. "I didn't say anything to get myself in trouble." The summer of 1994, Scotvold had coached both Bobek and Ervin. They looked alike, two teenage blondes with a world of skating talent. But they couldn't have been more different. Their peers had labeled Bobek the "evil twin"; Ervin, the "good twin." They were not friends. Bobek and Ervin both represented the United States at the 1993 world junior championships in Seoul, South Korea. At the time, Bobek was being coached by coach number six, Kathy Casey. Casey couldn't make the trip, so she sent a colleague, Lorraine Borman, who had coached Rosalynn Sumners to the Olympic silver medal in 1984. Keeping Bobek in the room they were sharing and away from impromptu parties became Borman's greatest challenge. One night, Borman recalled, Bobek pretended she was sleeping, then got up, went into the bathroom, and flushed the toilet. She then dashed across the room and tried to open the door and escape before the flushing stopped. "Nicole!" Borman said. "I know what you're doing. Get back in bed." A few minutes later, Bobek slipped out of bed again and began putting on her clothes. Borman flicked on the light. Bobek explained that she had gotten cold. "No matter what you think, you are not leaving this room," Borman said. Borman then got out of bed, sat down on the floor, propped herself against the door, and looked at Bobek. "If I have to, I will sleep here all night," she told Bobek. A half hour later, with Bobek finally asleep, Borman crawled back into bed. While Bobek was attracting the usual attention, Ervin had become an innocent tourist. One day, she went hunting for bargains with other skaters in Itaewon, the bustling shopping district in Seoul. She was interested in a leather jacket. The shopkeeper told her it was $100. Fine, Ervin said, and began to get out her wallet. Her friends tried to stop her. You were supposed to negotiate a price in Itaewon. "Ah, Lisa," they said, "you don't have that much money." "Oh, yes, I do," Ervin said earnestly, forking over the $100. The night before they left for home, Ervin was sitting in a room with most of the other members of the American team. She ordered one chocolate sundae from room service, then another. "You guys have to promise not to tell Carol," she ordered. Carol was Carol Heiss Jenkins, the 1960 Olympic gold medalist and Ervin's coach at the time. Ervin, who had had a spectacular rise to the top of her sport in the 1990s, was about to fall completely out of the picture. Difficulty with weight--and a desperate attempt to drop pounds by starving herself--would prove to be her undoing. That same night, according to several coaches, Bobek was hanging out with a group of Estonian skaters. Soon, their minibar was empty and they had no money to pay the bill. The front desk called American team officials. "A blond American girl was the culprit," the manager told them. They knew it wasn't Ervin, so they went to find Bobek. She wasn't in her room. Borman had given up control of Bobek to her mother. And her mother had lost her. The U.S. team was rousted and told to try to find Bobek. No one knew where she was. They called Casey in Colorado. Exasperated, Casey said she would pay the minibar bill. Just find Bobek. Within an hour, Bobek wandered back into the hotel. Where she had been, no one knew. With Bobek, no one ever really knew. In Sun Valley, the blond twins had latched onto new coaches. Scotvold was asked by CBS's Wilson as they ate lunch if Ervin was now his main skater. "Oh, no," Scotvold said quickly. "We've still got Nancy and Paul." It was soon apparent why Scotvold had been so reluctant to claim Ervin as his own. Her performance was dismal. She fell on the only triple jump she tried and could not even complete a double axel. This was a girl who in 1993 finished second in the nation to Nancy Kerrigan with four triple jumps. In less than two years, her weight had fluctuated from 110 pounds up to 130, down to 105, back up to 130. She was throwing away her lunch in trash cans at the rink in an effort to keep off the pounds that would ruin her jumps. Some days, she didn't eat a thing. The next day, she would eat everything in sight. Scotvold, who said he did not know exactly what Ervin was doing, was weighing her a couple times a week in hopes that she would get back to 110. The pressure on Ervin to reach that weight was immense. Ervin's father, Bill, was with her in Sun Valley. He worked for Du Pont in Buffalo; his wife and only child lived in a two-bedroom town house on Cape Cod, near the Scotvolds' rink. He visited once a month. When Lisa was seven years old, Bill and his wife, Jeanne, sent her to Cleveland to live with another family and train with Heiss. Now Heiss was watching from afar as Ervin skated worse than she had when she was ten. They had had their disagreements but had parted as friends. These kinds of things happened all the time in skating. The Sun Valley event was over by early afternoon. To no one's surprise, Kwan had won it easily. Bobek had been a sloppy second. That also surprised no one. Kwiatkowski and Ina had come next. Ervin was last. When Scotvold found out there was a way to catch a flight that would get them out of Idaho that evening and to Boston the next morning on a red-eye, he asked the Ervins if they were willing to try for it. "You bet. We'd love to get out of here," Bill Ervin said. Since it really didn't matter who won in figure skating in October, every one of the five women could smile broadly when a photographer arranged them side by side on the ice and asked them to hold still as the sun--still high over the mountains--sparkled off their spangles and sequins. They would leave each other there, perhaps to meet again at the 1995 Nationals in Providence, Rhode Island, in February. Over the next four months, one of them would nearly live up to the lofty expectations the skating world had for her. Another would continue undeterred along a journeywoman's career path, hoping that there still was a place for a college-educated adult in women's skating. A third would divide her time between singles and pairs skating and find more success in the latter. A fourth would be arrested. And the last girl squinting into the sun would not compete again. Copyright © 1997 Christine Brennan. All rights reserved.
