The Second Mark
折腾了许久，总算找到了FineReader得serial number和acitivation code， 所以现在能开始真正的扫描文字部分了。先把第一部分贴上来。
Prologue
Salt Lake Ice Center
February 11, 2002
8:34 P.M.
Yelena BEREZHNAYA places one white skate on the ice, bears down on the narrow blade, and surges forward. Before her the freshly made ice stretches out for two hundred feet. The ice is white, very white, bright as snow under a strong sun, but surprisingly there is no glare. From high at the top of the arena, light filters down in a way that warms the long white expanse and suffuses it with a soft glow. Berezhnaya pushes away from the barrier for the six-minute warm-up, and for a few strange seconds she sees no one ahead of her or beside her and experiences the peculiar sensation of skating alone at the Olympics. Then the other skaters come into view. Here are the Chinese pair and the Canadian couple, and here is her partner, Anton Sikharulidze. With two gliding steps she merges seamlessly into the fast-moving queue of skaters circling the perimeter of the rink.
From high up in the stands, the brightly costumed skaters circling below look like a school of tropical fish. The arena itself resembles a giant fishbowl. A four-foot barrier encloses the rink. Normally, the first row of spectators would sit just a few feet behind the rink barrier. But in this rink there is a solid wall rising thirty feet above the ice on three sides. This retaining wall has been painted in soothing marine blues and greens, and for the skater down on the ice the sensation is one of being inside a deep bowl whose sides rise up well above your head.
Somewhere in the vast space above you, seventeen thousand people are murmuring, fidgeting. Their sounds of anticipation drift down in one large overhead mass of nervous energy. Up in the stands, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder among the Chevrolet dealers and Coca-Cola executives, are more than twenty of the sport's former champions. They are here primarily because the skaters now on the ice represent the greatest collection of talent ever assembled on a single night in pair skating. The Chinese, the Canadians, and the Russians are generally considered to be three of the six best pairs in the sport's hundred-year history, and that is why, for the past three years, experts have been predicting that this Olympic final will be the greatest pairs competition ever. Every past champion, every great coach wanted to be in the building for this one.
For the moment, however, the world's best pair skaters are pretty much skating forwards and backwards. Within the sport this activity is known as "basic stroking." It is the purest form of skating, and it is the only part of Yelena Berezhnaya's extensive repertoire that she shares with the aristocratic skating enthusiasts who first contested the World Championship on a frozen pond in St. Petersburg in 1896. The simplest movements of skating can be the most difficult to perfect, and few ever achieve absolute mastery over the pure glide. Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze are better at basic stroking than anyone in the world and as good as anyone, ever. Their technique is so singularly exquisite that a few of the former champions up in the stands tonight are looking forward to the first minute of Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze's warm-up more than any other part of the competition. These same past champions will tell you that while they achieved great things in their careers, their one lingering regret is that they could never move over the ice in the way that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze are moving now.
Berezhnaya comes flying around a corner, generating a sharp gust of wind. She is wearing a striking short dress of dark pink. Berezhnaya is wearing less clothing to compete in the Olympics than most people sleep in, but she's used to it. Her skirt is lightweight, specially designed to flutter in the breeze created by her speed, thus reminding the judges how fast she is. Berezhnaya's face shows no emotion. She is shy, and no matter what dramatic motions she may make with her body, h A few feet to Moskvina's left, the Chinese coach, Yao Bin, watches his skaters speed down the ice side by side, a few feet apart. Their motions are perfectly synchronized. As they approach the end of the rink, the two skaters turn, dig a sharp toe pick deep into the ice, and launch themselves into the air. For a second they are flying, a blur of spinning arms and legs. Then they plummet to earth, each landing on the right foot at precisely the same instant. A roar of approval comes from somewhere above their heads.
Yao claps briefly, without noticing that he is doing it. He is completely focused on his strategy. He believes that if his team can land the first throw quadruple jump in history, the judges will be compelled to place them first. Yao has an absolutely ferocious competitive streak that he is constantly honing, like a man who draws a knife back and forth, back and forth through a sharpener. Asked to describe her coach, Shen Xue says only one thing: "Mr. Yao likes to win. He really, really likes to win." Yao believes that Shen and her partner, Zhao Hongbo, can win this title outright, and he does not care that most people feel that he should be happy just to be here coaching a gold medal contender when less than twenty years ago, Chinese pair skating was an international joke.
Yao's path crossed Moskvina's at the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo. Moskvina was there as coach of the eventual gold medalists. Yao and his partner, the first pair skaters ever to represent China, were there to compete. Yao's pair finished dead last, and there was a great yawning gap between them and the team that finished next to last. They were the skating equivalent of the outclassed swimmer who goes through his last two laps alone after the rest of the field has finished. In Sarajevo, the Chinese mainly distinguished themselves by committing amateurish mistakes that had never before been seen in Olympic skating. One Chinese skater competed while wearing a wristwatch. At one of the practices, when a Chinese skater leapt into a flying camel spin, loose coins came flying out of his pockets, astonishing everyone in the rink. The other skaters had to interrupt their Olympic practice to help him pick up his change.
Pair skating was virtually unknown in China in the seventies, when Yao Bin was growing up in the frigid northern city of Harbin, close to the Siberian border. In winter, temperatures often dipped to thirty or forty below zero, and with a little ingenuity the people of Harbin developed a system of flooding the soccer fields in winter to form makeshift skating ponds. In Yao's youth skating in China meant skating outdoors on dull blades in subzero temperatures, and Yao must have really liked to skate. At that time, Chinese Central Television, the main government network, did not broadcast skating, so Yao and a few of his fellow enthusiasts once took the train to the northern border, where they pulled in the Soviet television signal and watched the World Championships. After years of extreme isolation, Sarajevo was a watershed event in Yao's life. For the first time he glimpsed the beauty and magnificence that were possible in his sport. After Sarajevo Yao understood that a difficult movement could be done with infinite ease, so that it floated on the emotion of the music. While he was there he committed thousands of small details to memory. To this day Yao recalls the things he saw in Sarajevo in perfect detail, and with obvious delight: "The unison of the Russians. And the Americans had the high lateral twist lift—amazing! Amazing! And quadruple throw—they did throw quadruple Salchow on practice!"
It is a mark of how far Yao has brought Chinese pair skating that tonight, eighteen years later, his own team is the only team in the world that will even attempt the throw quadruple Salchow. This fearsome jump, the one that impressed him so forcefully in the Olympic practice sessions in 1984, has yet to be landed in competition, and most skaters will not go near it. The risk factor is too high, and the danger too distracting Zhao Hongbo brushes past David Pelletier, and for a moment they look like two forties movie stars passing on a Hollywood back lot. Zhao is wearing a tasseled black prince's costume pulled from the racks of the Metropolitan Opera. Pelletier is wearing a dark gray sweater vest over a lighter gray oxford shirt, and what appears to be a pair of Dockers. To the vast number of people seeing Pelletier for the first time tonight, he will come across as some kind of preppie, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Pelletier, a hockey fanatic, only got into pair skating because he thought it looked like fun to throw girls across the ice. Growing up in rural Quebec, the three Pelletier boys were a rough-and-tumble lot. His two brothers are now in the Canadian army, and if things had gone another way, David Pelletier might well have followed suit. Instead he is circling the Olympic oval dressed as the preppie hero of the American movie Love Story, while one of his brothers, who is stationed in Bosnia, watches via a live satellite hookup.
Pelletier glides over to his partner, a girl with a shiny brown ponytail named Jamie Sale, and takes her hand. Something about the gesture suggests a relationship, and it is true that they have their own love story off the ice. They have a charisma that you cannot teach, and when they perform, the spark between them reaches the people in the last row. Their choreographer, Lori Nichol, decided to use this obvious romantic current in her choreography for the Love Story program, and the consensus is that she has done so to tremendous effect. Since its debut in the fall of 1999, Love Story has received rave reviews. Part of its appeal is its simplicity. As you watch it, it's very easy to see that it is about two college kids flirting, having a snowball fight, falling in love, and suffering a tragedy thereafter. In a common conceit of figure skating routines, Jamie Sale's character (the one played by Ali MacGraw in the movie) develops terminal cancer while executing a throw triple loop, a spiral sequence, and a spinning lift that covers the length of the ice. It is a testament to Nichol's unerring sense of the form in which she works that somehow this does not come off as laughable. The program is far more moving than it has any right to be. It evokes genuine emotion, in the way that a really good Broadway show can be both sentimental and affecting at the same time.
The program is so effective, in fact, that recently Nichol and her pupils decided to scrap their planned Olympic year program and bring back the old Love Story. Many inside the Canadians' camp warned that the judges might frown on revisiting a two-year-old program. Their marks could suffer. Nichol also worries about this. So in Salt Lake City she has been setting the word out that such objections are not codified in the rulebook and should play no part in the judging. "Should The Nutcracker have only one Christmas?" Nichol asks, as a reporter scribbles away.
Sale and Pelletier are now performing a section of their choreography, performing from the tips of their fingers to the precise expression in their eyes. The music is so ingrained in them that they hear it even when it is not playing, and the effect is a strange one for the people in the stands, to whom the couple appears to be skating to music that the crowd cannot hear. The Canadians are too deep in their own world to notice their coach, Ian Ullmark, as they pass him. Ullmark marvels at their appearance: They look absolutely perfectly trained. No one would ever guess that ten days ago, Sale was lying in bed with the flu, and Pelletier was so freaked out by the pressure that he flat-out refused to come to the Olympics. Now, as they rehearse their routine, it takes a coach's trained eye to zero in on the telltale signs: Sale is even thinner than usual; Pelletier, still nervous, is just the slightest bit up on the toes of his blades. That's what Ullmark sees; everyone else in the arena is under the spell of that incredible charisma. More than anyone else in pair skating now, The warm-up is more than half over, and yet Yelena Berezhnaya remains alone, in the center of the ice. She does not seek her partner. Up in the stands, many a spectator wonders why the Russians won't practice together. Is something wrong? Or do they know something the others don't? Berezhnaya is untroubled by any such questions. With an air of absolute calm and control, she remains at center ice while the others circle around her, reeling off tricks.
Berezhnaya merely performs a series of fast turns on one foot. For a few seconds, she turns and turns and turns on the ice, on one foot, like a ballerina spinning en pointe atop a music box. Then she flings her arms out to stop the motion and balances on that one foot. She stands perfectly upright over the single blade. Her body looks much like a child's spinning top, with her slim leg forming the long wire axis, her torso hugging the axis like the body of the top, and her head resembling the round ball at its crown. The top spins slowly, then fast, then slows to a dead stop. She practices this movement again and again. You will never see her perform these simple turns in any competition, ever. But to the knowing eye, this exercise marks her as a former student of the old Moscow pair skating school. For the rest of her life, the stamp of the Soviet system is on her, as it is on all the great skaters in her country's long, golden history. For back when she was just another little girl dreaming about going to the Olympics, Berezhnaya watched her idol, Yekaterina Gordeyeva, performing these turns in the warm-up on television—just before Gordeyeva won the Olympic gold medal with her partner.
This technique of turning on one foot is an old Russian exercise, a time-honored method of adjusting to the ice, of feeling your spinal column become precisely centered over your skates. Being centered over the narrow blade is crucial for every risky move. When a gymnast performs a Dack flip on the balance beam, the crowd gasps as she lands precariously on the four-inch surface. When Berezhnaya drops down to earth from a jump, she is landing on a blade that is only a quarter of an inch wide— one-sixteenth of the width of a balance beam. Therefore Berezhnaya wants to warm up until she feels absolutely centered, as though her body has suddenly snapped into place over her skates. She has reached that ideal point now, and unbeknownst to her, she gets a nod of approval from someone now watching her. It is Yekaterina Gordeyeva, the champion whose extraordinary skating inspired Berezhnaya, a young girl from the provincial south, to take up pair skating.
Twenty yards away, Sikharulidze too is warming up simply. All around him, other men throw their partners, land difficult jumps, execute strenuous lifts. Sikharulidze, on the other hand, is doing a series of easy lumps that any third-grader could pull off. Like his partner, he is methodical, unhurried, in his own designated space. But unlike his partner, he looks tense. "It's strange, but you get a feeling," Gordeyeva says. "You know who is more shaky in the pair." Four years ago, at the last Olympics, Gordeyeva caused a stir by floating the opinion that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze, who at that point had been together for less than two years, were the finest team there. But Gordeyeva also predicted that the Olympic gold would hinge on Sikharulidze's nerves. While everyone else worried about Berezhnaya, who was thought to be fragile, Gordeyeva kept an eye on Sikharulidze. And she was right—it was Sikharulidze who made the mistakes that dropped them to second.
From her spot at the barrier, Moskvina looks out and meets Sikharulidze's eyes. Now, like a jockey applying the whip, she gives him a stern nod, as if to say, Well, go on, then! And Sikharulidze responds, building speed and launching into his first real jump. It is, thank God, a perfectly good triple toe. (Fifteen seconds later, at the other end of the rink, Berezhnaya performs her own triple toe, landing it with ease.) Watching Sikharulidze now, as he goes up crooked in the air and 暑假我也没什么事，我帮你翻译，不敢担保，翻译的好。 谢谢Prozuzu的分享，奖励积分一百点。
Prozuzu，抱歉啊！本来是想把你贴的第5部分加入精华的，不小心给删了，麻烦你再贴一次好吗？
实在对不起大家，检讨ing 请问各位，上面文章中提到02年奥运会时中国有3对选手可以参加，而姚冰只要从他的4对选手中选3对就可以了。那除了S/Z,P/T,Z/Z之外，还有一对选手是谁啊？ 应该是D/R吧。 可是丁杨和任重非不是姚滨教的，好像是姚滨以前舞伴栾波教的。 On his way, Sikharulidze passes the judges' table. Nine pairs of eyes go with him. He completes his movement, and now the judges' heads turn in different directions, separating their attention into nine smaller beams. A casual observer looking down the table would be arrested by the sight of Judge Number Four, a younger woman with striking red hair. She wears her hair long, and it curls extravagantly over the shoulders of her fur-collared coat.
Something about that enormous fur collar summons up an image of a rainy Paris street scene, and in fact, this is the French judge. She has the Frenchwoman's knack for dressing and for carrying herself in such a way that wherever she is, the moment seems to be an occasion. Whether she is standing in the mundane lobby of a drab Utah hotel or sitting at a folding table covered with white butcher's paper, an air of sophistication clings to Marie-Reine Le Gougne. In such unfavorable settings she seems to pull away a bit from her environment and become an island of sophistication, as she is right now, sitting at the judges' table in her fur-collared coat, adjusting her stylish eyeglass frames.
Marie-Reine Le Gougne feels the pressure. The tension created by the Olympic Games is already immense, but there is another source of pressure on either side of her. She does not turn to look at the Canadian judge sitting ten feet to her right. Ten feet to her left sits the Chinese judge, and just beyond him is the Russian judge. Tension radiates down the long table, forming a kind of force field between the nine people locked in its grip. For months now, in hotel dining rooms and chauffeured vans and hospitality suites, Le Gougne has heard whispers about who will vote with whom. One expects certain judges to stick together—Canada and America, for example, or Russia and Ukraine. The rumor mill has gone so far as to predict that tonight there will be a five-four split on the panel, and that it will come down to the vote of the French judge. Because the pairs event has no French medal contender, the French judge was perceived all along as a swing vote, someone to be lobbied—and Le Gougne has been lobbied. The pressure radiating down to her from both sides of the table is immense. She does not turn her head, but it is palpable.
But increasingly, a larger tension is mounting—a tension imposed by the noise behind the judges and above their heads, the disembodied voices of the crowd—a tension that increases every time they look at the skaters on the ice or at the Olympic rings displayed on the tall blue wall at one end of the rink. The arrival of a long-imagined Olympic moment is a surreal thing. The big-name athletes are actually here, now, all on the ice at the same time. There are so, so many cameras. One has the feeling of being watched at all times. The pressure is crushing, almost debilitating. At only forty, Le Gougne is one of the youngest judges ever selected for an Olympic post—and this is her second time judging the Olympics. Le Gougne is one of the rising stars of her generation of judges. Already, people in the narrow community that decides such matters are considering her for an important elected office within the International Skating Union. Most of the sport's opinion makers are sitting in the stands behind her now. How she votes tonight could influence her standing with the people who count. If her vote goes against the grain, she could go from front-runner to also-ran in one night. Four of the six minutes of the warm-up are gone. In two minutes it will begin.
The Russians now join the rest of the pairs. They seem to engage an internal lever and activate that sixth sense that all competitive skaters have, a kind of extra awareness that will allow them to stay in their own orbit without colliding with any of the other bodies in motion. Watching the skaters weave in and out, performing spectacular maneuvers only a few yards apart, one is reminded of an air traffic controller guiding dozens of planes safely through limited airspace. It is a remarkable sight. But to these sk
The Second Mark（英文原版）
不好意思，这段时间比较忙，好久都没有时间扫下面的章节，现在把第一章放上来。我以后尽量每星期更新一次。http://www.simonsays.com/assets/isbn/074324527X/C_074324527X.jpg
这一章主要是介绍Elena的成长历程，希望大家喜欢啦。
Chapter One
Each Time Yelena Bererzhnaya falls, she hits the ice with the same impact as a cyclist crashing at twenty miles an hour. Berezhnaya has a slight build and not much flesh on it, and the ice is hard as a sidewalk. So on any given day, her knees, hips, shoulders, and even her rib cage are various shades of blue and green. On days when Berezhnaya has a photo shoot, it can take up to an hour for the makeup artist to hide all the bruises on her legs. Still, falling especially on throw jumps—is just a part of the daily routine of a world-class pair skater. So Berezhnaya gets up quickly, gliding on one foot and shaking the other one until the pain subsides. Then she goes again.
Even for a world champion in pair skating—which Berezhnaya is, twice over—it's easy to fall on a throw jump. A throw jump is not one movement, but a sequence of precise actions and reactions between Berezhnaya and her partner. If any one of these motions is even slightly mistimed, the woman doesn't have a chance of landing the jump. Once her partner heaves her up and across the ice, she's traveling eighteen feet through the air, with her toes as high as three feet off the ground. She has to execute three turns in the air in less than a second—not to mention landing on one foot on a quarter-inch-wide blade and not sliding off that blade when, as they say in skating, ice is a very slippery thing.
Yelena Berezhnaya, who stands five foot one and weighs less than a hundred pounds, is no bigger than your average sixth-grade girl. Watching from the hockey bleachers of a practice rink as her small body crashes to the ice time after time, the typical response is to want to run out and stop her before she really hurts herself. But again, she and her partner come
around the bend of the rink, gathering tremendous speed. They sail by, generating a breeze that blows the hair of the coaches in the front row, and he launches her across the ice.
Too hard. She hurtles eighteen feet through the air and comes down precariously on one foot, balancing for a split second. Then her ankle buckles and she's down. That same bruised hip strikes the ice with a thud that echoes through the small rink.
This one knocks the wind out of her, and she sits there for a minute, crushed. Her partner, Anton Sikharulidze, a muscular six-footer, glides over to the spot where she sits and skids to a stop just behind her. With one quick motion, he places his hands under her arms and gently lifts her to her feet. The gesture recalls a mother setting down a toddler. For a couple of easy laps, they simply skate. But inevitably they start circling again. Once more they go by with that startling speed, and he throws her.
It happens in less than a second. She whirls three times in the air and drops down on one strong foot, arms outstretched like wings, the other leg rising high behind her back. At the instant that she lands, she glances across the distance she's just traveled to her partner, and for one brief second she gives him that smiling look that means, in the language of pair skaters, "Oh, you threw me just right!" Then she turns and takes one long stride, and he is already there beside her, his step matched exactly to hers.
To an observer watching from fifty feet away, the sight of Yelena Berezh-naya's slight frame taking some hard knocks is alarming. Seen from up close she is even more of a damsel in distress: wide blue eyes that are never quite happy, cute-as-a-button features that hold themselves aloof in a serious look. Some people say she never smiles; the truth is that she rarely smiles, at least in public, and that her natural expression is a solemn one.
So when Berezhnaya's coach, Tamara Moskvina, cast her as a Chaplin heroine in the team's long program one season, the casting was dead-on. She has that same winso And so when Berezhnaya played a Chaplin heroine on the ice, there was something very right about the whole thing—particularly the final pose, when she dropped to her knees and threw her arms around one of Sikharulidze's legs and looked out into the distance, waiting for better times. Just as it was resoundingly right when, one day in practice, Mosk-vina seized upon the idea of having Berezhnaya begin a program by actually stepping up onto her partner's skating boots. Berezhnaya balanced her blades lightly on his toes, wrapped her arms around him, and nestled her forehead in his neck. It was an inspired idea—her blades weightless on his feet, she seemed light as air. And later, when they took the ice before a crowd and Yelena Berezhnaya stepped up lightly, oh, lightly onto her partner's feet—well, anyone could see that here was someone truly delicate and floating: a wraith caught, momentarily, in an embrace.
Yelena Berezhnaya is a lovely girl. Her fine face is paired with a light, strong body, and audiences warm to her whether she smiles or not. Sometimes, when she passes through a backstage hallway, the middle-aged Russian women who invariably congregate there will murmur, "That girl is an angel, an absolute angel. ..." And when she is flying above her partner's head in a gauzy dress, there are moments when she really does seem to be floating.
Another element of the glorious feeling she inspires is her carriage. On the ice her bearing is purely aristocratic, as if she had gone to a finishing school where the girls practiced walking with stacks of books on their heads. Once, when asked what character she was portraying in a program, she replied in an offhand way, "Oh, you know, something like Natasha Rostova at her first ball." And she really did carry herself like a young countess out of Tolstoy. But this polish was acquired at a later stage of life, courtesy of Tamara Moskvina, for Berezhnaya was not raised in genteel surroundings. She may look like a cross between Natasha Rostova and an angel, but when she does smile, the angel shows her overbite.
Berezhnaya is a girl from the provinces. To get to her hometown from St. Petersburg, you must go to the railway station and take the overnight train to Moscow. Beyond Moscow, it is another thirty hours by the fast train to Berezhnaya's small city of Nevinnomyssk. It is an unimportant city in an unimpressive region known as the Northern Caucasus, the last bit of Russia before Georgia and Chechnya. The region is best known for producing wildflower varieties, mineral spas, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Eight months of the year Nevinnomyssk swelters under a blazing sun, and it is as different in climate as it is in culture from the big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. It is easy to see why, as a young girl, Berezhnaya assumed she would never leave Nevinnomyssk.
The Northern Caucasus is both remote and poor, and in Soviet times the entire region had just one ice rink, which happened to be in Nevinnomyssk. Today the rink is a parking garage; it closed down soon after what Russians call "the changes," the chaotic period in the early nineties when the Soviet Union stumbled, teetered, and finally fell. In addition to its now-defunct ice rink, Nevinnomyssk has two chemical plants, a wool factory, and a power plant. Berezhnaya's father works at the power plant, and for thirty years her mother worked as a payroll clerk at the state bureau of construction.
Berezhnaya and her two brothers grew up in a typical Soviet working-class home—one of those ubiquitous two-room apartments with the kitchen in the corridor. At night, Berezhnaya and her two brothers slept in one room, her parents in the other. In such cramped quarters every piece of furniture did double or triple duty: Couches also served as beds, and a single table was used for eating, sewing, doing homework, and everything else. Storage compartments were hidden everywhere, It was a common enough sight during dinner in a Soviet home to see a mother reach underneath the tabe cloth, pull out a drawer, and grab an extra spoo Growing up poor in the sunny south, much of life was spent in outdoor pastimes that cost nothing. Berezhnaya's mother liked to sit out in the courtyard of their five-story apartment block, chatting with the other mothers in the sun. "Well, you know," Berezhnaya says wryly, "there is always that one bench in front of the apartment building, and there my mother loved to go for the neighbors, the neighbors, and the endless conversations." The mothers sat in the courtyard and gossiped, and whenever a teenage girl came downstairs in a pair of ripped jeans, the older generation tittered on the bench. The children, too, passed the evenings in the courtyard, staging their own theatricals and trivia contests and talent shows, and it was here in the courtyard that Berezhnaya, who was ordinarily very shy, discovered that she loved to perform.
"Back then," Berezhnaya says, "everyone had some money worries. But 1 never felt as if 1 was limited, or lacking in something. For instance, if I saw something that 1 liked in a shop window, my mother would Immediately say, 'Oh, I'll make the same for you.' " Everyone's mother sewed, but Berezhnaya's mother was "a true master," who over the years proved her virtuosity by pulling off elaborate skating costumes and even a tiny fur coat. Berezhnaya remembers how one evening, sitting out on the court yard bench, her mother bet the neighbors that she could make Yelena a certain kind of blouse in one hour. "And indeed," Berezhnaya says triumphantly, "in one hour I came down to the courtyard wearing the new blouse, and looking very well."
In sleepy Nevinnomyssk, children were allowed to roam freely, and Berezhnaya remembers games of Cossacks and Bandits where the Cos sacks covered half the city looking for the hidden Bandits. The neighbor hood kids delighted in harmless pranks, like stealing green apples out of the collective gardens and eating the evidence. One spring night when Berezhnaya was nine, she participated in a thrilling plot to steal tulips from her neighbor's garden. "We crawled in, my boy buddies and I, in the pitch dark," she recalls. "It was ridiculous, since there were tulips growing everywhere like weeds. But still, we did it!"
Most of all, she loved to be with the other kids. She felt tremendous af fection for her classmates and tried to show it the best way a shy girl could. In the kindergarten there was one boy to whom she always gave her meat balls, and she used to make friends by bringing extra sandwiches from home. All week long she yearned for Saturday, the only day when she didn't have a skating practice, because then, "at last, we would all walk home from school together. And off we went, joking and talking, skipping over the puddles. It's quite a distance. If you walk very fast it would take half an hour. But sometimes we would stretch those walks to an hour and a half, just to prolong our pleasure." It was the life she would have chosen without a moment's hesitation, had it been up to her. But as things stood she could live it only on Saturdays. The rest of the time, she was skating.
If skipping through puddles and pinching green apples were high on Berezhnaya's list, figure skating was near the very bottom. She started skating by chance at the- age of four, and by the time she was six it was al ready a chore. "Going to practice was like reporting to work," she says tersely. "I did not like it. I did not like it al all. And it wasn't even that my mother wanted it," she continues, her voice using, "My mom never went very far into my skating life. No, it was the coaches who insisted that I continue skating. I was just doing what they wanted. Sometimes they would even come to my regular school and yank me out of class and take me to the rink for extra practice."
Deep in the girl's psychology, deeper than any native childish selfish ness, was a powerful inertia. Once a plan was set in motion, the little girl would endure anything rather than change the plan. Like every Soviet child, she wore her Young Pioneer jumper to school and sang odes to Lenin, and perhaps t So Berezhnaya packed up her things. "Truly, at that moment, I didn't want to go and live somewhere else," she insists. "It's just that people kept telling me, 'Well, you should just go and try it,' and so the decisions were made for me. I just followed along.
"I was on the train. I didn't understand why I was going to Moscow. What for ? Somehow, someone else decided for me. All I wanted was for them not to take me. You see, I always had bad eyesight. So I was thinking, Well, great. I'll just go and make them all happy, and because of my eyes, I won't be accepted to the pair skating school. And then it will all be over, and I'll go home.
"It was somehow too uncomfortable to change things, to say anything, and I was never thinking that I would remain in Moscow forever. But when they dropped me off in this hotel that was affiliated with the Red Army Club, not far from the bus station, I saw that some kids were really staying there—big boxers and wrestlers. They were staying in this hotel, and they were not going home. And that's when I realized: Oh, my God, where did I end up? What am I doing here?"
Today Yelena Berezhnaya is known the world over as the skater with the most exquisite vocabulary of essential skating skills. Her gliding, her positions, her lines are the ones coaches point to when they lecture about how it should be done. But when the thirteen-year-old Berezhnaya tried out in Moscow for the Red Army Club, the man assigned to her case, Vladimir Zakharov, thought she was a mess. Zakharov watched the tryout feeling glum. This girl was going to be a lot of work. "I could see that we would have to clean up her jump technique, but we could fix it. Her posture and stroking were, in a word, horrible." Zakharov pauses. "On the good side," he says, "she was small."
At some clubs a skater whose good side was being small would have been rejected straightaway, but the Red Army coaches ran their tryouts on the principle that talent was useless if a skater couldn't develop it. "Now, she had problems," Zakharov says, "but—she was a hard worker. So we were watching her closely, to see how well she listened. Does she work hard, and is there progress? Can she bring the talent out? And we saw that she worked incredibly hard. She was extremely desirous, concentrated." It was her desire that sold him. "You see, the great Stanislav Zhuk used to say, 'Here in this club, we want to be the champions. We want to take the medals. We're not interested in the rest,' " Zakharov explains. "And so from the beginning, it was this type of kid that we brought into our school." So Berezhnaya was accepted, and her heart sank. She was staying in Moscow; she was not going home.
In those years the Central Sports Club of the Red Army was the object of many a Soviet child's daydreams. Passing through its high wrought-iron gates, one caught a glimpse of the uniformed soldiers striding over the adjacent military grounds. The soldiers, like the athletes, trained here for the greater glory of Russia, and the grandeur of that mission was reflected in the compound's architecture. Arriving in a splendid courtyard, one stood between two ornate palaces: swimming on the left, gymnastics on the right. Between them, the two palaces were responsible for more than a hundred Olympic medals. Directly in front of them lay the stairs that led to the storied halls of the ice arena, where so many great figure skaters and hockey players had trained. In Berezhnaya's imagination, these steps were the ones ascended every morning by the young Gor-deyeva.
What Berezhnaya had never imagined was that Gordeyeva had been miserable here, training under the infamous Colonel Stanislav Zhuk. Zhuk had ruled the club for decades, and the school had been formed in his own image. He was a brilliant technical coach, and his pupils were technically brilliant; he was also, by all accounts, a yeller and an alcoholic of the first order. There was nothing more typical than to walk into the practice rink at ten in the morning and hear him absolutely screaming at some crestfallen g
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