My Sergei-A Love Story

The programs tended to be very difficult when she first made them, and then she’d have to take things out to make them skateable. For instance, she might ask us to clap twice during a crossover, turn our heads, then do a difficult jump. Impossible. Sergei would say to her, Marina, will you show us? Can you do this first, Marina? Or, Marina, it’s not possible to close your eyes before you jump.
       
We finished sixth in our first Junior World Championships, which were held in Sapporo, Japan, in December of 1983, three months after we had started skating with Shevalovskaya. The next year, when the Junior World Championships were held at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, we won them. Sergei was seventeen years old and I was thirteen.
       
It was our first visit to the United States, and to us it was like a little fairy tale. It was Christmas and there was a lot of snow, and Christmas trees decorated with beautiful ornaments. I took two of these ornaments home for souvenirs, a gold one and a navy blue one; I stole them right off the tree. There were candles all around, and Santa Clauses. And when the snow stopped falling, it was suddenly sunny, just like in a dream, all the snowflakes sparkling like crystal. The Broadmoor had a little pond with ducks in it, and Sergei and I would walk out and feed the ducks. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was. Then the weather got warm, and I was amazed that in winter you could walk outside without your jacket.
       
Everyone had warned us that the skating would be difficult because of the altitude, and one of the skaters before us came off the ice coughing blood. But it didn’t turn out to be a problem for us, and we skated clean, which our coaches had told us was the most important thing. Don’t try too hard, they warned. We weren’t expected to win, and after we did I remember going to a toy store to celebrate. There was a little monkey on sale for six dollars that I loved, and since, for me, it was a lot of money, I made a trade with the shopkeeper for a [I]matroishka[I/] I had brought with me, one of those stacking wooden dolls that are made in Russia. Then I asked Sergei to trade another [I]matroishka[/I] for a turtleneck sweater. It was very difficult at that time to buy children’s clothes in Moscow, so I was always careful to bring home the same number of gifts for my sister that I bought for myself. I bought us both a pair of pants and a shirt, plus warm boots for Maria and a long blue winter coat for me. The coat cost sixty dollars, which was a fortune. But it was something I could never have found at home. For my friends I always brought back souvenir soaps, shampoos, and lotions from the hotel to give out as little gifts.
       
After the competition there was a banquet, and what I remember best was Sergei staying around the girl ice dancers, all of whom wore beautiful dresses. He didn’t pay much attention to me off the ice. We were not very close friends yet and I was very young, both in years and in experience. For example, on the plane ride home, I sat with Vladimir Petrenko, who was Viktor’s younger brother and my age exactly. We ate ice cream, and this was unbelievable to us, beyond the realm of possibility, how they could keep ice cream frozen for so many hours on the plane.

Sergei turned eighteen on February 4, and, for the first time, I gave him a gift. It was a key chain that my father had brought back from Spain. It had a little gun on it that could shoot caps, and although this was a small gift, I was so shy that I worried about it endlessly. But Sergei liked it and kept it with him, which made me happy.
       
That spring we competed in a Friendship Cup at a beautiful mountain resort in Bulgaria. After the competition our team went outside together, and we were playing in the snow, having fun, throwing snowballs. Sergei loved that kind of horseplay. It was then that, for the first time, I remember becoming aware that I found him attractive, and that it was nice to be with him.
       
I never told anyone these feelings. To my great regret, I never had any close girlfriends to confide in, maybe if I had been spending more time at home, I’d have talked about my feelings with my mom. But we were so often at training camps or competitions that I spent more time with Sergei than I did with my family. Among the other skaters in our club, Anna Kondrashova was the girl I spent the most time with, but she was seven years older than me. To Anna, I was a child. Most of my life was like this. I was seldom around kids my own age.
       
I had to try to figure out all these mysterious feelings on my own, which I was not equipped to do. I knew that I felt sad sometimes, but I always thought I was sad because I was homesick. Not because I was lonely. I was so disciplined about training when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen that I never went to a friend’s house just to talk and gossip and do stupid teenage things. That’s the age that girls discuss boyfriends and crushed and feelings. It’s a void in my life I’ll never be able to fill.
       
And that’s one of the reasons I was so attracted to Sergei. He always had friends around him. He could go wherever he wanted and do whatever he wanted to do. His life seemed very different from mine.

[B][center]The Miserable, Pitiless Zhuk[/center][/B]

In May 1985 I turned fourteen. Sergei was too shy to come to my birthday party, but he called me on the phone to ask if we could meet. We settled on a spot near the subway, a short distance from my house. I was obviously excited. As I mentioned, Sergei seldom spent time with me off the ice. When he arrived at the meeting place, he had with him a huge toy dog, white and light brown in color. It was quite expensive. Looking back now, remembering how seldom Sergei ever surprised me with gifts, I’m amazed he had the courage to buy me this wonderful present. Afterward, this dog was always in my bed.
       
Marina Zueva had created a difficult short program for us for the 1985-86 season, which was done to music by Scott Joplin and involved lots of footwork and pantomime with our faces. Sergei had a nice, understated way of acting, using very natural expressions that never distracted from our skating. Marina used to have me watch Sergei and try to do what he did. They thought alike. She was closer to Sergei than to me, because he was older, and also because he shared her interest in reading. In her eyes, I was always the little girl, too small for some of their philosophical conversations.

Marina also made a difficult long program for us to a medley of music by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. The music was much more sophisticated than what other pairs were skating to, and we liked it very much. But the choreography was hard. In an early competition that year, Skate Canada, I fell as we did our side-by-side triple salchow, a challenging jump that Shevalovskaya had added to our elements.
       
The head coach of the army club at that time was Stanislav Alexeyvich Zhuk, who by any definition was a miserable, pitiless man. After my mistake, Zhuk told Marina that I had fallen sown because it was a bad program. He would create a new program for us, one that was plain and simple, and showcased only elements, not choreography. He also said that he was coaching us from now on, not Nadezheda Shevalovskaya. Thus began the longest year of skating that Sergei and I ever endured.
       
Zhuk, too, had been a pairs skater, finishing second three times in the European Championships from 1958 to 1960. He was in his mid-fifties, short, with a big stomach and a round face. His most arresting feature was his eyes, which were small and dark and looked very deep into you. They were very scary, peering at you from beneath his hairy eyebrows. All of Zhuk’s movements were fast. He also had very strong but not very nice hands. I didn’t like it when he showed us movements with his hands. And on the ice, when he demonstrated something to us with his feet, he couldn’t straighten his leg. It looked ridiculous.
       
Sergei used to laugh at Zhuk, but not to his face. We used to imitate the way he walked fast, taking very small steps. Sergei didn’t like him as a person. Zhuk drank every night, and he used to speak harshly, even filthily, to the boys. He liked to order them around as if they were soldiers, because they skated for the army club. “Shut up,” he would say, “I’m higher than you in rank.” Zhuk liked these army rules.
       
We used to skate in the morning from 9:00 to 10:45, then afterward we’d spend forty more minutes practicing lifts. Then I went to school, did my homework, and came back for the evening practice from 6:30 to 9:30.

Sergei had finished high school, and during the day he liked to take a nap. But Zhuk believed you should not sleep for more than forty-five minutes in the afternoon, or you would be too relaxed to train well that night. Our good friend Alexander Fadeev, the singles skater who also trained with Zhuk, used to sleep for three hours in the afternoon. So did Sergei. As a result Zhuk started telling people that Sergei was lazy and undisciplined. That he didn’t listen to the coach. That he missed practices. He told me that I should change partners because of Sergei’s habits.
       
I hated him when he said that. I always believed Sergei was the only one who could skate with me. I never, ever thought I’d change my partner. But Zhuk kept telling me bad things, and he had an expression he liked to use, accusing Sergei of “infringing on the regimen.”
       
It made Zhuk furious that Sergei didn’t take him seriously, that he just ignored him off the ice. Sergei used to say to Zhuk, “After practice, what I do is none of your business. If I want a beer, I’ll have one. If it’s Saturday and we don’t skate, I won’t get up at 7:00 A.M.
       
Zhuk could have told me anything, and I would have done it. I was, if nothing else, obedient. So I worried that Sergei wasn’t doing what he needed to be doing to become a champion. This was stupid of me, because in fact Sergei was lifting weights to make himself stronger and was skating beautifully. No matter what he did—tennis, soccer, running—Sergei was always very competitive with the other boys. He had his own code for living. Even though he never told anybody this code, he always lived by it. Sergei knew what was right and what wasn’t. I knew only what I was told.
       
Zhuk’s goal seemed to be to keep us as busy as possible, and to keep us around him as much as possible. Maybe because he was very lonely. Maybe because it was the only way he could keep himself from drinking. Zhuk wanted to control our lives. He used to tell us, “If I don’t coach you, you’ll never be on the World or Olympic team.” He tried to make us completely dependent on him, to make us think he was the only one who could look after our health and teach us how to eat and sleep.
       
He had us keep journals: how many jumps we attempted, how many we landed, how many throws, how many spins; how we felt before practice, how we felt afterward. Every night we were supposed to update these things. Sergei wouldn’t do it. He’d take my journal and copy it. But of course I kept mine scrupulously. I was so good about it. We had to bring our journals to practice every day so Zhuk could see that we were doing them properly. And every month we’d have to add everything up—how many hours altogether on the ice, how many jumps, how many landings, how many misses. Very, very scary.

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-8-2 20:26:17编辑过]

In the summers Zhuk had two places he liked to take us for off-ice conditioning. One was to a resort on the Black Sea, with a very mild climate, sort of like South Carolina or Virginia. We’d go there in mid-May and early June. We’d meet at 7:00 A.M. every morning, and Zhuk would tell us what lay ahead for the day. Then we’d run from 7:15 till 8:45, always on a normal road, never a special track, and never a special distance. Zhuk would just say run over there and run back. Do it twice, or whatever. Sometimes we’d run along the beach, on the rocks and shells and sand, which was uncomfortable but probably good for strengthening our ankles.
       
At 9:00 A.M. we’d have breakfast, then we’d do exercises that were good for the arms. We’d go to a special place near the sea that had big, round rocks, and we’d take these rocks and throw them forward, backward, and to the side. It was supposed to make our jumps better. The rocks weighed about five pounds, and we’d throw them back and forth fifty, sixty, seventy times. Zhuk was always very specific about how many repetitions. And of course I always did them exactly as he ordered. Then maybe we did some pushups and situps.
       
The worst was running the stairs. Zhuk always took us to places that had stairs. The longest was 225 steps; another had 175 steps. Sometimes he made us not run, but jump up the stairs, first with one leg and then with the other. Always with a stopwatch, and always we’d have to record what we’d done in the journals. Then at night, at our evening meeting, he could say “Today you were better” or “Today you were worse; we’ll have to do something with you.”
       
Zhuk also thought that undersea diving was important for skating. Snorkeling. He said it helped you control your breathing. You learned to take a deep breath and to hold it. But in skating, you don’t have to control your breathing. Only Zhuk, this madman, thought you did. I remember once in the middle of May he told everyone we were going spearfishing with him. It was his favorite hobby. Naturally I was the only skater to show up, and I was so angry at the others for not telling me they weren’t going to come. Just me and Zhuk. It wasn’t summer yet, and the sea was cold as ice. I was freezing. He told me to put some clothes on over my swimsuit, so I would be warmer. So I did. The flippers were too big because they didn’t have a small enough size for my feet, so I added a couple of pairs of socks. I put on a sweater, warm pants, and even a warm hat. I hate the sea anyway, and since I don’t swim well, it was so scary. Then Zhuk went into the water with his speargun and made me follow behind him.

In July, when the weather got hot and humid, Zhuk used to take us to Isikool, a health resort in the mountains. I preferred this place to the Black Sea, even though the altitude made the training on the stairs very difficult and painful. There was a beautiful, deep lake at Isikool about which there were lots of legends, and in the afternoons we used to go on long hikes through the woods. We played soccer and tennis, and sometimes Sergei and I would play mixed doubles together. Although he was always very competitive when he played with other boys, he was never competitive with me. I, however, used to get upset when I made a mistake, and Sergei would laugh and shake his head and ask me what I was getting upset about. We were supposed to be playing to have fun.
       
The best time for Zhuk was when we were training on the ice at Navagorsk, a center for elite athletes that was thirty minutes from Moscow. Navagorsk was in the country, surrounded by forests. It had more than one hotel, each with its own cafeteria, plus soccer fields, a movie theater, a swimming pool, a gym, a physical therapy center, and of course an ice rink. It wasn’t just used by skaters. Athletes in soccer, volleyball, and basketball also trained there. We used to go to Navagorsk fifteen days before every important competition: Nationals, Europeans, and Worlds.
       
For Zhuk it was ideal, because every night, instead of going home to our parents, we were in the hotel, and he could call a meeting. He always found some business to do: either listening to music or going over the journals or talking about what we were going to do the next day.
       
I was homesick all the time. I often cried myself to sleep at night. I shared a room with Anna Kondrashova, and Zhuk would tease us about eating dinner at the cafeteria. Anna always had a problem keeping her weight down, so we stopped going to dinner because afterward Zhuk would tell such stories about how much we ate and how much we’d weigh if we kept eating dinners like that. Just the girls he’d tease. So instead we’d skip dinner and would walk fifteen minutes to town to buy fruits, vegetables, and candy. Lots of candy. As I’m writing this, I can hardly believe what I’m saying. What were we thinking? How did we listen to him?
       
One time I saw Zhuk hit Anna. I was in the bathroom, and Zhuk came and started talking loudly to her. I decided I’d better stay where I was, but then they started fighting, and when I came out, he was hitting her on the back. I ran out to get Sergei, but by the time we came back Zhuk was gone. Anna was crying. That was nothing new. She cried almost every day.
       
Zhuk used to come to her and say, “I saw you last night go into Fadeev’s room. What were you doing in there?” Even if she had done this, it was none of his business, of course. But he would torment her with his spying, and I was so young that Anna never confided in me what was behind it. I understand now that he was trying to get Anna to sleep with him. He had done this with many girls over the years. Not me, fortunately, because I was so young. He had enough power that if a girl refused him, he could arrange it so she couldn’t skate anymore. This was a man without a heart.
       
Maybe being around this man is what made me, not a strong person, in the way my mother is strong—but a tough person. Tough enough to handle anything. Tough, not in a good way, but in a way that allows you to handle the bad things that life throws at you. Tough but hard. Too hard sometimes.

The 1986 Nationals were held in Leningrad, and it was the first time Sergei and I had competed at the senior level. We skated well, but to be honest I didn’t even worry about missing and element, because we were so perfectly trained. In my opinion we were overtrained, with nothing else in our heads. We did side-by-side double axels, triple salchow throw, double axel throw, triple twist. We finished second to the defending world champions, Elena Valova and Oleg Vassiliev. But Zhuk told us we had skated better than them. “That’s okay,” he said. “You’ll be first at the Europeans.”
       
The Europeans were held in Copenhagen that year. Before we went, Zhuk made me go see an acupuncturist, who puts needles in special places to make your pain go away. I don’t know where he found her, but her real magic was discovering the weakest point in your body. She called it a hole. She found such a hole in me, right beneath my left shoulder blade. I had not known this place was a problem until this woman told me it was, and pushed into this place until it hurt. She claimed she could see through my whole body through this weak point. It was my most vulnerable spot. The funny thing was, it wasn’t like I had a problem this lady was fixing. What kind of a problem do you have when you’re fourteen years old? The only problem I had was I didn’t have enough time to play with my dolls. That was the problem. But this lady could see a weak spot on my back, and she could touch it, and sure enough, because I had trained so much, it was a little bit painful. This was a very bad hole. She gave me a special metallic disc to put over the hole, which she said would protect me. She attached it with a piece of tape. Now I was prepared for the competition.
       
Then guess what? I lost it when I took a shower. And I thought, Oh no. That’s bad. I’ll fall down. I’ll miss all my elements because of the exposed weak hole beneath my left shoulder blade. We were already in Copenhagen for the European Championships, and I was distraught. Then right before the competition I found the metallic disc on the hotel room floor. So I put it back on, and all was saved.
       
Zhuk told Sergei and Fadeev to come to see this lady, too, but they just laughed at him. He couldn’t force them. Sergei never took any of it seriously. He was only serious with Zhuk during practice. And of course he was right. It wasn’t that he ever caused a problem for Zhuk, or raised his voice, or told him off. He just knew that off the ice, his private life was his own. He would do everything Zhuk said on the ice, but that was it. He was not obedient like me, who would do everything anyone said.

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-8-2 20:01:08编辑过]

Zhuk did, however, help me with my confidence. No one had expected us to be at the European Championships in 1986. they didn’t even have our names listed in the program, which Zhuk took pains to point out to us. He told me, ‘You will skate clean.” But I already knew that. And I was absolutely certain about Sergei. I never, ever worried about him. Even in practice I couldn’t miss anything, because whenever we missed something during our practices, Zhuk made us do it over again. It was like my father with the homework. Only instead of doing it once, we’d have to do it three times. I learned the double axel this way. Zhuk would tell me to do five double axels in a row. And if I did four in a row and missed the fifth, I had to start over. Always Zhuk had us practice a specific number of jumps.
       
We didn’t feel any pressure at the European Championships in Copenhagen, where we again finished second to Valova and Vassiliev. But we skated our programs without a mistake. After the free program Elena Valova was crying so hard, because she knew we skated better than she and Vassiliev, even though they won. She was having a lot of problems with her leg and wasn’t healthy enough to skate her best.
       
The trip to Copenhagen seemed more like a holiday to me than a competition. The queen of Denmark came to the Sunday exhibition and gave us huge boxes of Danish chocolate. We went shopping, and I remember buying some red boots that I later wore to the World Championships in Geneva. Every day we got twenty dollars in living money, and I used it to buy jeans that actually fit me, which were impossible to find in Moscow.
       
I could see clearly that life was nicer in every way in the West than it was at home. The streets were cleaner, the food was better, the service was quicker and more friendly. It was totally different from what we were used to—it was a nicer life but a more expensive life. I always brought gum and nice fruits home with me. During the winter it was impossible to get oranges and apples in Moscow. I also bought souvenir T-shirts for Maria and pins for my grandfather.

As soon as we returned home, we had to start preparing for the Worlds. There was no chance to recharge. You’re so weak after a competition from the travel and the emotional letdown that your body is susceptible to illness, and I came down with the flu. Then Sergei and I had to keep doing our programs in practice, the same ones we’d skated so well at the Nationals and the Europeans. Again and again and again, always under Zhuk’s critical eye.
       
So when we arrived in Geneva for the 1986 World Championships—our first—it wasn’t with the carefree spirit we’d had before the Europeans. It was like going to work. I was more tired and nervous than I’d ever been before, and the whole competition I could think of only one thing: I wanted to go home and be with my mom. I missed her so much.
       
Before the free program Zhuk told Sergei to take me for a walk, and we went to Lake Geneva to feed the swans. Sergei asked me if I was nervous. I said I was. And he said, “Yeah, me too.” But he didn’t look nervous. He always looked so calm, and to see him always made me feel calm, too. We didn’t talk much, and we didn’t touch each other. We still had an age barrier between us.
       
We skated cleanly again, and when Valova and Vassiliev made some mistakes, for the first time all year we beat them. In our first try, we had won the World Championships. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even like the program that Zhuk had created for us. There was no theme, no choreography. The movements didn’t mean anything to me. The music was not classical, not jazzy—it was almost like restaurant music, except there were funny, childish noises near the end of it, almost like a passing train. What Zhuk had us doing with our hands had nothing to do with what we were doing with the rest of our bodies. We just proceeded from element to element without feeling, intent only on not making mistakes.

I was, strange as it sounds, disappointed. It was our first trip to the World Championships, and we won. As we stood on the winner’s stand, I remember thinking, Why are they giving me this medal? These are the World Championships, the ones you only watch on TV. I never dreamed of being an Olympic or World Champion. And suddenly I was one, but somehow it didn’t feel right.
       
I went back to the hotel, sat down on my bed, and cried. It was too easy. It gave me no satisfaction. I cried and cried. Anna Kondrashova looked at me and said, “What are you, crazy? You were great.” But I wasn’t happy about it.
       
Sergei went to the fountain in Lake Geneva the next day and wrote his name on it. He only told me about it years later, saying in his teasing way, “Oh, you didn’t go with me? Too bad.”
       
That spring we performed with the other medalists on a twenty-city tour sponsored by the International Skating Union (ISU), through Switzerland, France, and Germany. We traveled by bus, and despite the fact that it was our first such tour, looking out the window was the only fun thing about it, thanks to Zhuk. I passed the time doing needlepoint. It was very boring, and the skating was difficult. Zhuk made us do either our short or long program every night, because we had no exhibition numbers—the fun, often frivolous programs that skaters prepare in case they’re asked to perform in a show. They’re never as difficult as competition programs. But Zhuk made us do all our throws and jumps. The buildings where we skated, in places like Davos, were cold, and we never had a chance to properly warm up.
       
Zhuk roomed with Sergei, and he would follow Sergei around, spying on him, never letting him go anywhere by himself. Zhuk gave trouble to all the Soviet skaters, refusing to let us go to the discos with the others. He told us that if we did, we’d never be Olympic champions. The worst thing was, I was so disciplined that even if someone had asked me to come along, I wouldn’t have gone.
       
Brian Boitano, who was also on this tour, later told me that he and Alexander Fadeev, whom everyone called Sasha, went for a walk one day, and Sergei came along. Brian asked Sasha, who spoke English, to ask Sergei what he loved about skating. Sergei said that he didn’t love skating. He skated because he had to.
       
That feeling in him eventually changed. But at the time I suppose it was true. It was so depressing to have to listen to Zhuk every day. He put pressure on us the whole season: from Nationals to Europeans to Worlds to the tour. It’s why I don’t like the memory of our first World Championships.

[center][B]Little Attentions[/B][/center]

Sometime during the summer of 1986, Sergei, Alexander Fadeev, Anna Kondrashova, and Marina Zueva prepared a letter to send to Central Red Army Club officials asking that Zhuk be removed as head coach. He had become intolerable, drinking for days on end, missing practices, and becoming increasingly abusive to the boys. He wasn’t fit to be coaching anyone, old or young. They asked me to sign it too, which I did.
       
My father was angry. He said to me, “This wasn’t your idea. Why can’t you think for yourself? Make up your own mind rather than allow yourself to be influenced by the others.” He was right about one thing. I am a Gemini. I tend to look at something one way one day, then the opposite way the next. I am too influenced by the opinions of others. But not in the matter of Zhuk. I despised this man every day. My father, however, thought that Zhuk was a great coach, figure skating’s equivalent to the legendary father of Russian hockey, Anatoly Tarasov. If he had a problem with drinking, he believed it could be solved.
       
Sergei, however, had made his decision. He talked to my father several times that summer, just a few words, but he told him he had to change coaches. Under no conditions was he going to train with Zhuk anymore. I remember overhearing them on the street one day, talking very seriously, and Sergei telling my father, “She’s going to skate with me, and I’m going to decide what coach we’ll have.” Sergei never told me, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you,” but I always felt it was so.
       
My father’s attitude started to change after we finished second in the Skate Canada competition because we weren’t well prepared. Also, Zhuk had driven me to tears in August when I wanted to go to our dacha one weekend to pick mushrooms with my grandfather. We had no training time scheduled. Zhuk said, “Fine, Katia, but first come over and we’ll listen to some music for a new program. It will only take a couple of hours and then you can go.” So I went, and it took all day, and we didn’t have time to go to the dacha. He upset me so much, and when I saw my father I couldn’t hold in my tears. Which was when my father finally said, That’s enough.

It was an awkward situation for the entire Central Red Army Club, since Zhuk carried the rank of a colonel. Armies the world over like to protect their own. The generals who oversaw CSKA finally decided that Zhuk could keep his title as head coach, but that Stanislav Viktorovich Leonovich would coach us, and travel with us, and otherwise be completely in charge.
       
Leonovich had won a silver medal in pairs at the 1982 Europeans with his partner, Marina Pestova. For one year we had trained on the same ice together at CSKA, and I had always called him Stas. Now that he was our coach, I began calling him by his first two names—Stanislav Viktorovich—which is more formal and respectful. He was a nice man, a kind man, with an interesting face. He had a cute nose, almost like a duck’s nose, and it made me want to smile just to look at him. Although Sergei and I were so happy to be rid of Zhuk, my father worried that Leonovich wasn’t tough enough to be our coach. He didn’t think he had enough experience.
       
But under Leonovich, everything changed, and skating became enjoyable again. The first thing he did was to bring back Marina as our choreographer, and she resurrected the Duke Ellington number that she’d made for us in 1985, the one that Zhuk had not let us skate because it was too difficult. It became our free program that year.
       
This number had more dancing, more footwork, more choreography, and more fun than anything we’d skated to before. Marina, Leonovich, Sergei, and I used to be the envy of all the other skaters because we had such a good rapport on the ice, always laughing and enjoying ourselves. When Sergei missed a practice, as he still sometimes did, Leonovich never raised his voice. Instead of getting angry, he would say, “Do you understand that because of your absence, Marina, Katerina, and I weren’t able to work yesterday?” Leonovich always called me Katerina—he was the only one to do so—because he thought it would make me feel older. He’d say, “There is more than just you, Sergei, who’s involved.” And Sergei understood this reasoning, and he stopped missing the practices. Rather, he stopped missing them alone, because as we grew older, he sometimes taught me to skip a practice with him so we might go fishing or waterskiing together on the Volga River. He never forgot there was more to life than the ice.
       
We won the Nationals for the first time that season, then went to the 1987 European Championships in Sarajevo. That summer we had learned a very difficult move called the quadruple split twist, in which Sergei threw me in the air, I did a split, then closed my legs and made four turns before he caught me. We were the only pair to do this quadruple element, and it was very exhausting—more exhausting than difficult, really. Soviet doctors had measured my pulse rate as exceeding two hundred beats per minute when I did it. I had to spin so fast that one time my elbow caught Sergei in the eyebrow, and within a few seconds his eye had swelled closed, and the next day it was a grisly black and blue.

Sergei turned twenty on the day we skated the long program at the Europeans, which we would long remember because of an unfortunate occurrence. In the first minute we had successfully done the quadruple split twist, which even Scott Hamilton, who was doing television commentary, incorrectly identified as a triple. So did most of the judges, which is one of the reasons we dropped this element from our program before the Calgary Olympics: it expended so much energy but didn’t appreciably improve our marks. Then somehow the elastic strap at the bottom of Sergei’s pants broke.
       
This strap was flapping around Sergei’s ankle. It wasn’t a danger, because it had snapped back up and was not dragging on the ice. But the referee, Ben Wright, an American, started blowing his whistle because he was worried that Sergei would trip.
       
We heard the whistle, but we didn’t know that it meant for us to stop. And with the triple salchow throw coming up, I was much more concerned about that. When I landed it perfectly, all the most difficult elements were behind us, and we naturally wanted to continue. Zhuk had always said to keep skating no matter what is happening around you, and only listen to your coach.
       
Then Ben Wright had the technicians turn off our music. It was eerie, to be skating in a full arena to complete silence. We looked over to Leonovich, but he made no sign for us to stop. “Skating?” I asked Sergei. “Yes, we’re skating,” he said quickly. So without our music playing, we continued our program, which was very tiring because of the concentration required. We had never, ever practiced our program this way. But we were skating well, no mistakes, and the audience began clapping for us long before we had finished. Afterward we were exhausted and very confused.
       
The judges were instructed not to write down our marks. The Russian judge told Leonovich that we could skate the program over again after two more pairs had skated, giving us a short time to rest. But neither Sergei nor I wanted to so this. We didn’t think we could skate any better than we just had, and we didn’t understand that if we didn’t skate again, we’d be disqualified. So when, after two more pairs, Leonovich asked if we were ready, we told him no. we were all done. He should have pushed us more, but Leonovich was never pushy. Sergei just didn’t want to skate it again, and neither did I. we were disqualified from the Europeans.

This was a sign of Leonovich’s inexperience. First, he should have told us to stop skating when the whistle blew. Then, he should have insisted that we try again, no matter how tired we were, knowing that the judges would surely mark the defending World Champions leniently after such an unfortunate incident. But it was a mistake the three of us shared responsibility for, and it made us angry as we prepared for the 1987 World Championships in Cincinnati.
       
Ben Wright was at the Worlds, too, and he apologized to us for what had happened. We said that we, too, were sorry and did not hold him to blame. In Cincinnati we skated our free program, this time to music, as well as we were able. In fact, of all our competitions, the 1987 Worlds may have been the time when we skated our best. We successfully defended our title, and this time, when it was over, I had no impulse to cry.
       
Afterward, we went on our first American tour with promoter Tom Collins, a nice man who puts on a show every year that features exhibitions by the World and Olympic champions. He has an exclusive arrangement with the ISU, and the skaters—who in those years were all amateurs—love to be invited on his tour, which plays to packed arenas throughout North America. According to ISU rules, we were only allowed, I think, eight hundred Swiss francs a year in cash payments, but Tom always gave us extra money, maybe fifty to a hundred dollars a week. We weren’t supposed to talk about it. But it was enough for me to be able to buy a four-hundred-dollar TV for my parents before I went home. Sergei helped me pick it out at a store in New York that was owned by a Russian sailor. He also helped me choose a suitcase in which I could carry all the clothes that I bought for my sister and me, and all the gifts for my parents and grandparents. Russian skaters always had huge luggage problems on the flight home.

My English at the time was almost nonexistent. I had taken English in school but had missed many classes because of skating, and I didn’t even remember the alphabet. Sergei and I would go into a restaurant, open a menu, and have no idea what anything was. It made me self-conscious all the time.
       
My roommate on that tour was Tracy Wilson, the Canadian ice dancer, whose partner was Rob McCall. She was older than me, and I think Tom Collins wanted her to watch out for me. She ordered room service every morning and always asked if I wanted something too. If I said yes, she never let me pay for it, no matter how hard I tried.