My Sergei (11 page)

Mike Powell/Allsport

After skating our free program.

In my journal that night I wrote,

I’m in my room, and it’s very weird that everything’s already over. It all happened so quickly. We were so long preparing
for this, then it all happened in one second. Of course I’m very happy. I called my mom from the press center when she was
at work at Tass, and she was so surprised. Leonovich told me after the competition that, before the free program, he’d dreamed
that we won. He’d never dreamed about figure skating before. He didn’t know whether he should tell us about this dream before
we skated or not, and didn’t know if it was good or bad luck to have this dream. I really want to go home. I really miss my
mom. Already, it’s a little boring for me here.

It’s mind-boggling that I should have been bored after winning an Olympic gold medal. But understandable, too, since I’d been
left behind and had no one with whom I could share my success.

The next day Ryshkin, on behalf of the federation, congratulated us and gave us each $3,860 in cash. I couldn’t believe my
eyes, because we certainly didn’t expect to get any bonus for winning the competition. I was already being paid something
like 350 roubles a month salary, which was more than either of my parents were making. But this bonus was more money than
I’d ever seen.

The Olympics would continue for another ten days or so, but I can’t say that I enjoyed them. Lots of photographers, lots of
interviews, very little time with Sergei. I met Peggy Fleming during an ABC interview, and she gave me a red sweater with
a panda on the front.
Vogue
magazine wanted to take pictures of me, without Sergei, and they wanted me to wear my skating dress. I didn’t like the idea
of putting on my skating dress without my skates. Plus they’d made up a set that looked like a forest, and I felt very stupid
standing in a skating dress in the forest. I didn’t feel comfortable in this picture. I just wanted to be left alone.

What drives me crazy now, when I look back on Calgary, is that I don’t remember Sergei from our first Olympics at all. I can’t
even picture him there, probably because I was so wrapped up in the competition I didn’t even look at him. I don’t remember
if we took a walk together before skating our free program, which we usually did. Or, if we did, where we walked. Or what,
if anything, we talked about. I just don’t remember, and it makes me angry at myself.

After winning this gold medal, I thought I had to treat myself to something. So I had my hair permed for the first time. I
also had my ears pierced and bought some little diamond earrings. Of course I watched all the skating events, and Brian Boitano,
Brian Orser, and Viktor Petrenko were just great. And it was fun to watch the showdown between Debi Thomas and Katarina Witt.
Debi didn’t skate very well. I was sitting right where the “kiss and cry” area was, and her coach, Alex McGowan, was standing
there, too. I remember in the middle of her program, Debi turned to him and just said, “Sorry.”

Katarina Witt had already skated and had been very good. She was nervously walking around, trying to find a place to stand,
stopping here for a little while then running around and stopping there. Always moving, she watched Debi’s program. I felt
so bad for her because the television camera was right in her face the whole time, recording her reactions. That’s probably
why she kept moving around, to try to get away from it. I was sitting by myself in the crowd, eating popcorn, and every time
the camera panned the audience, it stopped on me. The next day everyone asked me, “How was the popcorn?” It’s like Oksana
Baiul now. When she goes to hockey games she doesn’t know where to sit because the camera always finds her.

The ladies’ competition was held the last night of the Olympics, and there I was, alone. I never went anywhere with anyone.
All the other athletes were so much older than me, and I must have been the most boring person. I went to one banquet by myself,
looking for my friends, but when I peeked in, it was a dark room, and there weren’t even chairs set up. Just tables with food,
and a refrigerator with drinks and beer. I must have been the first one there, and it looked very scary. So I went back to
the dorm.

Someone was standing outside with a bag of fur hats that they wanted to give to all the girls. Because I was the only one
they could find, they gave the hats to me. They asked me to pass them out. We were leaving the next day, so I started going
around the dorm looking for people, but everyone was out. I had all these hats, and I felt so alone.

For most people, the Olympics were a place to make new friends. Anna Kondrashova, for example, found her husband at the Calgary
Games. She fell in love with an athlete from Latvia who competed in Nordic combined. It’s why she wasn’t in our room very
often. Every night she would go out, go walking, so she might meet someone and have a good time. But she was twenty-three.

Sergei, too, made lots of friends at Calgary. But I was too shy. Besides, who would I go make friends with? Hockey players?
It’s unimaginable. Maybe if I were to have found someone sixteen years old like me, we could have found something fun to do.
But I was too timid to even go out of my room, for fear that people would ask me what I was doing or where I was going. I
wouldn’t have been able to answer them. I enjoyed the actual skating, and was proud of what we accomplished, but it was a
long and lonely time for me.

We flew home on a special plane that made four stops along the way and took twenty-one hours. We’d land, get out, go to duty
free, buy some more drinks, then load up again. The whole plane went crazy, absolutely crazy. I was probably the only person,
including the pilot, who didn’t drink anything during the trip. It was February 29, a leap year, and Raisa Smetaniana, the
medal-winning cross-country skier, had her birthday on that day, so everyone celebrated the whole way home. We were totally
exhausted when we arrived back in Moscow, and a lot of people met us at the airport, bringing us flowers and making speeches.

When I showed my Olympic gold medal to my father, he did the same as he did with all my medals. He put it in a huge glass
goblet and filled it with champagne. Then he’d pass this goblet around for everyone to drink from. That’s why all the ribbons
from my medals are stained.

My father was very proud of me. Once Sergei and I started winning championships, he eased off his criticisms, though he couldn’t
stop himself from saying something about our costumes every time. “Maybe you shouldn’t use this color,” he would comment.
I didn’t take him so seriously anymore. I had my coaches, my choreographer, and my Sergei who would tell me whether something
looked good or not. But because my father was an artistic person, he felt he had to say something. He’ll always have his opinion,
and I’ve now learned to accept this.

T
o celebrate the gold medal, my parents took us to visit
Yegor Guba, a friend who raised minks for furriers. He lived on the Volga River, two and a half hours north of Moscow by
car, and many Russian figure skaters knew him. He was friendly and generous with his time, and in the summer he would take
us swimming and water skiing in the bay of the river. If we wanted to catch fish, he would set out traps for them to swim
into—pike and carp, very silvery and shiny, sometimes perch. It wasn’t sportfishing. It was like going to the supermarket,
because Yegor knew where all the fish lived.

We spent four or five days at Yegor’s, snowmobiling, taking saunas, resting, and talking and eating. Sergei came, too, and
I at last felt we had celebrated our gold medal together. Then we had to return to Moscow and begin training again for the
World Championships, which were held that year in Budapest. It was weird. My feeling was that we had done something so special,
and now I was drained emotionally, and I couldn’t believe we had to go back on the ice again.

The Olympic year is a very trying period, and most athletes have problems afterward, sometimes for as long as a year or two.
It just knocks you off track. I came down with the flu as soon as I got to Budapest, and they were giving me pills and feeding
me warm milk. When the time came to skate at the Worlds, I fell on the triple salchow throw during the free program. I couldn’t
hold the landing. Elena Valova and Oleg Vassiliev took advantage of the mistake and skated very, very well to win for the
third time, which was nice for them because it was the last time they were competing before retiring from amateur competition.
Elena was so happy, crying and smiling at the same time. She was a very strong-willed person, always having to tape her leg
before she skated, always competing in pain. Even though I was upset at my mistake, I could appreciate their joy.

The other thing I remember about that competition was the final girls’ practice before the free program. Debi Thomas and Katarina
Witt were skating to the same music,
Carmen,
and Katarina, coming off her Olympic triumph, was in unbelievable shape. She felt so relaxed in practice that she brought
a camera onto the ice with her and had somebody take her picture in her bodysuit. Then she did something that shocked me.

When Debi started to play her music, Katarina began skating to it. She was doing the movements from her program to Debi’s
music, and everyone watched only Katarina. The judges, the other skaters, the coaches. Debi didn’t know what to do. Katarina
had this air about her that said, I’m in the mood to skate right now, and I don’t care what anyone thinks. She was doing her
triple loop, even though she didn’t have it in her program. Of course it’s not right to act this way, and I felt sorry for
Debi. But this, after all, is sport, and Katarina has a champion’s mentality. She knows how to win, and in my opinion, she
won the gold medal right there at that practice.

In order to ease the disappointment of losing the World Championships for the first time in three years, I decided to buy
myself something nice to wear for the banquet. I don’t know what got into me, but I bought a miniskirt, one with a flared
hem that was very much in style, and a blouse to match.

I was very, very shy about wearing this outfit to the banquet. But I did it, and I was proud of myself. Sergei saw me and
just said “Wow.” That helped. I began to understand that in order to get attention, I had to wear something nice, maybe even
something a little sexy. Andrei Bukin hung around me all the time at the banquet, and so did Christopher Bowman. Lots of boys
did, in fact. Sergei didn’t say anything, but it was clear to me that he didn’t appreciate it when other boys gave me attention,
just as I didn’t appreciate it when other girls were around him. If he would go to another girl to talk or to dance—and
it was obvious he was popular with the girls—I would also go to another boy.

After the World Championships we went on a twenty-five-city European tour sponsored by the ISU. The European tours were much
crazier than the American tours. Anything goes, at least it seemed that way to me. The shows never started on time; the timetables
were much more relaxed; and there was never a lot of discipline enforced. After the shows we always had very long dinners,
which were often followed by parties, or trips to nightclubs.

I was still much younger than everyone else, and when Sergei went out at night with the older skaters—Marina Klimova and
Sergei Ponomarenko, Sasha Fadeev and Liz Manley, Viktor Petrenko—he didn’t bring me. They always would go to a bar, and
if I were along they’d have had problems getting in. It was upsetting, and made me jealous, but I also understood it. Sergei
would say, “Oh Katia, it’s okay. Tomorrow we’ll sit together on the bus.” And he would hug me. Sergei and I grew closer on
this tour. He hugged me more often, and would even let me sleep with my head on his shoulder on the bus. That was the best
thing for me.

We began to realize that we needed each other off the ice as well as on the ice. Although I still felt insecure about being
younger, I saw that I could be interesting to Sergei in the same ways his friends were interesting to him. That we could have
conversations about things. That I would take care of him, and he would take care of me.

But it became increasingly painful to be left behind so often. In Europe there were always so many interesting things to see.
And whereas before it wouldn’t touch me if Sergei would forget to invite me to go for a walk in Paris to see, for example,
the Eiffel Tower, or to a park in London, now it began to hurt. “You could have at least asked me,” I would tell him. “Maybe
I’d like to go, too.”

And he’d reply, “Oh, I didn’t know. I didn’t think of it.”

He never took me for walks, just the two of us. So I began going for walks by myself. I was sharing a room with the ice dancer
Natalia Bestemianova, and I spent a lot of time with her and her partner, Andrei Bukin, both of whom were married, and with
Valova and Vassiliev, who were married to each other. But it felt a little weird. Sergei, meanwhile, was going out with the
other skaters who were single. I remember one time on this tour when Sergei was dancing with a German ice dancer. I have a
picture of them. It was upsetting, but I never said anything to him about it. He wasn’t my boyfriend or someone I could feel
I owned. That whole Olympic year was not the happiest one for me.

After the European tour, we had a chance to go on the Tom Collins tour of America. All the other skaters went, but I was so
tired of traveling and so homesick that I said no. I told Sergei that I missed my mother and didn’t think I’d be able to handle
two consecutive tours. It meant, of course, giving up a lot of money, for us and for our coaches. Leonovich talked to me.
Tatiana Tarasova talked to me. But I didn’t change my mind. Now, looking back, I see that it was probably very stupid. But
I can also appreciate it as the first time I had really made a big decision by myself. I hadn’t talked to either my mom or
dad about it, and certainly Sergei wasn’t happy about my decision. But he just told me I had to decide for myself. He didn’t
try to change my mind.