Ice Ice Baby It ain’t hockey

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

By Jake Nichols

JH hosts figure skating sectionals.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming - I play hockey. I share with my brethren a disdain for the so-called sport of figure skating, yet I secretly love that movie The Cutting Edge, where the ex-hockey player is paired with a tempestuous prima donna and the unlikely duo stops bickering long enough to fall in love and go for gold at the Winter Olympics. But no one I know would be caught dead in one of those sissy outfits. If God intended man to skate, it was only so he could shoot and score and fight in the game of hockey.

Then I walked into the 2010 Pacific Coast Sectional Figure Skating Championships.
I saw Themi Leftheris first. He grunted as he hucked Angelyn Nguyen into the air like she was a sequined sack of flour. She spun three full turns and landed backwards on one foot with a thud that shook the building. If I were Leftheris, I would have thrown my back out. If I were Angelyn, I would have been screaming my head off, even before the landing would have shattered my ankle.

“If you listen close, you will hear the guy yell ‘out’ just before the lady hits the ice,” Morry Stillwell told me. “That’s to warn her the landing is coming because she can’t see where or when she is going to hit the ice. When she is spinning, everything is a blur. If he doesn’t do that, well, she’ll be drilling for oil.”

Stillwell has forgotten more about figure skating than most people know. He was competing in the late 1940s. He was the president of the U.S. Figure Skating Association when Tonya Harding had her goons whack rival ice princess Nancy Kerrigan in 1994. It was Stillwell who scored figure skating a lucrative $12 million contract from ABC to televise top events through 2007.

I told Morry I was a hockey player and, though I felt myself gaining new respect for these frilly competitors, they were a far cry from athletes in my book.

“These are athletes and don’t forget it,” Stillwell said. “Competitive figure skating is like running the four-minute mile, hurdling, and all the while trying to look like [Rudolf] Nureyev. And, oh yeah, gravity is your bitter enemy.”
Yeah, but…

“Look, you play hockey, right? You take 90-second shifts and you rest for four or five minutes. Imagine skating all out for four minutes with everyone in the arena, including eagle-eyed judges, watching your every move. There are no teammates to blame. There are no timeouts. It’s just you and a sheet of ice.”

I gulped hard. So there’s a little pressure.

“It is so hard out there. We don’t have pads or the support of teammates,” said Lisa Kriley, a figure skating coach for 18 years. She currently works out of Salt Lake and brought two promising skaters to the Sectionals in Jackson.

“I love hockey too and it definitely has its finesse and power, but I would say figure skating has it all: artistry, ballet, gymnastics; along with a toughness and courage to be judged while you are performing.”

What about pairs? You have a partner there.

“Pairs is the ultimate in skating,” Stillwell said. “Athletically, pairs is a real unbelievable challenge. I mean, she is being hoisted eight feet in the air under him, spinning at 15 miles per hour headed toward the wall. The girls are really courageous and tough.”

Right in front of a sign that read: “Practice Ice Today 3-4:40 p.m. No Death Spirals, please,” I asked Leftheris’s partner, Nguyen, if she was scared.

“You have to have a lot of trust,” she said. Nguyen had skated solo for years until Leftheris’ coach, Peter Oppegard, finally convinced her to become Leftheris’s partner back in May.

“I never thought I would like it,” she said.
But she took to it immediately. Oppegard saw something in the young Nguyen, but wasn’t convinced she had the balls to be a woman.

“It takes a great deal of courage. Your fate is not in your own hands,” he said. “At a tryout, you look for a girl who has a natural sense of where she is. I mean, you are being thrown through the air and you really have to know where the ice is and when you will arrive there.”

Just two weeks into practice with Leftheris, Nguyen left his arms and splatted on the ice awkwardly. Diagnosis: Broken wrist.

“Whose fault was that?”

“Depends on who you ask,” Leftheris answered. He looked sheepishly at Nguyen, who remained silent. For Leftheris, this is perhaps his final shot at the Olympics. At 26, he is considered a fossil by skating standards, but men last longer in pairs where they are so in demand they go through several women partners. For women, the life expectancy is short. Unless they are Asian, they soon grow too big to lift, throw and spin. They also tend to get busted up a lot.

Leftheris had a sniff of the big time when he partnered with U.S. standout Naomi Nari Nam in 2006-2007. Together, the pair snagged two bronze medals at national events, but a nagging hip injury forced Nam to retire and opened the door for Nguyen.

Still, Leftheris knows which side his bread is buttered on. “At the end of the day, it’s the girl who is the star, and the guy adapts to her.”

The couple’s stiffest competition for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team is the pair Don Baldwin and Tiffany Vise. Both have siblings who have excelled in skating. Baldwin’s older brother John is a two-time national champion and the only skater to throw and land his lady (Rena Inoue) for a triple axel at the 2006 Olympics. Vise was the first woman ever to be thrown for a quad, by her former partner Derek Trent, and land it.

For Baldwin and Vice to skate in Vancouver this February, they will likely have to knock out Baldwin’s big brother and Inoue, as the U.S. will send only two teams to the Winter games and the number one spot seems locked up by top contenders Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker.

“[Tiffany and Don are] talented enough to do it,” said their coach Jill Watson, who won a bronze medal at the 1988 Calgary games with Peter Oppegard as her partner. When I caught up with the pair they were getting an earful of Watson.

“Watch those triple-toes,” the coach barked.

“I was tight,” Baldwin said.

“I knew that when you went into it. I don’t want you watching the other skaters before you go on, anymore. Just do your warmup and stay loose.”
Vise prefers to spin clockwise; her partner, counter. That’s one of the things that took some getting used to once the duo began skating together last March.

“Don is an amazing jumper,” Vise said. “We do two triples in our long [program]. Nobody does that.”

Vise and Baldwin opted to perform only one triple in Jackson because of the smaller ice surface and sketchy ice.

“This is the first time in 37 years since sectionals were held at such a small rink,” Gary Merrell boasted. Jackson won the bid to host the prestigious event largely due to Merrell’s diligence and reputation. The face of Jackson Hole Figure Skating and father of local ice-skating phenom Lacey, Merrell worked tirelessly to land the event in Jackson and foot the entire bill for 41 visiting dignitaries and officials.

“We may be a small club, in a small town, with only one part-time ice sheet, but we make up for it with quality and dedication,” Merrell said.

Stillwell, who has been coming to Jackson for years for lesser events, agreed.

“Jackson Hole does a good job here with everything,” he said. “The host figure skating club is outstanding. This is a big deal for Jackson, Wyoming. You are going to see some pretty good skating here.”

Merrell, who coaches several students in Jackson and competed in the Senior Ladies division was impressed. “It was really special to see that level of competition at Snow King in Jackson Hole,” she said. “Once in a while you see that here in skiing and snowboarding – the real gifted athletes. It was inspiring for my kids. Maybe now they’ll believe me when I push them to train harder.”

Youngsters begin with lessons. If they show aptitude and passion for the sport, lessons become training, and things get serious.“

Training starts getting serious,” Kriley said. “It has to be intense while they’re young, before their body changes and they are still fearless. And it starts getting costly. There’s traveling, purchasing equipment, ice fees, coaching fees, medical bills, ballet lessons, gymnastics. But it’s all worth it for that special kid who could be one in a million.”

What are you looking for?

“The whole package,” Kriley said. “It’s very difficult to find. You need a self-driven, confident skater who is dedicated to getting better. Someone who can pay attention to detail; who likes the artistry part of it, yet they are very athletic. They have to be mentally tough; not be up and down with their emotion. That’s a lot to ask from your average teenager.”

Jackson figure skaters Anna DeLand, 17, and Mariah Bartlett, 16, both study with Lacey. Anna likes jumps, for Mariah it’s spins. Mariah hates footwork and Anna admits to still catching her toe pick now and then.

Maybe now they will listen better when Lacey drives them to be better. Watch your lines. Push, push. Head up, shoulders back, and smile.
Smile. Is smiling that important?

“Nope,” Stillwell flatly stated. “You don’t have time to see that as a judge. You are watching spins and lifts and jumps and everything else.”

I wouldn’t be smiling, either. Not if I had to be a figure skater. I would be too sore, too exhausted.

2010 Pacific Coast
Sectional Figure Skating Championships results
Senior Ladies
1 Beatrisa Liang, All Year FSC (Cali.)
2 Kristiene Gong, All Year FSC (Cali.)
3 Laney Diggs, All Year FSC (Cali.)
4 Amanda Dobbs, Peninsula SC

Senior Men
1 Douglass Razzano, Coyotes SC of Arizona
2 Keegan Messing, Alaska Assoc. of Figure Skaters
3 Andrew Gonzales, All Year FSC (Cali.)
4 Dennis Phan, All Year FSC (Cali.)

Senior Pairs
1 Tiffany Vise, Broadmoor SC
   Don Baldwin, Los Angeles FSC

2 Laura Lepzinski, Detroit SC
   Ethan Burgess, All Year FSC

3 Angelyn Nguyen, Los Angeles FSC
   Themistocles Leftheris, Los Angeles FSC

4 Amanda Dobbs, Peninsula SC
   Joseph Jacobsen, All Year FSC

Photo by Heather Erson.  heathererson.com



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