Special Report - Don't mess with a 12-year-old ice skater

Don't mess with a 12-year-old ice skater
June 14, 2002
by John Bloom

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., June 14 --"Saaaaaaaaaaraaaaaaaah!"

Imagine this keening wail in a place that sounds like the world's biggest elementary school cafeteria, punctuated by squeals, cacophonous shouts and "Woooooooo"s.

"Saaaaaaaaaaaaraaaaaaaaaah!"

The ten-year-old girls are almost crying when they scream. I think some of them were crying. They couldn't stand the tension. They couldn't believe they were in the same building with Sarah Hughes.

You gotta hand it to the dads who load up the SUV and cart the family to "Champions on Ice" and shell out 60 bucks or more for each ticket. I got the impression that all the fathers in Continental Airlines Arena were actual hostages. They were forced at emotional gunpoint to pony up the cash, chauffeur the brood to the arena, buy souvenir shirts, then spend most of the evening running to get hot dogs and Diet Cokes for their posse of princess ice queens.

And the little darlings in their flouncy Britney Spears tops are fickle as hell. Michelle Kwan is in the show, too, but she is so last year. I think the loss of prepubescent affection even affected Kwan's performance. She was missing jumps left and right, all because these fiercely judgmental middle-schoolers critiqued her every move and triumphantly decided that she's obviously not as good as Sarah.

And the Russians and the French and the Canadians--well, they get polite applause, but they're not Sarah. They could have programmed this ice show as All Sarah, All the Time, with Sarah doing every routine she's performed since the age of 5, and everyone would have gone home happy. They could have had Sarah read the phone book while doing figure eights, and thousands of little girls would have swooned and thrown flowers.

In fact, they make frequent announcements that you're not supposed to throw flowers onto the ice because it's dangerous, especially in a show using a lot of pinpoint spotlights, but when Sarah skated, it was obvious these petite terrorists were not going to be denied flower-throwing. Apparently the management knows that, no matter how many stern announcements are made, you're going to have floral arrangements on the ice after Sarah's solo, so they have a gofer assigned to bouquet-pickup duty. I'm sure that the bouquet is something else that Dad paid for.

In fact, I'm estimating that if you're a typical American family with two daughters living, say, ten miles from the arena, you're out about $700 by the time this whole thing is over, including the stop at Applebee's and the investment in two souvenir programs, since how could April and Brandy expect to share one for the rest of their lives?

The promoter of the tour is named Tom Collins--unfortunately he doesn't sell Tom Collinses to the besieged fathers--and Collins obviously knows that Sarah Hughes is his star. He has her anchor the show and close the first act as well as do the final solo, and he gives her the most dramatic entrances. The only other Olympic stars that might have been able to match her fame are Sale and Pelletier, the Canadian figure skating pair that got the famous "phantom" gold medal, but they passed on "Champions on Ice," as did their Russian rivals. My guess, though, is that they knew in their hearts they couldn't compete wtih Sarah.

Fortunately the show is fairly talent-packed even when Sarah is not stretching her arms like a butterfly, her perfect brunette bob framing her always smiling face. (Is it my imagination or have the girls started cutting their hair that way, too?) The most thrilling and athletic performances come from the Russian men, Alexei Yagudin and Evgeni Plushenko, who are bitter rivals off the ice and so unfortunately never appear together.

These guys are both consummate showmen. Yagudin, the gold medalist, uses a lot of the same material he used in the Olympics, including all those difficult jumps, which is refreshing to see in an ice show where you can get away with a lot less. Plushenko, though, is even more electrifying. The silver medalist is a tall blond aristocratic-looking extrovert who has the brooding look of a Tolstoy hero. He loves the audience, loves to skate close to the rail, and his music is classical and dramatic. He acts every moment, like a young Baryshnikov, and knows how to rouse the audience with perfect musical cues and ascending levels of emotion and technique.

The only guy who comes close to the Russians is Michael Weiss, who has never medaled at the Olympics and only reached bronze at the World Championships. Looking natty and rugged in fluorescent white space pants and a mesh T-shirt, he triple- jumped his way around the rink like an acrobat and never missed.

Elvis Stojko did his maniac rock-and-roll schtick with a lot of back flips. Surya Bonaly, the European champion from France, did her patented back flip onto one leg. (She's so muscular that she's almost like the anti-Sarah.) Rudy Galindo brought down the house with his energetic Village People medley, complete with a wardrobe Ru Paul would kill for. And Kazakova and Dmitriev, the former Olympic pairs champions, were so elegant and perfect you wanted to put them on a wedding cake.

The only other show-stoppers were Vladimir Besedin and Oleksiy Polishchuk, who are not really ice skaters at all but Russian circus acrobats who did an hysterically funny clown version of "Swan Lake" in which one guy climbs all over the other guy putting the full force of his skating blades on his back, shoulders and head. It's kind of one of those you-have-to-see-it- to-believe-it things.

But the most dramatic moments are reserved for the three female Olympic medalists. rina Slutskaya, the silver medalist, does an athletic but uninvolving cowgirl number. Sorry, not Sarah. Michelle Kwan does her usual sail-around-the-rink-on-one- leg-and-take-the-occasional-jump routine, but she falls down twice, either missing or shortening all her jumps. Obviously not Sarah.

And then Sarah kind of floats out onto the ice and does a program from "Lite FM" that, I have to admit, was perfect. She does triples that look so easy you think they could probably be quintuples if she so desired. She looks elegant and confident and relaxed. It turns out, when you see her, that she really was by far the best skater. Besides, 20 million 12-year-olds can't be wrong.

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