The difference in Oksana Baiul was apparent from the minute she emerged from an elevator into the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. She was alone.
No Viktor Petrenko, her guardian angel, Ukrainian compatriot and fellow Olympic figure skating champion, who has often acted as an interpreter. No Galina Zmievskaya, her stern coach and surrogate mother, who has often helped interpret between some lines or draw others beyond which no questioner would dare step. None of the handlers from the William Morris Agency, who have been as protective of Baiul as her coach.
“I try to be just a girl, just Oksana, just like everybody,” Baiul said.
She was wearing a pink leather jacket, black pants and a bewildered expression. Maybe that look had something to do with a little confusion over where she was and how she had gotten there. After all, the day before, Baiul had been flown on a chartered aircraft from a Tuesday professional competition in West Palm Beach to a Wednesday performance with the Tour of World Figure Skating Champions in Champaign. The bus from Champaign arrived at the Ritz at 2 a.m. Thursday. If this was Thursday morning, it presumably was Chicago.
She settled into a sofa on the far side of the lobby. A fountain drowned out the few noises in the seemly atmosphere. Baiul looked around, her eyes seeking a point of reference in her world of thick carpets over marble floors, of maids and concierges, of charter flights and buses and 75 shows in 71 cities-Anchorage to Miami, Boston to San Diego, Champaign to Moline-in 90 days, including two at the United Center Saturday.
This has been Baiul’s world for the 16 months since she won the 1994 Olympic gold medal before one of the largest audiences ever to watch a television broadcast. This, plus the half-dozen professional competitions and the month-long “Nutcracker on Ice” tour and the knee surgery and the move from Odessa, Ukraine to Simsbury, Conn., and the CBS movie of her life and being one of Barbara Walters’ 10 most fascinating people of 1994 and the annual income estimated between $2 million and $3 million. Three years ago, she was a virtual orphan from Dneprpetrovsk, a city closed to the world for decades because of its missile factory. Then she moved to Odessa after being all but adopted by her coach. Maybe Baiul will never get over the confusion about where she is and how she got there.
“You have to realize that just going from Dneprpetrovsk to Odessa was a humongous change,” said skating consultant Jirina Ribbens, who has taken film crews to interview Baiul in both places. “She went from a nobody with no one to an instant family and instant fame. She has had no privacy, rest or time to be a girl.”
Since last March, Baiul has made two state visits to the White House, each with a different Ukrainian president.
“She has this ageless look in her face,” President Clinton remarked after the first.
“Wise for her years,” said 1990 world champion Jill Trenary, 26, whom Baiul has called her idol.
“She is sort of an old soul,” said 1988 Olympic champion Brian Boitano, a co-star in the “Nutcracker” and the champions’ tour.
`She is a special girl’
Oksana Baiul is 17 years old. She is reigning Olympic champion, the youngest since Sonja Henie in 1928. She has overcome the death of her mother, desertion by her father, sudden departure of a longtime coach, lack of a long-established reputation in a sport where the past weighs heavily on the judges, back and leg injuries in a violent practice collision the day before the Olympic final, two dramatic changes in her environment and too little sleep before this interview that had literally taken months to arrange.
Apologies were offered for the hour, which seemed too early on what was a rare day off for the skating tour. Baiul’s eyes suddenly brightened. She had chosen this time rather than one in the afternoon because it meant the rest of the day would be free for her to focus on shopping, and there was Water Tower Place waiting next door. She had reoriented herself.
“Tommy (tour promoter Tom Collins) asked me to take her shopping when she was first on the tour in 1993,” Trenary said. “Now she can do it for herself.”
After the 1993 Tour of World Champions, Trenary gave Baiul a silver necklace. A month ago, in Providence, Baiul called Trenary over after a tour performance and said, “Every time I wear this, I skate perfectly.” She pointed to the silver necklace. “Here she is, Olympic champion, with tons of necklaces. . .I was so touched,” Trenary said. “She is a special girl.”
“I don’t know how I can explain to you,” Baiul said of her situation. “For me it is unbelievable because, three years ago, four years ago, nobody understands who is Oksana. Now people come and tell me, `Hello, are you Oksana? Can you sign for small children? Can you sign for me and my grandmother?’ It’s so good, and I’m so proud.”
She was alone, fending for herself in English, a language she has learned remarkably well in a very short time with no formal instruction. A compliment about her fluency brought a crosseyed grimace that delighted the photographer. Baiul growled in mock anger over his having caught the expression, a goofy reminder that this was still a kid sitting across a coffee table from you.
“Everybody tells me, `Oksana, when you were 15, no brain, and now, still no brain,”‘ she said, laughing. “I am doing sometimes something so bad. I go to store, and I buy very expensive clothes, and the next day I go to normal store and buy very cheap clothes. I am all the time changing because I don’t like all black or all white or all purple. I like every day changing.”
A fairy tale come true
Seventy-five shows in 71 cities in 90 days. It’s a wonderful life, one that she has chosen to continue for the foreseeable future. Baiul recently eschewed the opportunity to regain her Olympic eligibility and try for another gold medal in 1998. The sport’s tangled eligibility rules may be changed again next year, giving Baiul a second chance to make that decision. But it seems unlikely she will change her mind, partly because she is loath to return to the sort of training necessary for Olympic-style competition, where jumping is emphasized, often to the detriment of artistry.
“She already has the gold medal,” said Petrenko, the 1992 Olympic champion. “The most important thing in her life has happened. She has grown up and now she has more understanding of what she has done and how important it was.”
Two years ago, after she went from unknown to world champion in four months, questions about the past were answered only by tears. Even asking them seemed like child abuse of a girl who had lost everyone-the grandfather who bought her first skates at age 3, the grandmother who brought her to practice while her mother taught French, the mother who reminded little Oksana that fairy tales come true, that she would be a swan instead of an ugly duckling. All had died before Oksana was 14. Her father had left when she was 2.
This history all came from Zmievskaya, who took charge of Baiul’s life as well as her skating in 1992, when her previous coach suddenly left Dneprpetrovsk for a job in Canada. That caused Baiul’s move to Odessa with few belongings, one of them a ring she still wears, a ring passed down from her grandmother to her mother to her. She skated one of her Olympic performances, the technical program, to the Black Swan music from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” It was, Baiul now can explain without tears, homage to her late mother.
“Swan Lake” was music Baiul’s mother wanted her to use since the skater was a little girl. For years, Oksana protested about being too young to interpret it properly. The Olympic year was the right time.
For 2 minutes, 40 seconds at the OIympic Amphitheater in Hamar, Norway, Baiul did not merely skate like a swan. She was a swan, from the tiniest movement of her hands to the fluttering of her arms to the tilt of her head. It was one of the most choreographically and emotionally brilliant Olympic performances ever., That Baiul had a flaw on one required jump was inconsequential to both the judges and the spectators.
“She’s my idol,” Trenary said. “She creates things out there no one else can.”
Going for the gold
Yet Baiul stood second to Nancy Kerrigan of the U.S. after the technical program, and her chances of winning seemed to end after the practice collision with Germany’s Tanja Szewczenko. It left Baiul with a bruised disc and three stitches in her leg.
“The doctors tell me I probably can’t skate,” Baiul said, recalling the traumatic aftermath of the collision. I tell them, `No, I have to, I want to, because this is the Olympic Games.’ My coach, Galina, said, `Okay, we’re going to practice the next day, and if there is pain, we don’t compete.’
“Then I go , and I skate so bad. My coach started crying and me, too. Everyone was coming , `Oh, it’s okay, Oksana, don’t worry, you’re so young, you have maybe another Olympic Games.’
“I said, `Galina, don’t cry, please. I try to skate. Yes, I skate. I try.”‘
Only once has Baiul watched the videotape of what happened that Friday evening in Norway. The review brought her to tears, the same reaction she had upon being told a 5-4 judges decision had given her the Olympic gold medal over Kerrigan. When she replays that performance in her mind, what stands out are not things like the dramatic jump additions she made in the final seconds, changes that probably won her the gold medal. She remembers most the moments after the announcement for her to take the ice to start the program.
“I stayed just one minute, and Galina said, `Okay, Oksana, God bless you, and your mom is always with you.’ I don’t know why, but always these words will be in my brain, in my mind, everywhere.”
Wouldn’t the mention of your mother make you cry? Baiul was asked.
“It made me stronger,” she said. “After, I started crying. So many problems before the Olympic Games, and now I did it. So I cried.”
A new world
There would be no time to understand hows and whys. Fame and fortune beckoned, along with intrigues about who would manage Baiul’s career Former Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk is said to have played a major role in Baiul’s split with her previous agent, Michael Rosenberg, to sign with the William Morris Agency, whose other figure skating clients have been Henie, Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill, all Olympic champions whose popularity transcended the sport.
Yet Ukraine could not provide Baiul a decent place to train, so she and her coach and their entourage were lured to the International Skating Center of Connecticut by the new facility’s director, Bob Young, who had a long friendship with Zmievskaya. The troupe includes Petrenko, his wife, Nina, who teaches ballet to the skaters, and his brother Vladimir, a skating instructor; Zmievskaya, her husband and younger daughter; and Baiul, the terror of Simsbury’s streets with her fresh Connecticut driver’s license in hand.
“You know about this?” Baiul asked, ingenuously. “I am driving so fast, very fast, but when I see the police I am like, 40 miles per hour. Sssh. Don’t tell the police.”
Some wonder if Baiul has also gone too fast on the ice since winning the Olympic gold medal. After emergency surgery to repair torn cartilage in her left knee Sept. 28 in Sun Valley, Idaho, she said one doctor advised her not to skate again hard for six months. She was back on the ice in two days.
Baiul simply demands such a work ethic of herself. Jessica Roos, 18, of Hamden, Conn., a junior-level skater who shares practice time with Baiul, said, “When Oksana is doing her training, she is in her own world, where getting the job done is everything. There isn’t a day she slacks off.”
“I do not understand my life without skating,” she said. “From 3 1/2 years old, I am skating, skating, skating, and this happens, and I am so afraid I can never skate.”
The promoters who had booked Baiul in several made-for-TV competitions were equally nervous. Yet she fulfilled all her commitments in a wide variety of events, although her skating clearly was lacking in stamina and jumping strength. Of her four individual competitions, Baiul won only the Rock ‘N’ Roll Championships, beating Kerrigan by the same numerical margin that had won the Olympics. Baiul said neither her knee nor the results bothered her.
“You understand, I am not a machine,” Baiul said. “One day I am a top skater, the next day a very bad skater. Three months good skater, five months bad. Always black-white, black-white, black-white. This is sport. It is very interesting.”
`Very much in control’
She gave similar advice to Boitano one night after he was bemoaning a bad performance. “Bryushka,” Baiul said, using an affectionate Russian diminutive, “You’re no robot.” Marveled Boitano: “Here I am, 31, learning something from this 17-year-old.”
Boitano also has learned Baiul is unlikely to be manipulated by anyone–agents, promoters or directors. One night during the “Nutcracker” tour, she threatened a walkout if the show was not changed to give her and Boitano more ice time for the benefit of the paying customers. In their pas de deux, Boitano had no doubt Baiul was the boss.
“She is very strong, very opinionated and very much in control,” Boitano said. “If she wants things a certain way, it’s not, `I am Oksana,’ but, `This works best for me.’ She is 17 years old in a lot of ways and 30 years old in a lot of ways.”
She is too young to reflect on her career and has been through so much, so many changes, those reflections may remain blurred for several years. Baiul retreats from the rush of celebrity, particularly at the post-performance parties on the tour, where she is set upon by people whom she doesn’t know and who are speaking much too fast in a language she is only beginning to understand. Somehow she finds a quiet place in the maelstrom, an anchor in the swirl of attention, a way not to lose her way in the glitter of Ritz hotel lobbies, where one morning she was being asked about how she would like to be remembered.
“Just a girl,” Baiul said, “a small girl who was a good skater for `Swan Lake.’ “
Being singular is just another form of being alone. She knows all about being alone. It takes some growing into.
