In the unpredictable world of figure skating, where champions retire at age 15 and Olympic medals are decided by a tenth of a point, nothing much is certain unless your name is Stephanie Freitag. For when Stephanie goes up, she comes down. Perfectly. On one leg. Almost every time.
Consistency has been the hallmark of the meteoric rise of the 10-year-old skater from Westmont, so much so that it earned her a fourth-place finish in March in the Ladies Intermediate Division of the 1998 United States Figure Skating Association’s Junior Olympics in Texas. Stephanie competed primarily against girls aged 13 to 15 whose programs packed a higher level of technical difficulty, but her performance was more technically proficient.
Although figure skating has endured criticism in recent years that it has evolved into nothing more than a jumping competition, Stephanie earned silver medals at the 1997 Upper Great Lakes Regionals and Midwestern Sectionals with programs that combined technically proficient jumps with well-centered spins and interesting choreography.
“She’s quite a little package,” said Cindy Caprel of Mt. Prospect, one of her five coaches.
With her high finish at Junior Olympics, the USFSA’s version of national competition for juvenile- and intermediate-level skaters, Stephanie may be considered one of the sport’s rising stars. “She’s a little fighter. She really tries hard, and she covers the ice well for her size,” said Joseph Serafine, president of DuPage Figure Skating Club and a USFSA national-level judge.
Despite the adulation four her skating accomplishments, Stephanie can’t quite figure out why people have begun to make such a fuss over her. “It’s kind of odd because people are always saying I did a good job,” she says between bites of breakfast at her home rink, Seven Bridges Ice Arena in Woodridge.
A tremendous amount of natural talent has propelled Stephanie through skating’s lower competitive ranks. “The girl has springs in her knees,” noted her coach of three years, Jennifer Hiller-Gruber of Wheaton. That, plus an uncanny understanding of where she is in the air at all times during jumps, has made learning even difficult elements easy. “I knew almost from Day 1 (of coaching her) that Stephanie had a lot of talent,” Hiller-Gruber said. “You’d show her something once, and she’d get it right away.”
It wasn’t always that way. “I almost failed Delta because the blade wasn’t mounted right on one of the skates,” Stephanie says, recalling a session of basic skating lessons at Downers Grove Ice Arena.
“She did fail Freestyle I because she didn’t have enough revolutions on her two-foot spin (see accompanying story),” chimes in her father, Bob.
Like many families who get involved in the sport, the Freitags thumbed through a park district brochure looking for something to do. Stephanie started class lessons in the winter of 1993 and progressed to private lessons about a year later. But it wasn’t until she began working with Hiller-Gruber and landed her axel and the first of her double jumps that her skating took off, notes her father. It was also around that time that Stephanie realized she loved the sport. “When I started competing, I knew that I really liked skating,” she says.
Yet her first USFSA competition, the Southport Invitational at Zion in February 1996, wasn’t a harbinger of what was to come. At that point, Stephanie’s bag of tricks included only a single axel and a double salchow. She managed to land only one jump in her program. But five weeks later, at the Wisconsin-Illinois-Minnesota Invitational in Milwaukee, she had a repertoire of five solid double jumps.
“Everything happened so fast. I’d teach her a jump, and a week later it would be consistent,” recalled Hiller-Gruber. Both coach and family began to hear accusations that they were “sandbagging” Stephanie — in other words, keeping her at a lower competitive level so she’d win.
To that point, however, Stephanie had only tested through USFSA’s pre-preliminary level. Because of her rapid acquisition of elements and the lag time involved in applying for testing and entering competitions, she wasn’t able to compete any higher than preliminary for a time. In the spring and summer of 1996, Stephanie progressed through preliminary, pre-juvenile and juvenile required tests that enabled her to compete in the Juvenile Ladies Division at the 1997 Upper Great Lakes Regionals in Duluth, Minn., where she placed fourth.
That placement, however, didn’t allow her to move on to national competition because only the top two competitors from each region are selected to attend Junior Olympics. Skaters at intermediate and above must progress through an additional level of competition, sectionals, to compete at the national level.
By this time, however, the name Freitag was well known to Midwestern judges and competitors, as Stephanie’s younger sister, Traci, began to compete. The family had fallen into what Bob refers to as “the black hole” of skating, where endless amounts of time and money go to the sport.
A typical day for the girls begins between 5:15 and 5:30 a.m. The Freitags’ white van, with thermal tights and skating dresses scattered throughout the back and hair scrunchies hanging from the gearshift, arrives at Seven Bridges around 7 a.m. Stephanie and Traci skate for about an hour, then head off to school. Bob works as a self-employed accountant, then brings the girls back most afternoons to Seven Bridges.
“I wouldn’t be able to do this if I had a regular 9-to-5 job,” notes Bob, a single parent who says his schedule enables him to take the girls to skating every day as well as all competitions. He also works as an ice monitor at Seven Bridges to help defray costs.
Stephanie’s schedule includes Girl Scout meetings on Monday afternoons, off-ice conditioning and religious education on Tuesdays. She takes gymnastics on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, a cross-training activity that coach Hiller-Gruber says aids her jumping ability. Both girls skate on a precision team based at Downers Grove that practices on Saturday mornings, and both play softball in the summer.
“We’re not home very much except to sleep,” Stephanie says.
Adds her father: “It sounds like they do nothing but skate, but they do most of this in the wintertime when they’d be inside anyway. During the summer, they’re outside, just like other kids.”
Physical activity is an essential part of Stephanie’s daily regimen. Diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at age 5, she tests her blood sugar levels and self-administers insulin shots in the stomach twice daily. Hiller-Gruber said the disease doesn’t affect Stephanie’s skating. “At the beginning of a lesson, I’ll ask her if she’s feeling sluggish, and if she is, I’ll give her a piece of candy, but she has never had any problems,” Hiller-Gruber noted.
Hiller-Gruber and Caprel also coach Traci, 8. The younger Freitag has not only had to live in the shadow of her sister’s accomplishments but is often mistaken for Stephanie. At 4 feet 2 inches and 60 pounds, Traci is only two inches shorter and about five pounds lighter than her sister, making her a virtual twin. “People call me (Stephanie), and I don’t like it because I want them to know it’s me,” Traci says. “I get mad but only for a minute.”
Technical elements have come easier for Stephanie, but Traci is the more expressive of the two. “She has a lot of personality on the ice, and she feels the music, which is rare for an 8-year-old,” Hiller-Gruber said.
Sharing the ice with a sibling has made the sisters develop a common characteristic. Neither likes to watch the other jump during competition. The sister sitting in the audience will cover her eyes immediately before a jump or bury her head in the arms of the nearest person.
“I get nervous because if (Traci) doesn’t skate well, she starts to cry,” Stephanie says.
Adds Traci, “I’m afraid (Stephanie will) fall, and I want her to do really, really good.”
Because of her showing at the Junior Olympics this spring, Stephanie will move up one level to novice. To do well in qualifying competitions next fall, she needs to start landing consistent double axels and to add one or two triple jumps to her repertoire. To that end, she has landed three different cheated triple jumps (salchow, toe loop and loop), meaning that the rotations on the jumps were just short of three revolutions. Caprel noted that Stephanie has tried all the triple jumps, including the triple lutz, which, although not landed, had the best consistent rotation.
“Going from intermediate to novice is one of the biggest steps there is, but if she gets the jumps, she’ll do just fine,” Caprel said.
Hiller-Gruber noted that during the next year Stephanie will need to add more speed, make more eye contact with the audience and improve her presentation scores.
The Freitags’ journey through skating has been one big learning experience. Bob has evolved as a skating parent, while the girls have learned about life on the ice. He has gone from buying $29 skates at K-mart to learning not only every spin and jump but also what constitutes good and bad ones.
“What I’m hoping for is longevity in this sport,” he says. “It would be nice if (Stephanie and Traci) could be national competitors. To be a senior lady and skate nationally would be a major goal.”
SKATING HAS ITS OWN LANGUAGE
Most competitive figure skaters are introduced to the sport through classes at their local ice arenas. In beginning levels, skaters learn basic maneuvers such as stroking, forward and backward crossovers (lifting one foot over the other to gain speed), turns and stopping.
When basic skills are proficient, skaters move on to freestyle elements, the spins, jumps and footwork that form competitive programs. Many learn-to-skate programs embrace Ice Skating Institute (ISI) designations to test skill levels. In Freestyle I, for example, skaters learn a two-foot spin, a basic spin where both feet touch the ice, and two half-rotation jumps, which form the basis for single, double and eventually triple jumps.
As freestyle level increases, so does the difficulty of the maneuvers performed, beginning first with half-revolution jumps and progressing through all single jumps to the axel. Although considered a single revolution jump, the axel technically has 1 1/2 revolutions. It is the most easily recognized jump as it is the only one with a forward takeoff. The lutz, with its long backward diagonal entry and vault into the air with the free leg, is the second most easily recognized jump.
Jumps are divided into two categories, edge jumps and toe jumps. In an edge jump, a skater steps onto her takeoff foot, bends the knee and uses the spring of that leg plus lift from the free leg to propel herself into the air. The salchow, loop and axel are edge jumps. Toe jumps use the toe pick of the free leg to dig into the ice and propel the skater upward. The toe loop, flip and lutz are toe jumps. Of the six most commonly performed jumps, the salchow is considered to have the least difficulty, followed by the toe loop, loop, flip, lutz and the axel.
Competitive skaters eventually leave ISI designations to go through United States Figure Skating Association (USFSA) testing levels. Some USFSA competitions have events for limited beginner and beginner levels for which no tests are required, but the bulk start at the pre-preliminary level. From pre-preliminary, skaters test and compete through preliminary, pre-juvenile, juvenile, intermediate, novice and junior to senior level. The senior level skaters are the amateurs generally seen on televised skating competitions.
