He is a Massachusetts fisherman’s son whose first trips to sea quickly made Todd Eldredge prefer the relative stability of water that was frozen solid. Yet Eldredge has become the ancient mariner of ice skating, his career remarkable for its distinctions and distinct for its length.
At 30 Eldredge spans three eras in his sport. His first senior world championship in 1990 was the last in which compulsory figures were part of skating. He won a world title during the boom years that followed the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding debacle, when skating became a big part of TV programming and skaters of Eldredge’s ability banked the spoils. For him, they include a Ferrari, a classic Corvette, a BMW and a luxurious lakeside house outside Detroit.
Then he went through the quad revolution, when prodigious jumping became a required part of a champion’s repertoire, while he fought on as merely a triple threat.
Eldredge competed at his first senior national championship in 1988, finishing eighth, and went on to win five U.S. titles in the 1990s. When he takes the ice in his 12th senior national championship Tuesday at the Staples Center, Eldredge will try to make a third Olympic team by finishing among the top three in men’s singles.
“The years he has been able to remain on top is, in a way, inspirational,” said reigning U.S. champion Timothy Goebel, 21. “I’m looking at him and saying, `I can still be doing this well, 6, 7, 10 years down the road.’
“Over so many generations Todd has been sort of the pinnacle of skating. The consistency he has had over his career really has made an impact on the skating community.”
Consistency rarely attracts attention. Despite his world title and more world medals, six, than any other man in the past 50 years, it became easy to overlook Eldredge. He was like a well-crafted art object in a familiar room, seen all the time but rarely noticed.
Eldredge’s skating style is rooted in subtlety, polished but not passionate, a mirror of his well-mannered demeanor off the ice. His stunning spins and flowing edge skating have been overshadowed in the past four years by the quadruple jumping of Goebel and flamboyant Russians Evgeny Plushenko and Alexei Yagudin.
Eldredge, yet to land a quadruple in a significant competition, seemed more an artifact than an attraction, his routine excellence just . . . routine.
Last year, when he returned to the world and national meets after two seasons of lightening his competitive load, fans suddenly began to appreciate what Eldredge had brought to the sport.
At the 2001 worlds in Vancouver, where he finished third behind the two Russians, fans stood to give Eldredge long, fervent ovations. At last month’s Grand Prix Final in Kitchener, Ontario, where he struggled into fourth, the crowds reacted similarly.
“When people watch me skate, there isn’t a boom moment,” Eldredge said. “They kind of take it in quietly and then react at the end.”
If Eldredge makes next month’s Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he will become a sentimental favorite, trying to unburden himself from the albatross of Olympic failures.
At his first Olympics in 1992, Eldredge competed with a bad back, botched a double jump in the short program and finished 10th. Two years later, weakened by flu, Eldredge failed to make the U.S. Olympic team.
At the 1998 Winter Games, he was third after the short program but a substandard free skate condemned him to fourth.
“Having not gotten the medal or skated the way I wanted at an Olympics was a driving force for me,” he said.
Eldredge would not be favored to win a medal. He takes heart from the example of speedskater Dan Jansen, whose final Olympic race ended in the title that had eluded him.
“It was something American fans really wanted for him,” Eldredge said. “It was great for everyone to share in that experience. Maybe something like that can happen for me.”
After all these years, the bronze age would be a fitting epoch to mark an epic career.
