It has been more than a decade since the fall of the Soviet Union, but everything about this situation still seems unsettlingly abnormal, even the weather.
Thunder rumbles through the steamy air, signaling a storm that will do little but add to a week of oppressive heat and humidity. In the heart of cold Russia?
A visitor from the United States is sitting down to dinner across the square from the hulking Belorussky Station, from which thousands of Red Army soldiers left by train to fight Hitler’s invasion in 1941 and to which many fewer returned victorious in 1945. The restaurant is a Japanese yakitoria. Grilled meat on skewers, eel and squid sushi, crab tempura. In Moscow?
The American’s dinner companions include a famous Russian sports operative and two Hungarian agents. No, not that kind of agent. These are from International Management Group, and they have done everything possible to arrange this meeting in the open with their client, a Russian woman considered a serious threat to U.S. interests.
A Red Menace wearing tight maroon capri pants and a beige blouse, with five earrings in her left ear? With capitalist agents? No, not that kind of threat.
This threat is for the 2002 Winter Olympic gold medal in women’s figure skating, and this sports operative, Irina Slutskaya, is the first Russian woman ever given a realistic chance to win it. Her principal rival in Salt Lake City will be Michelle Kwan of the United States, but the only thing cold about this war is the surface on which it will be contested.
In the past, there would have been great mystery about the Russian athlete in such circumstances. Questions could be asked only after great bureaucratic wrangling, and long answers in Russian would be translated as “Yes.” Or “no.” Slutskaya speaks freely in occasionally fractured but stunningly idiomatic English, and an hourlong interview turns into two hours of sharing food, anecdotes and laughter.
The only mystery for Slutskaya is how to manipulate the chopsticks she has been given on this late summer night.
“I can’t use this,” she said. “It’s always going like this …”
One chopstick stayed in her hand, the other tipped over. That sort of problem has been typical of her skating this Olympic season.
Slutskaya was runner-up to Kwan in the last two world championships, but the Russian finished ahead of Kwan in all five of their other meetings the last two seasons. When Slutskaya began this season by beating Kwan at the Goodwill Games, where judges for the first time gave her a big edge over Kwan in the presentation marks, the Russian became the solid gold-medal favorite.
She has won only three of her five competitions since then, including a victory over Kwan in the Grand Prix Final, and Slutskaya has not skated consistently well in any of them. She has not landed more than five triple jumps in any long program, and she has not done a triple-triple combination since the Goodwill Games. She took two ugly falls on jumps in the her last competition, the European championships.
“I’ve made some really surprising mistakes, but I’m glad it’s now,” Slutskaya said after losing to Maria Butyrskaya at the European event.
Butyrskaya is the only Russian woman to have won a world title in singles figure skating. Only one Russian woman, Kira Ivanova, ever has won an Olympic singles medal, a bronze in 1984. In 1996, Slutskaya was the first Russian woman to win a European title.
“Irina’s problem comes down to basic technique,” said Olympic champion and skating analyst Dick Button. “If you have perfect technique, you will miss once in a while. If you don’t, you may be strong enough and competitive enough to fight it through, but not all the time.”
At the Grand Prix Final, where the judges gave her a questionable victory in the decisive free skate, Slutskaya also was hopeful the mistakes were getting out of her system at the right time.
“Each competition, I go up, up, up in small steps,” she said. “I think that way is better for me this year.”
Learning to rebound
Slutskaya, who turns 23 Saturday, clearly took a step down at the mid-January European meet, but personal experience has taught her how to come back from a much lower point. A world bronze medalist in 1996 and ’97 and silver medalist in ’98, she failed to win one of the three spots on Russia’s 1999 world team and several times was ready to quit.
Many told her it was time to leave Zhanna Gromova, the coach with whom Slutskaya had worked since she was 5. Instead, the skater fought through a period during which she would practice five minutes, begin to cry, leave the rink and come back the next day to skate 10 minutes, cry and leave, until she finally got over it.
“She was crying, and she was working,” Gromova said. “Sometimes it is like that. Irina is temperamental, mercurial. I am calm. Sometimes we are day and night, fire and water. But together we make the mistakes, and together we correct them.”
Slutskaya is asked about her temper. She eats part of an egg roll and grins.
“Ho-ho. Ho-ho,” she said. “Ask my husband.”
We will have to take her word for it. Slutskaya’s husband, physical education teacher and recreational hockey player Sergei Micheev, does not accompany her to competitions, nor does he do interviews.
“I’m so quiet in life, but I can be absolutely so crazy if my practice is going bad,” she said. “For my work, I can kill … not kill, but I can scream. For my work, I can do anything, because I know for what I am skating.”
Unseen problems
Few know one reason is to pay the hospital bills for her 58-year-old father, Edouard, who has undergone three serious spinal operations in the last two years and was hospitalized from August 2000 through January 2001. For Slutskaya, an only child, the even greater price was to watch her father, who teaches automobile mechanics, age dramatically.
“Everything hurts him,” she said. “He was so young and strong. He got so much older so fast.”
Last summer Slutskaya paid to send her parents to Israel so her father could undergo more tests and visit his parents, who emigrated there for medical reasons related to her grandmother’s asthma. Slutskaya also frequently vacations in Israel. She said her grandfather is half Jewish but that she is “Russian, not Jewish.”
Slutskaya also has had her share of medical problems. A fall in practice before the free skate final at the 1997 world meet left her with nerve damage in her back that required painkillers for her to skate and months of treatment to heal. The back pain returned before the 1998 Olympics. After missing 10 days of practice, she tried acupuncture before getting further injections. They allowed her to skate in the Olympics, where she was fifth, and a month later at worlds, where she was second.
That has not stopped Slutskaya from dreaming about parachute jumping after this Olympics. That daredevil streak comes from her mother, Natalya, who was under the height limit for parachute jumping but did it anyway.
During an interview last year with Russia’s Sport Club magazine, the impish Slutskaya was teaching her mother how to catch grapes in her mouth. At the Japanese restaurant, she begged her companions to try some of her food while launching into a shaggy dog story about the 100-pound plush elephant her husband bought her. She has a zest for animals that infuses her imagination.
“All of life is like a zebra,” Slutskaya said in a Tribune interview before the 2000 world meet. “White line, black line, white line, black line. I had a black line last season.”
The Aug. 6, 1999, marriage helped her erase that mark from her psyche. Before she met Micheev at a summer camp eight years ago, he had known her as the girl in the white dress whom he had noticed while channel surfing one day. It was a telecast of her winning the world juniors when she was 15.
“He said, `I really like this girl,”‘ Slutskaya said. “He didn’t know me. I was just the girl in the white dress. It was like in the movies.”
Virtually unrecognized
Few Russians would recognize Slutskaya even now that she is a worldwide star in figure skating. Sitting in the sun at a Moscow lake one afternoon, she was “shocked” when a woman approached her and asked, “Are you Slutskaya?” Kwan, meanwhile, is rich and famous.
“She is lucky,” Slutskaya said. “She has lots of commercials and everything. Good for her.
“In Russia, who likes figure skating?”
Kwan lives in a two-bedroom, $575,000 townhouse in a gated community south of Los Angeles. Slutskaya and her husband live in a three-bedroom, top-floor apartment near a forest in Moscow’s Sokolniki district. The building is only 4 years old, but it already has fallen into disrepair and is hardly enhanced by the corrugated metal fences surrounding it. The apartment’s major attraction is a vista allowing her to see several of the Seven Sisters, the imposing Stalinist skyscrapers meant to convey the state’s power over individuals.
They share the apartment with a real shaggy dog, an Akita named Bars, which Slutskaya bought last year in Florida while on the Champions on Ice Tour. The lengthy tour has given Slutskaya the chance to develop both her English and a friendship with Kwan.
“Everyone thinks if we are competitors, we must be competing everywhere,” Slutskaya said. “On the street. With bad words in the newspaper. But I am not like this, and she is not like this.
“On the ice, we want to kill. Each other. Like this,” she said, laughing as she mimed scratching eyes out. “When we’re outside, we’re so friendly. We go to a Japanese restaurant sometimes on the tour, and we’re always talking. She’s a nice person.”
Slutskaya’s bitter rival is Butyrskaya, the 1999 world champion.
“[Butyrskaya] has bad words for me, and the journalists are writing this,” Slutskaya said of her countrywoman. “I never say behind her back that she is bad, but she is always talking like this.”
What sets Slutskaya apart from Kwan and Butyrskaya as a skater is her speed on the ice, her spins and her powerful if erratic jumps. Relatively weak presentation skills led Slutskaya this year to Giuseppe Arena, the LaScala choreographer who designed her passionate long program to music from Puccini’s Tosca.
“It’s hard to compare our skating because it’s totally different,” Kwan said.
“I like Irina’s energy, and I like her jumps, which are very natural and easy looking,” said Olympic champion Peggy Fleming, a TV commentator. “But she has been really inconsistent. She doesn’t look very focused out there.
“I get the feeling she doesn’t put a lot of thought into it before she does it. She seems like, `Oh, well, I’ll go out there and just do it.”‘
Fleming’s opinion must be viewed through the spectrum of her well-known predilection toward Kwan. Other observers think Slutskaya is so concerned with the intricacies of Arena’s choreography it has affected her jumping.
“Of course, I always need to skate better, better, better,” she said. “It is important for people to think, `She skates good, she skates again good, again good.’ I never thought my choreography was so bad [in the past].”
Slutskaya has a complete understanding of Tosca’s story, which ends with the character’s suicidal jump from the roof of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo. While even fictional despair does not apply to Slutskaya, she hopes to make up with similar fire and passion what she lacks in refinement.
“Maybe at the end, I will jump on the judges,” she said.
Slutskaya wanted to do that at last year’s world meet, where her unprecedented triple-triple-double jump combination was not enough to beat Kwan’s superior artistry. The Russian was left sobbing.
“It was the first time I was so close to win the gold,” Slutskaya said. “Somewhere in my heart I gave myself first place, and of course I was sad. It’s normal.”
It is comforting to be reminded that the human condition, unlike manmade political systems, is timeless.
