The U.S. skater from Oak Park never dreamed the Olympics would be added to his life story, and what he is getting out of being at the Winter Games has nothing to do with medals.
The Russian skater who trains in Bensenville sometimes feels she is giving up life and limb for the gold medal she is on the verge of winning.
For two people sharing the same 2006 Winter Olympic competition, the pairs event, Aaron Parchem and Tatiana Totmianina are having utterly different experiences.
Totmianina, 24, is in the lead after she and partner Maxim Marinin utterly dominated Saturday’s short program.
Last season she suffered a horrifying televised fall from a lift that left her with a concussion and likely will give her headaches the rest of her life. This season she has dealt with stress-related intestinal problems that have stripped 5 pounds from a body that weighed only 105 to start.
What Totmianina has not lost is a wry sense of humor.
“Maybe this is not a good way to think, but to get something big, you have to lose something big,” she said. “I am losing my health to get medals.”
Parchem, 28, also had a fall, his coming on a triple-toe-loop jump midway through the 2-minute-50-second short program. The impact left him and partner Marcy Hinzmann in 13th place going into Monday’s free skate final.
“I don’t have any kids now,” said Parchem, married to 1992 Polish Olympic skater Zuzanna Szwed. “But when I do, this video with the fall is the one they are going to watch. They are going to see their daddy is an Olympian but that he also is human.”
That perspective, Parchem said, is the only view for him to take of the Olympics after never having let sport consume his life.
“I was an after-school skater until I was 19,” Parchem said. “The opportunity to be a part of this is something that in a million years I never would have imagined.
“When I got into pairs, all I wanted was to do was one international competition.”
Totmianina and Marinin have starred on the international circuit for four years, finishing fourth at the 2002 Winter Olympics and winning the last two world titles. Heavily favored to win in Turin, they took a solid lead over Chinese pair Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao. Another Russian team, Maria Petrova and Alexei Tikhonov, is third.
The other U.S. pair, Rena Inoue and John Baldwin, were sixth overall but second only to Totmianina and Marinin in the technical marks after making history again with one of their elements, a throw triple axel. The move involves the man grabbing his partner at the waist and launching her into a 3 1/2-revolution jump.
It never had been done in competition until Inoue and Baldwin pulled it off while winning the U.S. title a month ago. This time their execution was much better, earning 8.64 points under the sport’s new judging system–or 2.44 more than any other pair earned from a single element.
“We wanted to leave a mark on the sport,” Baldwin said. “They can say we pushed the sport forward.”
