Not Too Late for the Fairytale Ending

Figure skating is a solitary sport. You train alone, with your coach. You get up every morning before the sun comes up, to spend hours in a cold rink. Jumping and falling, jumping and falling. The same series of movements, over and over, with toe pointed, head tilted, hand fluttering just so. Always with a smile on your face.

Every day of the year you train: ballet and dance lessons. Weight training. Running. Workouts in the gym. And twenty hours every week in the rink.

Yours is a sport that despite having a newer, more quantitative scoring system, you’re still judged on everything from the color of your panty hose to the number of sequins on your outfit. Your off-rink life is judged. Are you humble? Are you articulate and well spoken? Do you come from a respectable family? Do you deserve to win?

You don’t have a life outside of your sport. Every morsel of food, every swallow of liquid is parsed out and monitored. You give up friends, you give up school, you give up a social life, you give up a life with your family. You’re 15 years old and can’t remember a time when life wasn’t like this.

Your sport is a series of qualifying contests that leads up to one big contest. There’s no coverage of the qualifying contests, like all of the football games that lead to the super bowl. No one in TV Land cares who won the Midwest Sectionals or the New England Regionals. In your sport, the only thing people are interested in and tune into is the Big Event: The US Nationals.

With Nationals, it’s the equivalent of the last play of the Superbowl, fourth down, and you’re the quarterback trying to throw the winning pass. You have less than seven minutes to show the judges you are worthy. There are no mulligans, no do-overs. You have one chance: one slip of the blade, one fall spells failure.

You approach the ice and think about the thousands of hours of practice, the $100,000 or so each year you and your family spend to get you to this point. In this sport, everyone sacrifices.

The winner and runner-up receives parades, glory, and a chance to compete internationally. Anything less than third place is a disappointment and another year to train--and hope.

Given all of this, you have to wonder why anyone would want to become a competitive figure skater. Maybe it’s the feeling of propelling yourself and flying in the air. Maybe it’s the combination of artistry and athleticism.

In 1994, skater Nicole Bobek was asked why she skated and she just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Because I like it.”

Bobek had what coaches would call raw talent. She was an easy--albeit sometimes sloppy-- jumper, and yet being a bit rough around the edges, had a lightness and grace about her on the ice. Growing up never knowing her father, Bobek and her mother, a former skater from the Czech Republic, formed a close-knit bond.

Listen to skating commentators today, and septagenarian telecaster (and former Olympian) Dick Buttons will still wax poetic at the grace of Nicole Bobek. It's rumored that because Buttons went on and on about Bobek's signature spiral (in photo, right), that it served as a wake-up call for other skaters, including Michelle Kwan and Sasha Cohen, who ended up with signature spiral sequences of their own.

Bobek’s ascent into elite figure skating did not come easily. Her skating record could diplomatically best be described as irratic. One year she came in fourth, the next 16th. She earned a reputation as being rebellious and difficult: she smoked cigarettes and had a mouth like a sailor, which of course only endeared her to me.

She had ankle problems, and weight issues, and sometimes lacked a commitment in her training. In the course of her career, she hired and fired a dozen coaches in a sport where a coach is regarded much like a marriage partner: one you stick by through thick and thin.

However, in 1995, 16 year old Bobek, despite herself and against all odds, won the U.S. Senior Ladies Nationals. She later went on that year to place third in Worlds. You might not remember Bobek because, despite her gold at Nationals and a bronze at Worlds, subsequent performances were not as good: she placed third in 1997 and 1998, earning her a berth on the 1998 Olympic team, where nerves and injuries got the better of her, and placed a disappointing 17th place.

Sadly, Bobek did not get the storybook ending that she very likely wished for. A few days ago Bobek was arrested as part of a large drug ring that sold and distributed methamphetamine.

You can't help but wonder what happened to Bobek. If you look at her MySpace page, you see a girl whose hero is her mom, enjoys doing charity work, and who hopes to be a mother “someday”. Three years ago, she even made her acting debut acting alongside Oscar winner Sean Penn.

Bobek’s self-declared hero, her mother, is standing by her daughter’s side, posting the $100,000 bail and saying she will help her in whatever way she can. She still has faith in her daughter, saying that she is a good girl and got mixed up with the wrong crowd.

Bobek is only 31, and it breaks my heart that someone so young with so much going for them becomes seduced by drugs. I hope that she doesn't see herself as a has-been, but a smart, funny, intelligent girl that made some bad choices. I hope that her mom continues to stand by her, to help her daughter make some better choices, so she can get clean, take accountability at the charges in front of her, so she can have another chance at the fairytale ending that she--and everyone else--deserves.