Figure Skater Autobiography Lit Review-- Part 5
My lit review roundup concluded with Ekaterina Gordeeva’s My Sergei: A Love Story (with E.M. Swift). If the Russian pairs team of Gordeeva and Grinkov weren’t famous enough with two Olympic gold medals, Grinkov’s sudden, premature death in late1995 during routine training in Lake Placid would’ve been enough to seal their fame forever. My Sergei hit the stands in 1996, and I recall my high school friend Sara Gillette reading it in the commons during lunch of our senior year. While my figure skating stannery was not completely cemented, Sara was over the moon about the sport already. I recall her clutching the book lovingly to her chest and looking heavenwards, sighing, on more than one occasion when asked how the book was. Although I wasn’t much aware of G&G’s skating prior to that time, skating in general was hard to ignore in the mid-1990’s, and that meant I’d seen more than one fluff sports tribute to the fallen Grinkov. Between Yamaguchi’s gold and the Harding-Kerrigan scandal, figure skating was big business.
Like Hamill’s book, this one dispenses with the useless skating glossary. The margins are pretty generous and the font even more so, but I felt like this was the most interesting of the books I read. At just under 300 pages, it feels substantial despite fairly simplistic sentence structures and short chapters. Although Gordeeva doesn’t really discuss skating in any particular detail, the book is utterly fascinating because G&G came up through the Soviet sports machine. This means that the typical US skater narrative of family struggling to make ends meet and general uncertainty/anxiety surrounding skating is out the window. Gordeeva describes being sent to “sports school” beginning in grade school, where, “… until I was ten years old, we had the summers off from skating.” Gordeeva treats her childhood fairly simplistically, really only stating that home life was fairly idyllic. Her father dreamt of her becoming a ballet dancer (another possible avenue following sports school), but she failed the entrance exam. The paragraph about this episode concludes, “I was never quite good enough to please him. Maybe in the Olympic Games I was okay.” This tone typifies the writing in the book, actually; I realize the book is likely colored by how soon after Grinkov’s death it was published, but Gordeeva regularly comes across as too self-effacing in this book. Many of the passages describing Grinkov stress how good, kind, patient, competent, he was, and that Gordeeva never felt good enough in comparison. This hardly seems fair, since at 4 years older, Grinkov was likely to have been in a developmentally different plane for most of their formative years as a skating pair and again early in their life as a couple.
While the Soviet system seems to have afforded G&G a skating career that lacked the angst common to US skaters, that doesn’t mean it was without tension. Gordeeva describes their relationship with one particularly awful coach, Zhuk, whom she calls “a miserable, pitiless man.” She relates how he took her undersea diving at a summer training camp and nearly drowned her by making her swim with her clothes on [the water was too cold to go in just a swimsuit], and actually beat another female skater with whom they trained. He terrorized the other girl, and Gordeeva writes, “I understand now that he was trying to get Anna to sleep with him. (…) Not me, fortunately, because I was so young. He had enough power that if a girl refused him, he could arrange it so she couldn’t skate anymore.” Another revealing passage about this time reads, “Brian Boitano, who was also on this tour [a 20-city tour of Switzerland, France, & Germany for medalists in the World championships] later told me that he and Alexander Fadeev, whom everyone called Sasha, went for a walk one day, and Sergei came along. Brian asked Sasha, who spoke English, to ask Sergei what he loved about skating. Sergei said he didn’t love skating. He skated because he had to.”
The couple’s love story unfolds touchingly, with them slowly falling in love through Gordeeva’s late teen years and blossoming into a full-on love affair between the 1988 games and the 1994 Lillehammer games. Gordeeva is careful to point out that this didn’t necessarily bleed into the couple’s skating life: “We never complimented each other after we skated. (…) Though to be honest, Sergei was never much of one for compliments or flattery. He never said I looked beautiful, or fresh… The most he ever said was ‘Wow,’ although he said other things with his eyes.”
To me, the most enjoyable part of the book was Gordeeva’s little asides about personalities who are still around the sport today. While touring the US on the now-defunct Tom Collins Champions on Ice (which, incidentally, Kwan and Hamill also recognize by name as having been an excellently run tour that was fair to its skaters), Gordeeva roomed with Galina Zmievskaya, Viktor Petrenko’s coach and soon-to-be mother-in-law. Of them, she writes, “Viktor was always very quiet around me, but friendly, and absolutely dependable as a friend. (…) [He] worked very hard with Galina, and I was amazed how much time they spend together, both on and off the ice. (…) [They] would go to restaurants together, go walking together, everything. (…) I thought it was all too much. But I never heard Viktor complain about it.” These 10 sentences tell me more about them as people and as coaches than all of the footage of them in Be Good Johnny Weir, to be honest. Later, Gordeeva describes Oksana Baiul at a New Year’s skating show: “[She] was so young. Galina’s daughter, Nina Petrenko, who was married to Viktor, kept following her around during the exhibition because Oksana didn’t know where her dress was, where her hairpiece was, what time she was supposed to go on. She couldn’t take care of herself. (…) Nina said she never warmed up before skating. (…) She wasn’t the least bit awed to talk to the older, more experienced skaters.” This sounds like a World and Olympic champion to me, folks.
Besides the time capsule feeling of these interludes, the insights into a different culture is what makes this book tick. I felt particularly enlightened reading the parts about Gordeeva’s unexpected pregnancy, and their feelings about how other skaters reacted to it while they were touring. Upon being told congratulations by an American friend, Gordeeva says, “This is very American. In Moscow, the attitude is quite different. The reaction of friends is more like, ‘Oh, you’re pregnant. Lots of work ahead.’ (…) It says a great deal about what kind of life people in Russia expect.” Gordeeva describes falling in love with Grinkov and feeling lucky that he was polite, considerate, and handsome, because she wouldn’t have known how to look around for someone better. According to her account, Russian women of the time didn’t have much romantic ambition the way their Western counterparts did, since everyone basically viewed everyone else as the same under Communism. This isn’t presented in an idealistic way, but as more of a matter of fact, ho-hum, “why bother” attitude.
The book is sad, make no mistake. Gordeeva’s grief is communicated loud and clear, but she is moving on with her life by the end of the book. Their daughter Daria is already nearly 18 (!) and Gordeeva remarried Russian skater Ilia Kulik [1] and had another child in the early aughts. Some critics point out that Gordeeva has done extremely well for herself since Grinkov’s death by playing the grieving widow. This seems unnecessarily cynical, and I won’t deny that the end of this book made me a little teary when she talks about needing friends more than ever, and in a way she never thought possible.
[1] There hasn’t been an official announcement, but sources say the couple has split up.
Like Hamill’s book, this one dispenses with the useless skating glossary. The margins are pretty generous and the font even more so, but I felt like this was the most interesting of the books I read. At just under 300 pages, it feels substantial despite fairly simplistic sentence structures and short chapters. Although Gordeeva doesn’t really discuss skating in any particular detail, the book is utterly fascinating because G&G came up through the Soviet sports machine. This means that the typical US skater narrative of family struggling to make ends meet and general uncertainty/anxiety surrounding skating is out the window. Gordeeva describes being sent to “sports school” beginning in grade school, where, “… until I was ten years old, we had the summers off from skating.” Gordeeva treats her childhood fairly simplistically, really only stating that home life was fairly idyllic. Her father dreamt of her becoming a ballet dancer (another possible avenue following sports school), but she failed the entrance exam. The paragraph about this episode concludes, “I was never quite good enough to please him. Maybe in the Olympic Games I was okay.” This tone typifies the writing in the book, actually; I realize the book is likely colored by how soon after Grinkov’s death it was published, but Gordeeva regularly comes across as too self-effacing in this book. Many of the passages describing Grinkov stress how good, kind, patient, competent, he was, and that Gordeeva never felt good enough in comparison. This hardly seems fair, since at 4 years older, Grinkov was likely to have been in a developmentally different plane for most of their formative years as a skating pair and again early in their life as a couple.
While the Soviet system seems to have afforded G&G a skating career that lacked the angst common to US skaters, that doesn’t mean it was without tension. Gordeeva describes their relationship with one particularly awful coach, Zhuk, whom she calls “a miserable, pitiless man.” She relates how he took her undersea diving at a summer training camp and nearly drowned her by making her swim with her clothes on [the water was too cold to go in just a swimsuit], and actually beat another female skater with whom they trained. He terrorized the other girl, and Gordeeva writes, “I understand now that he was trying to get Anna to sleep with him. (…) Not me, fortunately, because I was so young. He had enough power that if a girl refused him, he could arrange it so she couldn’t skate anymore.” Another revealing passage about this time reads, “Brian Boitano, who was also on this tour [a 20-city tour of Switzerland, France, & Germany for medalists in the World championships] later told me that he and Alexander Fadeev, whom everyone called Sasha, went for a walk one day, and Sergei came along. Brian asked Sasha, who spoke English, to ask Sergei what he loved about skating. Sergei said he didn’t love skating. He skated because he had to.”
The couple’s love story unfolds touchingly, with them slowly falling in love through Gordeeva’s late teen years and blossoming into a full-on love affair between the 1988 games and the 1994 Lillehammer games. Gordeeva is careful to point out that this didn’t necessarily bleed into the couple’s skating life: “We never complimented each other after we skated. (…) Though to be honest, Sergei was never much of one for compliments or flattery. He never said I looked beautiful, or fresh… The most he ever said was ‘Wow,’ although he said other things with his eyes.”
To me, the most enjoyable part of the book was Gordeeva’s little asides about personalities who are still around the sport today. While touring the US on the now-defunct Tom Collins Champions on Ice (which, incidentally, Kwan and Hamill also recognize by name as having been an excellently run tour that was fair to its skaters), Gordeeva roomed with Galina Zmievskaya, Viktor Petrenko’s coach and soon-to-be mother-in-law. Of them, she writes, “Viktor was always very quiet around me, but friendly, and absolutely dependable as a friend. (…) [He] worked very hard with Galina, and I was amazed how much time they spend together, both on and off the ice. (…) [They] would go to restaurants together, go walking together, everything. (…) I thought it was all too much. But I never heard Viktor complain about it.” These 10 sentences tell me more about them as people and as coaches than all of the footage of them in Be Good Johnny Weir, to be honest. Later, Gordeeva describes Oksana Baiul at a New Year’s skating show: “[She] was so young. Galina’s daughter, Nina Petrenko, who was married to Viktor, kept following her around during the exhibition because Oksana didn’t know where her dress was, where her hairpiece was, what time she was supposed to go on. She couldn’t take care of herself. (…) Nina said she never warmed up before skating. (…) She wasn’t the least bit awed to talk to the older, more experienced skaters.” This sounds like a World and Olympic champion to me, folks.
Besides the time capsule feeling of these interludes, the insights into a different culture is what makes this book tick. I felt particularly enlightened reading the parts about Gordeeva’s unexpected pregnancy, and their feelings about how other skaters reacted to it while they were touring. Upon being told congratulations by an American friend, Gordeeva says, “This is very American. In Moscow, the attitude is quite different. The reaction of friends is more like, ‘Oh, you’re pregnant. Lots of work ahead.’ (…) It says a great deal about what kind of life people in Russia expect.” Gordeeva describes falling in love with Grinkov and feeling lucky that he was polite, considerate, and handsome, because she wouldn’t have known how to look around for someone better. According to her account, Russian women of the time didn’t have much romantic ambition the way their Western counterparts did, since everyone basically viewed everyone else as the same under Communism. This isn’t presented in an idealistic way, but as more of a matter of fact, ho-hum, “why bother” attitude.
The book is sad, make no mistake. Gordeeva’s grief is communicated loud and clear, but she is moving on with her life by the end of the book. Their daughter Daria is already nearly 18 (!) and Gordeeva remarried Russian skater Ilia Kulik [1] and had another child in the early aughts. Some critics point out that Gordeeva has done extremely well for herself since Grinkov’s death by playing the grieving widow. This seems unnecessarily cynical, and I won’t deny that the end of this book made me a little teary when she talks about needing friends more than ever, and in a way she never thought possible.
[1] There hasn’t been an official announcement, but sources say the couple has split up.