Growing Up & Staying There

As far as Peggy Fleming is concerned, getting to the top is a whole lot more fun than being there. Last year Peggy was a carefree, 17-year-old high school girl who confounded experts by taking the women's world figure-skating title away from Canada's Petra Burka. Last week she was back to defend her title in Vienna--this time as a serious-minded college freshman, worried about her studies and her future. A repeat victory at Vienna might ensure her the lucrative pro career she has been counting on ever since her father, a newspaper pressman in Colorado Springs, Colo., died of a heart attack last April. "I have everything to lose," she whispered at rinkside as she watched her 22 competitors from twelve countries practice their compulsory "school" figures --the "counters," "threes," "brackets," "rockers" and "serpentine loops" that count for 60% of a skater's score.

Peggy need not have worried. All fall long, while she was attending Colorado College, she worked out for six hours a day, often starting before dawn so that practices would not interfere with classes. The hard work paid dividends quickly: on the first of the compulsory figures, an "inside counter"--a kind of figure eight performed mainly on the inside edges of the skate blades--Peggy jumped into an eight-point lead over Canada's Valerie Jones, 20 over "East Germany's Gabriele Seyfert. By the end of three days and six figures, she was ahead by 69 points. "The best we can hope for now is second place," complained Gabriele's mother. "Peggy is practically unbeatable."

That was more than anybody could say for the other Americans: the best U.S. male skater, Gary Visconti, finished behind two Austrians and the top U.S. pairs team, Cynthia and Ronald Kauffman, behind pairs from Russia and Germany. But Peggy clinched one gold medal for the U.S. with a magnificent free-skating exhibition that started out as a disaster when she fell trying to execute a difficult "double axel"--a double backward spin. The audience gasped, then cheered as Peggy picked herself up and went back to her routine as if nothing had happened. Dressed in shocking pink, skating to the strains of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique and Verdi's La Traviata, she swept through a series of loops, spins, splits, lutzes and spread-eagles with mathematical precision and balletlike grace. Finally, she tried a second double-axel ("Oh was I scared,")--and this time it was picture perfect. The crowd gave her a standing ovation, and the judges were so impressed that all seven rated her in first place despite her spill. That was nice, allowed Champion Fleming, "but I would still like to go out there again and do it right this time."

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