Test of the Best on Snow & Ice

The scene: Port Washington, N. Y. "Stretch, Dorothy, stretch. Open up, get your arms up. Move it, keep it going." Although she has just won her third consecutive U.S. figure-skating championship, Dorothy Hamill is training again. She has been up since 5 a.m., on the ice at Twin Rinks since dawn. First she practiced school figures, tracing and retracing circular designs, skating backward and forward in perfect circles. Now it is nearly noon. Sweating and struggling to maintain her radiant smile, Dorothy, 19, is skating her freestyle program. As she swirls over the ice, leaping and spinning at presto pace, Twin Rinks Pro Peter Burrows shouts instructions. "Push it, give it more extension! Fly into it!" He shuts off the music. Dorothy bends over, gulping air. "O.K., "says Burrows, "let's try it again."

Cut to Kitzbuehel, Austria. It has been less than two weeks since Canadian Downhill Racer Dave Irwin spun out of control off the steep course in Wengen, Switzerland, slamming into the hillside at 60 m.p.h., cracking a rib and suffering a severe brain concussion. Despite the injuries and a steady downpour, though, Irwin has been working out here. "I took a couple of free runs today," he says. "Straight down, nonstop. " He will be back out every day from now on. "There's nothing a doctor can do for me," he says. "The cracked rib still hurts a little, but I'm doing stretching exercises to improve my lung intake. About the brain concussion --I'll just need a little more time."

Now, Davos, Switzerland. A two-day snow has covered and closed the 400-meter speed-skating oval. Skaters from Poland, Canada and the U.S. jog through the quiet alpine village, play poker, and fret. "We've got to skate," says U.S. Sprint Specialist Peter Mueller. "We're losing precious time." At last, late in the afternoon, the ice is cleared and the Americans lace up. Their arms swinging in the hypnotic rhythm of the workout, the skaters seem oblivious to the cold and stinging snow. Round, round, round they go, fluid figures in the fading light.

In snow and on ice the world over, the artists and athletes of blade and board and bobsled have been pushing themselves to the limit, staying longer on the training course, sharpening edges, testing waxes, perfecting performances and steeling nerves. Now the preparing is at an end, and what for many is the focus of a lifetime of single-minded dedication begins: the test of the best in the quadrennial Winter Olympic Games.

Next Wednesday afternoon in Bergisel Stadium in Innsbruck, Austria, 1,500 athletes from some 40 nations and 70,000 spectators will watch as Josef Feistmantl, a former luge-sled gold medalist, lights the Olympic flame opening the twelfth Winter Games. That flame will burn for twelve days of competition in the dangerous, exciting, magically graceful world of winter sports. More than half a billion people around the world will follow the action on TV, including millions in the U.S. who can tune in 39 1/2 hours of coverage on ABC, most of it in prime time.

What they see will be a glittering montage of contradictory images: athletes gathering for an ancient festival of peace in an Olympic village surrounded by barbed-wire fences--a grim reminder of the massacre of eleven Israelis at the summer games in Munich four years ago; a lovely, old city of narrow streets and gilded buildings, crammed with cars, microwave towers and the trappings of progress. There will be much talk about the glory of amateur athletics, although the concept is now scarcely more alive than Innsbruck's medieval statuary.

Even so, the Olympics can still be the best sport has to offer in entertainment, nervy verve, and old-fashioned inspiration. This year's Games promise to deliver all three in abundance. On the slopes of the Tyrol, a pack of European and Canadian men and women, plus a handful of Americans, will be hurtling down the fall line in a battle for alpine skiing supremacy. Through the neighboring valleys and forests, Scandinavians, East Germans, and Russians will be straining to win the cross-country marathons, while overhead Austrians, Finns and Swiss try to fight gravity for the longest ski jump. On the icy, twisting bobsled and luge chute, Italians, Swiss, West and East German daredevils will be approaching the speed of insanity.

It is on ice, though, that the Olympics should present the most riveting and partisan spectacle for U.S. viewers. The nation's most talented team is in speed skating, with at least two gold-medal prospects (see box page 64). For nine days they will be locked in a race with a powerful Russian assemblage.

When those showdowns end, all attention will turn to Olympic stadium for the Games' most dramatic and elegant event--figure skating--and America's premiere artist on ice, Dorothy Hamill. If the U.S. has picked up no gold medals by then, Dorothy will be the last chance. No matter the stakes of national pride, she will be well worth watching. With a dancer's sense of her own body, an incandescent smile and a skating style as fluid as a Chopin prelude, Dorothy will light up the Olympics.

Figure-skating fans already know what to expect. Two years ago at the world championships in Munich, Dorothy gave a performance that captivated the crowd--and revealed much about the source of her appeal. The drama began as Dorothy, who battles almost uncontrollable jitters on the brink of each performance, waited at the end of the rink to be introduced for her free-skating program. As the points awarded to the previous skater flashed on the Scoreboard, the crowd erupted in an explosion of boos and catcalls, protesting the low scores. Dorothy thought they were jeering her, and her already fragile composure collapsed. In tears, she ran off the ice into her father's arms.

For some performers, the day might have ended there. Not for Dorothy. After realizing the boos were not aimed at her, she collected herself and skated back out on the ice, head and shoulders set in grim determination. Her music started and suddenly came the smile like a flash of sunlight. Surely, evenly, she started to skate, and soon was sweeping through her routine as if gravity did not exist. The crowd was caught up in the moment, and in four minutes Dorothy turned the entire, week-long championship into her show.

That can happen any time, anywhere that she is skating well. At her best, Dorothy embodies the old adage that power perfected becomes grace. Skating with elan and subtle musicality, she skims over the ice, gliding smoothly into jumps that flow without hesitation into spins and spirals. There are no seams in her skating. "Every move is right, every line is clean," says two-time figure-skating Gold Medalist Dick Button. "Everything is in the right position." Charles Foster, a judge at the U.S. championships in Colorado Springs last month, put it this way: "Dorothy skates with finesse; she performs a difficult program, works at high speed, plus she interprets the music with feeling. She's a beautiful skater."

Blessed with a strong, trim build (she is 5 ft. 3 in., 115 lbs.), Dorothy has total body control, one reason she can land a jump so softly. That same sure strength allows her to perform skating's more difficult maneuvers gracefully. Like Mikhail Baryshnikov, the ballet dancer whom she idolizes, Dorothy never shows preparation for a leap. She seems to hang nonchalantly in flight. Her most beautiful move is a delayed Axel in which she hangs suspended before completing 1 1/2 revolutions in the air. Skating fanciers also admire Dorothy's spins: high-speed yet delicate rotations within rotation. They seem effortless.

Perhaps her most remarkable quality is the most elusive one: her musicality. Every move is annealed to rhythm; each musical line is filled out fluidly rather than punctuated abruptly. When it is all going right, Dorothy's performance can inspire even Dorothy, who has skated it hundreds of times. "You're skating and doing the most difficult things," she says, "and the audience is with you. They're clapping, cheering. You're floating. It's like nothing else I've ever felt."

On some occasions, that feeling can be hard to achieve. Inconsistency is a problem, as Dorothy will admit herself. Says Button bluntly: "She can blow it." The reason is nerves, her invariable, inescapable stage fright. "It's like going to an execution," says Dorothy, "your own. I stand there in the dressing room thinking, 'Am I going to fall? Why am I doing this? I'll never do it again.' "

Last month at the national championships, the tension, compounded by fatigue, disrupted Dorothy's performance: she left several jumps out of her program. "She can't afford to do that in Innsbruck," says her coach, Carlo Fassi, who guided Peggy Fleming to her gold medal in Grenoble eight years ago. He is right. Dorothy's main competition in the Olympics will be European Champion Diane de Leeuw, an unflappable skater.

One reason for Dorothy's clockwork anxiety is simple lack of confidence. "I think I look lousy," she says. When an ABC sports crew offered to rerun a video tape of her free-skating program in Colorado Springs, she declined. She is particularly afraid that a fall will ruin her performance. "Think how much time I've put into this, and how much other people have to help me. With one mistake, it could all go down the drain."

If it seems odd that a three-time national champion should be plagued by such doubts--every skater falls in competition--it is not in Dorothy's case. She is a girl of many moods. One friend calls her "a mass of conflicting emotions." A lover of classical music and ballet, she passes the time at home reading gothic potboilers and watching soap operas. She is a loner who also can suddenly turn herself on to become the life of the party. Recently, while the U.S. figure-skating team waited to be interviewed on the phone by NBC, Dorothy settled behind the spacious desk of a hotel executive, grabbed a fat cigar, and began dictating satiric messages to a fellow skater.

Though she goes to sleep by 9 o'clock every night to be fresh for dawn practice, Dorothy manages an active social life, including boy friends in more than one port. "I guess I've been in love twice," she says philosophically. "Not now, though. It hurts so much when it's finished, it's not worth it." Finally, she is a woman with a potentially lucrative career (she could sign a six-figure contract to turn pro today), who says she has "never really given much thought to women's liberation."

It could be that she has been too busy skating. Ever since the day, eleven years ago, that Dorothy pulled on a pair of $5.95 skates at a pond near the Hamills' Riverside, Conn., home, she--with her parents--has been swept away by the sport. It has pulled Dorothy out of school to practice seven hours a day, six days a week, plunged her and her mother into a nomadic life between Lake Placid, Tulsa and Denver to work with the best coaches. Last year she saw her elder brother and sister for less than a week. Skating has also drained the paycheck of her father, an executive at Pitney Bowes. Chalmers Hamill attends every major competition, epoxy and screwdriver in hand for last-second repairs on Dorothy's skates. His wife agonizes while waiting in the hotel, too nervous to watch her daughter skate.

"My parents said, 'If you want to skate, that's fine,' " recalls Dorothy, " 'as long as you work hard.' " Not that anyone has regrets. "I don't even know what it's like to be normal," laughs Dorothy, "but I've never really found anything I liked to do as much as skating." Adds her mother, "For us, it was just like having a child who's good in school. You sacrifice."

Considering the work that has gone into getting ready for Innsbruck, the Hamills need all the commitment they can muster. For Dorothy the preparation has centered on practice. Few other athletes work as long or as repetitiously in quest of evanescent perfection as a figure skater. Training with Fassi in Denver, and more recently with Peter Burrows in Port Washington, Dorothy has spent hours etching the compulsory figures she must skate to near perfection in Innsbruck (see box). She prefers the effort that goes into polishing her free-skating program.

There is more work to be done off the ice. With a hand from her parents, Dorothy has selected her music (schmaltzy but stirring themes from old Errol Flynn movies) for the free-skating program. She has spent a week in Toronto arranging the free program with Choreographer Brian Foley. Meanwhile, new costumes have been made. Finally, there are the skates. She will need at least two pairs: one with blades that have short toe picks and a shallow bottom groove between the edges, the better for gliding through the figures; another with oversize toe picks and a deep groove to add bite for the free style.

Even with all these preparations, Dorothy has not quite convinced herself that she is going to the Olympics. "When people say 'Good luck in Innsbruck,' " she explains, "I have to pinch myself." If Dorothy is beaten, it will probably be by Diane de Leeuw, who has a strong if unexceptional style. De Leeuw, though able to skate for The Netherlands because her mother is Dutch, is a resident of Paramount, Calif. She chose to enter under the Dutch flag because her family thought Diane would make that Olympic team more easily. The other serious contender is Christine Errath of East Germany, who is back after breaking her leg last year. The women's competition may also offer deft performances from two youngsters: Russia's Yelena Vodorezova, 12, and Linda Fratianne, 15, of Los Angeles.

It will be the first Olympics for Hamill and Fratianne, as for most American competitors. For many the outcome will be less than their dreams. Medal chances for the U.S. ski teams are marginal, and finishes in the top ten will also be scarce, especially in the Nordic events. The U.S. hockey team will be outmanned and outgunned by a Russian squad that may be the best in the world--amateur or professional. Even America's speed skaters, who are medal contenders, will enter the Games underdogs to a sleek Soviet team.

For Americans following the action, the question will be why? Why can't a nation of more than 200 million people and great wealth produce Winter Olympic teams that are the equal of entries from Russia and the far smaller European nations? For one thing, winter sports are simply not as glamorous in the U.S. as in Europe. A successful skier here labors in obscurity, while in Europe he is often a national hero. What's more, in Europe amateurs do not exist. Topflight skiers quietly receive fat fees from equipment manufacturers. Where private enterprise stops, governments step in. The Russian hockey team, for instance, is a state-supported operation. So is the speed-skating team. The American speed-skating program is so impoverished that there is only one 400-meter rink in the entire 50 states--compared with nine, for example, in The Netherlands.

The support U.S. teams receive--from individual benefactors, corporations and athletic clubs--is channeled partially through the U.S. Olympic Committee, which finances Olympic-related expenses such as travel to Innsbruck, and partly via individual team organizations.

A few Americans do have a chance for some kind of medals. Besides Hamill, there is Downhiller Cindy Nelson, 20, from Lutsen, Minn. She ranked seventh in this season's overall standings at the end of last week. Her family runs a ski area and Cindy has been racing since she was six years old.

Among speed skaters, Sheila Young, 25, of Birmingham, Mich., has covered the 500-meter sprint less than a second off the world record. When she is not skating, Sheila can be found cycling, sculpting abstract forms in stone, or reading Kurt Vonnegut and mystical German Novelist Hermann Hesse. "Hesse," she says, "has made me appreciate the beauty of little things."

Sheila's teammate, Peter Mueller, 21, could also pick up some gold. A long and strong-legged product of Madison, Wis., he too is a sprinter--as well as one of the speed-skating team's coolest poker players. "Peter's a fanatic," says his fiancee and fellow Skater Leah Poulos, 24, herself a medal possibility at 500 meters. "When he wants to be good at something, he doesn't stop." Rounding out the key contenders are U.S. ice dancing champions Colleen O'Connor and Jim Millns. The top American pairs duo--Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner--won't win a medal, but will skate with a flourish.

Naturally, Americans watching the Games will be pulling for Young and Mueller and Hamill. Austrians will be banking on victory from their skiing heroes, and Russians will be cheering on their countrymen. But despite the rivalries and loyalties, the news from Innsbruck will boil down to something as old and transcendent as the idea of the Olympics--the lonely, private, consummate effort to exceed in the human arena, and in competition where the drama and grace of the match surpass all else.

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