The Word She Uses Is "Invincible"

By Tom Callahan

The loveliest Olympic sport, figure skating, actually preceded the first Winter Games by 16 years, debuting in the summer of 1908. Attention quickly centered on the women (skating people prefer you to say ladies), though dimpled Sonja Henie was just 15 in 1928 when she won the first of three gold medals that launched her multimillion-dollar movie career. In at least two respects, the blond Norwegian starlet of Sun Valley Serenade is still the ideal. East Germany's Katarina Witt, reigning world and Olympic champion, is ( studying to be an actress. And U.S. Challenger Debi Thomas, Witt's primary competition in Calgary, likes the sound of multimillions.

From Tenley Albright's time in 1956, through the princess phases of 1960's Carol Heiss (who made less than multimillions in Snow White and the Three Stooges), of 1968's Peggy Fleming and of 1976's Dorothy Hamill, Americans got to feeling sort of proprietary about the ladies' gold necklace. "But now it's been twelve years since we've won it," says Thomas, with a look of eagles, "and I'm going to fight to bring it back." Unballing her fists, she mutters to herself, "If I can keep my head screwed on, I just know I can win the gold."

It is a remarkable head. In a 40-year flashback to Albright and Dick Button, a Harvard doctor and lawyer who won gold medals in their free time, Thomas, 20, is a Stanford premed student with an out-of-fashion perspective. "Maybe I have different values, I don't know," she says. "But I think my outlook on life has been my advantage. Things like the importance of an education and being whatever you can be give me an inner strength to pull things off on the ice."

Like most wisdom, hers can be traced to a loss. "At 13 years old, I had three triple jumps, and I thought, 'I can't be beat.' But I didn't even make it to the sectionals, let alone the nationals. Right then I decided I wasn't going to put the rest of my life on the line in front of some judges who might not like my yellow dress. That was the year I did correspondence school: you know, mail-it-in junk. I didn't learn a thing, and I wanted to learn everything."

By the way, Thomas is black. But she seems to regard her race as the merest coincidence. When she hears the term role model, she cringes. "I never felt I had to have a role model," she says. "It was like, 'O.K., I want to be a doctor, and I want to be a skater, and I'm going to.' I didn't think I had to see a black woman do this to believe it's possible." Her burgeoning mail tells her that in spite of herself, she has been an inspiration to young black women and is about to become a nationwide, if not a worldwide, symbol. "If so," she says, "I have to be glad."

In fact, Thomas had a very strong role model in Janice, her mother. Most of the skaters have strong mothers, and most of the mothers have mink coats. "But my mother's not a rink mom," says Debi. "She works." She's a programmer-analyst in California's Silicon Valley, divorced from Debi's father since 1974. "A coach once advised Mom to rent a fur coat just for the nationals, but I did all right that year without the fur coat." Janice Thomas laughs and says, "They tell you it's to attract sponsorship money, as well as to look a certain part when you're away from the arena. I told them, 'Too bad.' I didn't want them changing me either."

Including the coach's salary (Debi's coach since she was ten has been a Scot named Alex McGowan), a world-class training program is likely to cost a skater's family $25,000 a year. "I'm kind of a spoiled brat," Thomas says. "It's like, my mom didn't always have the money for something, but we'd get it anyway." The "brat" fails to mention all the dresses she personally sewed and beaded, or the years she made do with other people's customized boots. She does say, "Sometimes I went without lessons for a few months until we'd catch up on the bills." Of her father, who also works in the computer industry, Thomas notes carefully, "He helps now, but it was my mom who put it all on the line for me."

Janice Thomas, a veterinarian's daughter, grew up in an atmosphere of achievement around Wichita, where it took her a while in the '50s to realize that blacks were restricted to the balconies of movie houses; she thought it was the preferred view. Quickly married and divorced, she occasionally toted an infant son to physics class at Wichita State. Her second brief marriage produced both a daughter and a transfer to San Jose. The baby girl audited graduate school and made early memories of symphonies, operas, ballets and ice shows. "Debi comes from several generations of people who refused to think in black-and-white terms," her mother says. "But I communicated my lunch- counter experiences to her, and she's had a few of her own. When Debi was eleven, we came home from a competition to a cross burning in the front yard. But our reaction to awful things written on the garage door, or eggs splattered all over the car, was to recognize them as isolated incidents, to wipe them off and not make a big deal of it."

In a sport so subjective and judgmental, not to mention whiter than several shades of snow blindness, a black child might be excused for factoring racism into indecipherable marks. Especially during Thomas' dues-paying years, peachier opponents without even a double Axel (2 1/2 rotations in midair) were outscoring her triple jumps. After one such disappointment, Janice suggested a refinement. Motioning toward a competitor, Debi whined, "That one doesn't do it." Her mother answered cheerfully, "Well, that one's got blond hair, and you don't." In the usual skating course, the painstaking progression (procession?) ultimately has as much to do with stick-to-itiveness, politics and reputation as it does with skill. She made her way.

Since the age of five, after Thomas was enchanted by the ice-show antics of Werner Groebli, the Swiss Mr. Frick of Frick & Frack, she has kept an expression of joy and a capacity for wonder, even through the past twelve years of six-hour-a-day practices. Her coach always has been and always will be "Mr. McGowan," but she says, "I've never been a puppet on a string." Her earliest impression: "You know what's the best thing about skating? You can walk without moving." As a tomboy, she gave momentary consideration to a career in ice hockey, and still wrinkles her nose and bats her eyelashes when she purrs, "Figure skating is such a bea-u-ty sport." She is given to regular flights of whimsy ("Why do they throw flowers? Why not pizza?") that occasionally leave the galaxy. "What I'd really like to be is the first skater in space. Can you imagine what that would be like? Once you start spinning, you'd never stop."

Her first major stop was the nationals of 1986, where at 18 she succeeded Tiffany Chin as the U.S. ladies champion. Fourth in the 1984 Olympics at 16, Chin was the appointed darling of '88 until both her constitution and confidence began to crumble. She turned pro last November, some say to protect her muscles, others say to preserve her reputation.

A month after her nationals victory, early in 1986, Thomas flew off to Geneva for a summit with the Brooke Shields of Sarajevo, the G.D.R's great Witt (pronounced Vitt). And, for the first time since the Olympics, Witt had to settle for second. Still only 18, Debi was world champion, and the single word she had used to sum herself up on Stanford's application forms suddenly seemed an understatement: "Invincible." Within a year, that would change. Tasting some of Chin's medicine, on two throbbing Achilles tendons, Thomas lost the '87 nationals to Jill Trenary. Then in the '87 worlds at Cincinnati, Witt took Thomas in their rematch. Even as her title evaporated, Debi was entranced by the sight of Witt atwirl. "The girl," she said, "is blazing."

Maybe Thomas was reacting to Witt when Debi finagled a consultation with the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. "I couldn't believe it," she says. "Standing right there. Baryshnikov. I was so inspired. The neat thing is, I think he was inspired too." He suggested a few points of emotional emphasis, an exaggerated movement here and there. "Could you do this?" he asked gently. Then he turned her over to a colleague, former American Ballet Theater Soloist George de la Pena. "I found her to be extraordinarily intelligent," says De la Pena., "and extraordinarily shy. A lot of people look at her as being an extrovert and a bit of a comic. But I think it's a shell that hides a very soft center. Her emotional capacity is quite deep. We worked on opening up."

It had been 54 years since a dethroned champion regained the U.S. title, but Thomas brought a revived confidence to the Denver nationals last month, a fresh sense of drama. "Baryshnikov let me see it," she says. "George made me feel it." With two triple jumps, slam-bang, at the start of her long program, Thomas left Trenary and Caryn Kadavy behind. They join her on the U.S. team. Describing the feeling, Thomas says, "You're so high, a tingle goes through your whole body. If you've done something, and you know it's right, it's like, 'Ahhh.' The people can see it in your face, and it reflects off them right back to you." She stands 5 ft. 6 in., weighs 116 lbs., and is acquainted with power, grace and stamina. While she is skating, she is talking to herself. "I'm going to eat this one alive . . . I conquered that jump . . . extra energy now . . . Oh God, here it comes."

Her third of five triples, the especially treacherous one, is something called a triple Salchow-double toe loop combination. Twice in a row now, including at the nationals, she has abbreviated it. "I don't know why I chicken out. A lot of times in practice, you'll take off completely crooked on a hard jump and still land it. If you trust your nerve as well as your skill, you're capable of a lot more than you imagine. I'm going to land that one in the Olympics . . . if it kills me."

With the nationals won, Thomas packed up her 1984 Toyota and drove from Denver to Boulder, where practice ice has been made available. She is supposed to be on a sabbatical from Stanford but could not resist several courses last semester at the University of Colorado. "I'm used to a suicidal load, calculus, chemistry and stuff -- I whale on it. I took German here just for fun, and I've had a blast." Of course, her study of German is not entirely ! idle. "I want to speak a little of it to Katarina. She's all right, I like her. I can't exactly say we're friends, but we've been able to sign each other's programs. 'Good luck. May the best man win.' "

Underscoring her sixth straight European championship with seven perfect sixes, Witt is poised to go out on top at 22. East Germany's system of athletics may be the acclaimed model of scientific selection, but Witt ended up the sweetheart of Karl-Marx-Stadt for the purest reasons: her kindergarten happened to be next door to the skating hall, and her parents were softhearted. In Valley Girl German (Rhine Valley), she explains, "I bugged them until they finally gave in and registered me for skating classes. They never thought it would go so far."

So far that Witt's imposing coach, Jutta Muller, has dragged her husband Bringfried into Witt's service. He wrestles her bundles of fan mail that bulge with impassioned letters from both sides of the Berlin Wall, including the marriage proposals of "U.S. boys," from locations, Witt says, "you'd never think cared about figure skating." Considering her appearance, this is a possibility. "If she were an American," the U.S.'s Fleming once said, "her face would be everywhere. I mean, look at her."

Decidedly not an American, Witt is proud of her distinction as the "worker's hero" and thinks of herself as a "diplomat in warm-ups." Talking in Karl-Marx-Stadt with journalists, including TIME's James Graff, she says, "When I do well, coming from a socialist country like the G.D.R., other countries have grounds to respect us. It is the working people who provide the basis for me to pursue skating at all. In a way, by skating and appearing on television, I'm saying a little danke schon to the public." Her "you're welcome" comes in the form of a shimmering wardrobe, a pleasant apartment and a white Wartburg sedan, for which she did not have to wait twelve years. "When you do well, you simply have certain privileges," she says. "That's true everywhere."

Looking forward to an acting career, she has already started glancing back. "I've been skating for 16 years; it's been my whole life from morning to evening. I think for the first time it will be hard for me." A self-described flirt, one who professes to be "naturally lazy," Witt nonetheless will miss the metronome discipline of Muller. "When you do something special," Witt says, "you become someone special too." But: "Skating gets harder as you get older because you have a name to lose."

Describing the one she could lose it to as "hard to get along with," Witt might be referring to the juicy fact that both Thomas and she will be registering at Calgary under the same assumed name: Carmen. Independently, they selected music from Bizet's opera, and naturally neither would give a thought to changing. As an archetypal character, Carmen has been interpreted in a thousand ways, but this will be the first time one of them will survive.

Especially for the capitalists, the disparate value of gold and silver is undeniable. "It still shocks me, the warmth and affection," Hamill says twelve years after her triumph at Innsbruck. "It never goes away." She continues to make star turns on television. Meanwhile, Lake Placid Silver Medalist Linda Fratianne, Thomas' childhood favorite, has done seven years of ten-month tours for Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom on Ice. Since 1980, skating's three disciplines (school figures, short program, long program) have been reformulated. By today's measurements, Fratianne would have won the gold medal. "But sometimes I think my sanity is better off with the silver," she says. "My father used to send me a bouquet of flowers before every competition. The card always read, 'Win or lose, you're still my champ.' "

Financially, Thomas figures, "whatever happens, I'll do pretty well." She has already started making commercials and, within the new amateur codes, has been stashing cash in a trust fund. "I want to make a lot of money. Someday I'd like to start a skating training center." To that end, she has discarded microbiology as a potential specialty in favor of orthopedic surgery. The Boston surgeon, Dr. Albright, admires both Thomas' skating ("She takes me out on the ice with her") and her thinking. "Debi's going to discover that there really are biochemical and physiological reasons for all these little things she's worked out on the ice. 'Oh, that's why!' she'll say. When the Olympics are over, I really think she'll need something bigger than she is, something as all-consuming as medicine."

As the Games approach, Thomas reflects, "This last amateur year has been like a long chapter finally closing. A new one will open up then. Back to Stanford, on to medical school. I never wanted to feel that if I didn't win the gold medal, I was nothing. I'm not worried anymore." Her mother says, "When I look back now, it isn't the money or the miles I think of, it's + all the years she skated well. All the times she quit, all the times I quit. Luckily, we never quit together." The Olympic theme piped increasingly on TV ads is beginning to get to Debi. "Goose bumps," she says. "I'll go through the house saying, 'I can't do it, I can't do it.' Then I'll get there, and I'll love it. One moment of glory is worth everything."