They Call Them Ladies?
INSIDE EDGE
by Christine Brennan

If there was one person the USFSA would have wanted to patriate and deck out in red, white, and blue, it would have been East Germany's Katarina Witt. Throughout the history of her sport, there has never been a stronger competitor, a more crafty and calculating athlete, than Witt. Man or woman. She had the look of a seductress, the gait of a truck driver. She knew what she had to do to win, and she did it. She was good when she had to be good; great when she had to be better. She wore ruffles, but she stared daggers into the hearts of the women she faced. She improvised to their music in practice. She stood by the ice when they skated and dared them to blink. You could not beat her. You simply could not beat her.

Rosalynn Sumners and Debi Thomas were two of the U.S. women who tried, and failed. Figure skating is such a small world that Witt, Sumners, and Thomas always run into one another, even now. They'll be seventy and still seeing each other at competitions or dinners. Witt and Sumners skated at a few of the same professional competitions in the fall and went on to tour together in Stars on Ice from winter into early spring of I995. Thomas no longer skated competitively. She divorced the man she eloped with after the I988 Olympics and was in her second year of medical school at Northwestern University. But she was not far from her old sport. She gave her opinion when TV stations called. She attended skating events. She planned to visit Witt and Sumners when Stars on Ice, which she was on several years ago herself, pulled into the Midwest in the winter.

From the moment the three women met, their lives were inexorably altered. In Sarajevo in I984, Sumners pulled back on her two last jumps, turning a triple toe loop into a double, and a double axel into a single. She lost the gold medal to Witt by one-tenth of a point on one judge's card, the same margin by which Kerrigan lost to Baiul. In Calgary four years later, Thomas made mistake after mistake, skating so badly she wanted to leave the ice, making it easy for Witt to win.

Years later, each American still viewed the outcome not so much as Witt's victory but as her own loss. That's what losing to Katarina did to you. She won, but you thought you lost. Time didn't change that. But what growing older did do was ease the pain, if not a whole lot, at least a little bit.

In the past couple of years, Witt and Sumners had become good friends. Witt and Thomas are another story. That friendship probably will never fully blossom.

"I remember congratulating her backstage right after it happened, and I remember thinking, 'These people want me to congratulate Katarina for them, not for me,"' Thomas said of the scene in Calgary. "They wanted this whole glorified thing, and I don't work that way. I was totally dazed and she deserved to win and all, but I was just thinking, 'I can't believe I skated that shitty.' That's all I could think. It wasn't like, 'Oh, I hate you for winning.' Even now, people come up and say, 'You should have won,' and I'm like, 'Come on, what competition were you watching?"'

Thomas didn't even win the silver. Witt won the gold in I988, Liz Manley of Canada finished second, and Thomas dropped to third to get the bronze, becoming the first black athlete to win a medal in a Winter Olympics.

"Katarina deserved it," Thomas said. "She really has always gone out and done her best, and she's been lucky enough that everybody else screwed up when she was doing that. That's what happened to me. I've always had a lot of respect for her. I've said it again and again, 'You cannot one-up this girl."'

After Sonja Henie won three consecutive Olympic gold medals from I928 to I936, ten Olympic Games went by before another woman won more than one. Katarina Witt's accomplishment in the 1980s came at a time of unparalleled athletic growth for women figure skaters. Triple jumps that once could be landed only by men now were being mastered by women. The United States was particularly strong; waves of American women rolled into international competitions, each with something more than the next. Elaine Zayak, Rosalynn Sumners, Tiffany Chin, Debi Thomas, Caryn Kadavy, Jill Trenary.

Witt beat them all.

In Calgary, Witt had skated well in the long program, landing four triples, but she had not been exceptional. There was room for Thomas to win. She and Thomas were the "Dueling Carmens," both having chosen music from Bizet's tragic opera. This was like arriving at a party in the same dress. They both found out several months before the Games, but neither one would back down and change.

So they argued about it in the media.

Witt insinuated that Thomas could not perform artistically to the music, that jumping alone would not win the gold medal. "You can either skate to this music or you can express it," Witt said brusquely in Calgary.

Thomas hated the glamour-girl aspect of the sport and fought to remain athletic. She smirked at the idea that Witt's Carmen died at the end.

Normally, skaters who are finished watch the others on a backstage television monitor or get so nervous they can't watch at all. Witt would have none of that. In I985, at the world championships in Tokyo, she stood beside the boards as Chin skated. Witt maintains it wasn't a psychological ploy. Others say it had to be. Whatever it was, Chin didn't beat her.

Witt also had another habit that she maintained wasn't a mind game. It's an unwritten rule in skating practices that when your music is on, you own the ice. Other skaters practice their jumps and spins and footwork around you, but the skater whose music is playing has the right-of-way. Katarina accepted this rule, but with reservations. At the I987 world championships in Cincinnati, when Kadavy's music came on, Witt began to make up her own routine to it. "Everybody looked at me and not her," Witt said. "I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't know I would drive them crazy and make them nervous."

Witt wasn't the only one to take over a practice session. At the I992 Olympics, Surya Bonaly rared back and landed a backflip in front of Midori Ito. Although referee Ben Wright admonished Bonaly (backflips are illegal in Olympic-division skating), the damage was done. Ito was shaken and skittish throughout the rest of the Olympics.

When Witt skated after a competitor, she was devastating. At those 1987 worlds in Cincinnati, Thomas was suffering from Achilles tendinitis in both feet and actually applied ice shavings from an icemaking machine to her ankles before she performed. She went out and skated magnificently, landing all five of her triple jumps. She brought down the house. Everyone who was there thought there was no way Witt could beat her.

With the crowd still roaring for Thomas, Witt coolly skated into position and began her program. Thomas came out to watch. Unbelievably, Witt tried five triple jumps, even though no one thought she could do five triple jumps. On one, she had a slightly flawed landing, but otherwise she was perfect. Witt received a 6.0 from the East German judge-surprise!-and won the title. Thomas finished second.

Alex McGowan, Thomas's coach, was in awe.

"No other skater in the world could do that," he said, shaking his head.

The I988 Olympics were eleven months later. Thomas was pulling off her skate guards, getting ready to take the ice. Witt stood in a group near the boards, just off McGowan's shoulder. She was staring at McGowan and Thomas. As nineteen thousand spectators in the Saddledome looked down, they saw two skaters: Thomas, and Witt.

"I wanted to see it live," Witt said.

Before actually finding a seat in the second row of the arena, Witt saw something that eased her mind. Thomas and McGowan had a habit of slapping each other's palms right before Thomas left him to skate. That night, Thomas and McGowan went to hit their hands together and missed. "I knew she was too nervous," Witt said, "I knew she would not pull it off."

Thomas, however, said she was not nervous. Quite the opposite. She came in too relaxed. The last thing you want, she said, "is a relaxed Debi Thomas. I'm much better neurotic. I just kind of zombified and went out there and was waiting for my music to start, and I said to myself, 'You're not ready.'"

As Thomas's music built to a crescendo of impending doom, she took off for a triple-toe-loop/triple-toe-loop combination, a much more athletically demanding maneuver than anything Witt had tried. Thomas landed the first triple, but two-footed the second one horribly.

Her brain sent her an ominous message: "Well, so much for the program of your life."

At that moment, no more than twenty seconds into her four minute program, Debi Thomas wanted to give up. So she did. She had trouble with two more triples and came off the ice apologizing to McGowan. She now knows that she probably made a mistake in giving up so soon. Had she quickly forgotten about the first error and skated cleanly the rest of the way, she still could have won the gold medal.

It was lust that she had her mind set not simply to win the gold medal, but to win the gold medal by skating perfectly. She wanted it all. So when the perfect performance was frittered away on the first combination jump, her objective was gone, and she gave in.

How silly it sounds now that one jump would make or break a lifelong desire to win the gold medal. But much of what Debi Thomas did that year to prepare for the Olympics followed that flawed logic. She even trained that way. If she missed the combination in practice, she would stop the music and start over again.

"No, no, no!" McGowan would scream out, but it didn't matter. That Saturday night in Calgary, all she could think about was stopping and starting the music over again. But, that time, she could not.

"When she didn't hug me on the podium, it was honest," Witt said of Thomas. "She was just upset. And I can relate to that. You go to the Olympics and everyone expects you to win, and then you're not just second, you're third. And then you're out of your mind, you forget anything around you. And for me, that was somehow honest. All the hugs and everything are not honest. Some are and some aren't. She was at this time honest. She showed that she's upset, so she showed her human-being side, which I respect. Maybe yes, she should have behaved better like a lot of people said, but the whole expectation which was put into her, she just didn't know how to deal with something like this. You have to respect it. While somebody failed in this one thing, why should this one be a bad person?"

Thomas found herself preoccupied with Witt again in early I994. Witt was going back to the Olympics, having been reinstated from the professional ranks, and Thomas was being asked by countless reporters what she thought.

"Katarina's going to win," she would say. "I'm telling you. Nobody knows about the Katarina curse. They're all going to screw up and she's going to win."

Between I988 and I994, Thomas had had more encounters with Witt's tremendous competitiveness. They were on a tour through Italy and neither was in great shape, so they were trying only double jumps. One night near the end of the tour, Thomas tried her triple toe loop and nailed it. Witt, skating after Thomas, saw that and threw in a triple toe loop of her own.

Then, in another exhibition, Thomas performed two triples. Witt had been practicing two herself, but that night went out and did three.

"I'm telling you, you cannot one-up this girl," said Thomas.

Witt did not win a medal at the I994 Winter Games, the first Olympics her parents were able to attend after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She wasn't even close, although her seventh-place finish did beat Tonya Harding. By then, at twenty-eight, she didn't have the jumps of the other women: Baiul, Kerrigan, China's Chen Lu, Harding, and several others. But she did qualify for the final group of six skaters, and she did get to skate last, performing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" as a tribute to the people of Sarajevo, where she won her first gold medal.

"I didn't skate the perfect free program and I wasn't really in the best shape, but I walked away and thought, 'It would have been too good to be true if I would have made a perfect program.'

Thomas of course watched on television in Chicago.

"At first, I couldn't understand why Katarina would go back after winning all there is to win, twice," Thomas said. "But, you know, you could see it in her face. She just loves skating, and she just looked so happy to be there. It was like she really didn't care if she won the thing or not."

Months later, Thomas and Witt talked about it when they ran into each other at a skating event. "I do remember thinking, you know, her parents never got to see her compete and win those gold medals," Thomas said. "And they were there, in Norway. And so she's like, 'It was the best Olympics of all the ones I've done,' and, you know, I believe her. I truly believe that. It's like there are certain things where the emotional value is more than the actual medal itself."