Do it for America
LITTLE GIRLS IN PRETTY BOXES
by Joan Ryan

Debi Thomas stood on the ice in the Calgary Saddledome as the final skater of the 1988 Olympics, as much a symbol as an athlete. She was the first African American to win the U.S. Championships, which she did in 1986 and 1988, and the World Championships, which she won in 1986.

Muscular, smart and outspoken, Thomas had come to symbolize the outsider crashing skating's country club ball. She tweaked skating tradition by wearing a black unitard for her technical program at the 1988 Olympics, but she had performed too well and was too popular a skater for the judges to deduct points. She was pretty but not a beauty queen, graceful but not balletic.

She carried onto the Calgary ice not only the hopes of a nation looking for its next Dorothy Hamill but also the hopes of African Americans looking for role models for their daughters. Thomas filled the slot perfectly: while she marched toward the Olympics, she began her freshman year at Stanford University, the first stop in fulfilling her dream of becoming a doctor.

Thomas also felt the expectations of the Northern California skating community, which wanted a homegrown champion. Local judges monitored her practices to make sure she would be ready for Calgary. Her coach demanded she drop out of school for the five weeks before the Olympics to concentrate full-time on her training. She had already signed on with International Management Group to represent her in what would be a financial bonanza if she won the gold.

The pressure to succeed turned skating into a job for Thomas, an eight-hour shift, five to six days a week. What she loved about skating - the sensation of flight, the swirling sense of freedom - had been boxed up and stored with other childish fancies. Skating had become work, grim as a grey suit. Too much money was at stake and too many sacrifices had been made, draining the sport of any fun. "I remember telling my mom, 'I don't even want to go,' " Thomas says. She had wanted to take a week off after winning the national championships in January, then gradually work up to a performance peak the following month in Calgary. Her coach wouldn't hear of it. He wanted her working every day for a month. "But you can't stay at a high for four weeks," Thomas says.

In Calgary, Thomas and her two team mates marched in the Opening Ceremonies, then flew to Colorado to train by themselves until a few days before the competition, sacrificing the camaraderie of the Olympic Village. "It didn't even feel like the Olympics," Thomas recalls. There was no time for the "Olympic Experience." Thomas had gone to Calgary for one purpose, to bring back the gold. "I remember thinking at one time, 'If you don't skate well, you're going to die.' "

Defending Olympic champion Katarina Witt had skated well in her long program but had left enough room for Thomas to beat her. At the edge of the rink Thomas's coach, Alex McGowan, exhorted, "Do it for America!"

Do it for America? "Christ," Thomas thought, "America?"

She stood in the center of the rink waiting for her music, from Bizet's Carmen, to begin, all the pressure and expectations narrowed like a laser onto the spot where she stood. Suddenly Thomas knew she didn't have it. "The old me would have said, 'You have got to get your act together right now. You don't have time for this crap. Do it!' But I gave in. I thought, 'Well, maybe my body will just do it because of the training.' But your body doesn't automatically do things just because you've trained eight hours a day. What makes you really come together under pressure is determination and focus and toughness. And I didn't try to do it."

When she botched a combination of triple jumps fifteen seconds into the four-minute program-she hadn't missed a jump in practice all week-she gave up. She couldn't do what she had come to do, which was to skate the best performance of her life and win the gold. She turned her triple jumps into doubles, her doubles into singles. She finished third, behind Witt and dark horse Canadian Elizabeth Manley.

In what should have been the crowning moment of a remarkable career-she did, after all, earn an Olympic medal-Thomas felt only horror and shame. "It was like one of those tortures in Dante's Inferno. I just wanted to get it over with. I don't remember much of it. I've blocked a lot of the Olympics from my memory.

Up on the victory stand, when she accepted her medal, she felt as if she had let down her coach, her family, America and all African Americans who looked to her as a role model. Thomas wanted to quit after the Olympics, but her coach and agent pressed her to compete at the World Championships the following month. "They thought if I won, then the Olympics wouldn't mean as much. Everyone was thinking in dollar signs," she says. "I sort of suffered through Worlds. That was even more of a disaster. The one thing I do remember is skating my long program at Worlds and I'm screwing my stuff up right and left, and I had the biggest smile on my face because I was just, like, 'You'll never have to do that again.' "

Though she is married and flourishing in medical school at Northwestern University in Illinois, those four minutes at the Olympics still haunt her. Six years later she has yet to watch a tape of her performance. She skated a few years in ice shows while attending college, then left skating for good in 1991. Since then she has skated twice-one time at an outdoor arena in Chicago with friends from med school and the other in the frozen fountain in the park across the street from her apartment. She skated like a child, trying jumps, fooling around. "It was really fun," she remembers. "But I could never go to a rink to skate. When I go to a rink and see people training, I just get chills. I sit there and I think, 'I can't believe I did that for twenty years.' "

Thomas says she has healed most of her wounds and shed the past. But she knows others who haven't. "It's nice when I run into people I used to skate with and I see that they came out okay, because there are some people with a lot of emotional scars. A lot of them just never really realized that life does not revolve around skating. They're still hanging on to it. They never saw that there was something more. I realized after the Olympics that my life wasn't over just because I didn't skate well."