Inside Edge : A Revealing Journey Into the Secret World of Figure Skating

Book by Brennan Christine

The figure skaters gathered slowly in the mahogany-paneled lobby of the majestic Mirror Lake Inn in Lake Placid, New York, flashing no smiles, barely saying a word. The collection of gregarious entertainers had been reduced to silent, wide-eyed stares. The crackling wood in the fireplace made the room's only noise.

They had met in hotel lobbies in fancy street clothes hundreds of times in the past, but never for an event as devastating as this. On a cold night in late November 1995, they were to travel through snowswept Adirondack mountain roads to a nearby funeral home for a private wake for Sergei Grinkov, their colleague and friend who died of a massive heart attack during a skating practice the day before.

Scott Hamilton, who always has been the leader of the Stars of Ice tour, came down from his room first. He had not yet heard the news of the day, that an autopsy performed on Grinkov revealed that his left anterior artery, which feeds the heart muscle, was virtually closed. The autopsy also found that the twenty-eight-year-old Grinkov's heart was enlarged from high blood pressure and that the two-time Olympic gold medalist had suffered an earlier heart attack within twenty-four hours of his death.

"I talked to him that morning," Hamilton said when told the news. "I couldn't tell that anything was wrong. He was talking about Dasha [Daria, the three-year-old daughter of Grinkov and his wife and skating partner, Ekaterina Gordeeva] coming to be with them, and he was great and very excited. If anything was wrong with him, I never knew."

Grinkov collapsed while he and Gordeeva were practicing for the opening performance of the 1995-96 Stars on Ice tour. Gordeeva and Grinkov were running through a program on the USA rink, one of four ice surfaces in Lake Placid's Olympic Center, when he was stricken. Several skaters said that after lifting Gordeeva, Grinkov set her back down and then stopped skating.

"Are you okay?" Gordeeva asked her husband.

"I just feel a little dizzy," he told her.

She helped him sit on the ice. He then started to lay back and lost consciousness. Rescue workers arrived within three or four minutes but they couldn't revive him. By then, word of Grinkov's collapse had reached the other skaters working in an adjacent rink. They all frantically raced to the USA rink and were standing or kneeling beside Grinkov when he was carried off by paramedics and taken to Adirondack Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 12:28 P.M. Monday, November 20, 1995, three days before Thanksgiving.

"They're devastated, obviously," Hamilton said about the Stars on Ice cast. "They can't make sense out of any of it, and neither can I. He was the biggest, strongest, most capable of all of us, and he's gone."

Paul Wylie, like Hamilton, said he never saw any indication that Grinkov was having heart pain or shortness of breath.

"The guy was on the bike every day," Wylie said. "One of my last vivid memories of him was last Saturday, working out in the hotel gym with him. We were both on the bikes and he was lifting weights too. He looked over at me and said in his Russian accent, 'Good boy, good boy.' He was always like that."
Wylie said the skaters all are responsible for their own medical checkups, adding he knew only that Grinkov was seeing a doctor for a back that had been giving him problems for months.

"It's not like a team sport," he said. "We're all independent contractors. If I miss a show, I don't get paid. We all know it's our responsibility. I think Sergei did look out for his health."

The day after Grinkov died, Wylie wandered into the USA rink, a place most of the others were avoiding.

"I had to walk out there, even though my mind was flashing back to what happened there on Monday, to seeing him lying on the ice with the paramedics around him, putting my hand on Katia's back, touching his skate, praying that he would be okay," Wylie said. "I didn't want to go, but I told myself, 'No, you are going to get on this ice.' It was a haunting thing, especially skating over the patch of ice where he lay and that feeling of helplessness that came rushing back to me, but I had to face it head on."

Gordeeva and Grinkov, who was five foot eleven and weighed 180 pounds, won the 1988 and 1994 Olympic gold medals in pairs skating, as well as four world championships. They had settled into a lucrative professional career that allowed them to perform their graceful and romantic programs before more than half a million spectators a year. In addition, they regularly appeared in televised professional events.

"What they had is what everyone wants," Kristi Yamaguchi said. "My first year on tour, I watched them almost every night. I'd go out and stand in a corner and just watch them. They just floated across the ice."

"Rosalynn Sumners and I stood on the ice during a number last year as they skated, and we always said to each other, 'Isn't that amazing?' " Wylie said. "They way she looked at him, this power between them, so beautiful and pure, yet so effortless in appearance. They reminded me of Romeo and Juliet."

On the 1994-95 tour, Hamilton led into a romantic duet by the pair by standing alone on the ice after being snubbed by various female skaters. He told the audience: "Then something catches your eye, something so pure, so genuine, so incredible, that you realize that, yes, you can in fact have it all."

At the private wake, Gordeeva told several of her fellow skaters, "Maybe it was too perfect."

Living and traveling in a new land, often without their daughter and with so many American stars, was not always easy, Gordeeva and Grinkov said during a wistful interview ten months before his death.

"Sometimes I think people like us and think we're so good," said Gordeeva, who spoke for the both of them. "But when people like Paul Wylie and Katarina Witt skate, the fans give them their hearts. I can't think we're the best here. I still feel like we're guests [with the American fans].

"I know for sure we will never get a standing ovation. We had one once, at Madison Square Garden, but the fans do that mostly for other skaters. A standing ovation would be the best for me. A standing ovation is the only thing we wish for. But maybe I need to change my mint, because it's hard [for Russians] to take America's heart. Americans like, 'Wow,' but we are more like, 'Awwww...' "
As Gordeeva talked, Grinkov, who spoke little English, nodded his head and smiled.

Two days after Grinkov's death, the day before Thanksgiving, Wylie dashed out of the inn to get his picture taken for a Russian visa. He was preparing to go to Moscow for Grinkov's funeral.

Asking for directions to get to the photographer, Wylie was told by the other skaters to "make a turn at the road that goes up to Sergei and Katia's."
The condominium where Grinkov and Gordeeva had been living was just up the street.

"You always said their names together, and that's the way we'll always think of them," Wylie said. "The two of them, together."

"You don't think of one without the other," Hamilton said.

While Hamilton and Wylie prepared to fly to Russia, Gordeeva, her parents, and 1992 Olympic gold medalist Viktor Petrenko drove home from the condo to her permanent U.S. home in Simsbury, Connecticut. There, they picked up Daria and left for Moscow. Gordeeva and her daughter observed a traditional Russian Orthodox forty-day mourning period before returning to the United States.

In late February 1996, Gordeeva and the Stars on Ice cast skated a memorial for Grinkov in Hartford, Connecticut. As a national television audience watched on CBS, Gordeeva performed on her own in public for the first time, with a spotlight shining where Grinkov would have been.

Even a day or two after Grinkov's death, the other skaters knew Gordeeva would return to the ice.

"She'll come back to us," Hamilton said. "That's what she is, a skater. She understands we are her family and she'll come back to us when it's time."
"It's hard for us as Americans to understand, because we're not from that culture, but skating is of the utmost importance to her family and to her," Wylie said. "I really do hope she comes back. She's just a precious, precious person."