Gordeeva's `My Sergei' Tells Touching Love Story

MILWAUKEE - She looks so small out there by herself. Even having other skaters practicing at the same time as Ekaterina Gordeeva cannot diminish the impression of her being stranded on a glacier.

Gordeeva feels the same thing. There is for her a loneliness she once experienced as the temporary isolation of total concentration but now is a permanent solitude. There once was G&G, touching the world in surpassing harmony as Russians, lovers, two-time Olympic skating champions and parents.

Gordeeva and her late husband, Sergei Grinkov, had an extra dimension together. He was 6 feet tall and 163 pounds. She is only 5-2 and 95 pounds.

"Ice so cold. Rink so big. And little woman so alone on the ice," said choreographer Marina Zueva, who has worked with Gordeeva for 14 years.

Zueva was speaking last month, after Gordeeva had just finished her first competition as a singles skater, the World Team Championship. Nine months had passed since Grinkov died of a heart attack at 28, ending a partnership of such intense personal and professional concert that no one who ever saw them could fail to mourn his - and its - passing.

In Gordeeva's new book, "My Sergei," written with Sports Illustrated's Ed Swift, it becomes even more evident how special their relationship was and how multidimensional a man Grinkov was.

Literate, compassionate, affectionate, possessed of an innate musicality and a zestful temperament, he was a husband who once pushed the car out of the garage to avoid waking his wife while he went to buy things for a surprise breakfast in bed. No wonder the book is subtitled, "A Love Story."

"This is my life"

Gordeeva, 25, a Muscovite transplanted to Simsbury, Conn., could not imagine ever skating with another partner. So, at least for now, she is soldiering on alone, a singles skater for the first time since age 10, struggling through a four-minute program to a haunting piece of Rachmaninoff, falling on one jump and stepping out of the landing on another. With Grinkov, perfection had not only been an ideal but a commonplace.

"The first few times I skated singles in shows were terrible," she said over lunch in a Milwaukee hotel as she described her performances after her debut during a Grinkov tribute last winter. "I would come out on the ice totally lost. I couldn't feel the arena or the crowd.

"I was so used to have someone big around me, I was pretty sure everyone could see us and feel us. In singles, I thought no one can even see me out there. After a show in Paris last spring, I was so upset I thought, `I'm not going to skate anymore.' I am getting more comfortable with it as I continue."

Since her agent, Jay Ogden of the International Management Group, suggested Gordeeva try singles last spring, she has been in demand for both shows and competitions. With the judging emphasis on artistry in most professional skating competitions, her limited jumping ability is not a serious liability.

"To be honest," Gordeeva said, "this is the way I can earn money. This is my life."

Skating helped healing

What some forget is when Grinkov died, Gordeeva had lost not only her husband and the father of their daughter but, at first, also her career and her daily touchstone of training for that career.

It was skating that helped Gordeeva emerge from the sorrow that followed her husband's late November funeral in Moscow. For days, she sat around her parents' apartment, with nothing to do other than experience the same feelings over and over again. Finally, after waking up with tears in her eyes several successive mornings, she realized the sport could provide a different focus.

"It was part of the healing process, I guess," she said.

She finished second to Kristi Yamaguchi in singles last weekend in the U.S. Pro Championships in Albany, N.Y. It was the first time for Gordeeva to be scored head-to-head (rather than in a team format) against other top singles skaters, including Olympic champions Yamaguchi, Katarina Witt and Dorothy Hamill. After skating several years with Grinkov in the Stars On Ice tour, she will do singles performances this winter.

"For me, pairs skating always will be more interesting," she said. "To create and tell a whole story is much easier together.

"I'm thinking it would be possible now for me to skate with another person. It will never be the same as with Sergei, and I don't want it to be. I am starting to enjoy singles now, but if something came up in pairs, I could probably do it."

"Don't forget Sergei"

Alone on the ice, Gordeeva still thinks of herself skating as a pair. What she wants people to see is not just a young woman learning to move forward after tragedy by using her best and favorite skill. In her presence, she wants the audiences to feel another's.

"Maybe when people see me on the ice, they will also remember about Sergei," she said. "This is the way I can tell people: `Don't forget Sergei and how we skated together."'

There is a reminder in the music, the Rachmaninoff Elegy in E-Flat Minor, from a recording with the late composer at the piano. An elegy is a lamentation for the dead. And Rachmaninoff, as both pianist and composer, radiated the soul of Russian romanticism, just as Gordeeva and Grinkov did as skaters. They became the romantic period's sporting exponents, winning Olympic free skates in 1988 and 1994 to the music of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Chopin.

"I never liked to watch our skating (on tape) and never really appreciated it," she said. "Now when I watch the video tapes, I really like to see it. I realize now it was something so up high."

Grinkov would tolerate nothing less. He wanted to compete in another Olympics because he had made a couple of mistakes in 1994.

"When he said this to me last year, I said, `You are kidding,"' Gordeeva recalled. "The way he looked at me, so serious, he probably meant it."

It was not Grinkov's seriousness but his playful expressions that linger in the mind. That he spoke little English made it necessary for most to judge his mood by the shape of, rather than the sound emanating from, a mouth that seemed perpetually locked in an impish grin.

That smile lives on in Daria, 4, a Montessori preschooler in Connecticut. The little girl has begun to ask more and more questions about her father, questions that demand painful answers. Gordeeva struggles to overcome the sadness and tears Daria sees in Grinkov's mother when she talks about her late son.

"I don't want Daria to cry when she talks about Sergei," Gordeeva said. "I want her to be able to explain to all people who her father was and what a wonderful man he was."

Entirely on her own

Gordeeva fully came to comprehend that after he dropped her during a lift in practice three months before the 1988 Olympics. The sadness he showed during visits to the hospital where Gordeeva was recovering from a serious concussion, she recalls in the book, "had a buoyant effect on my skating. . . . Before that, we had been like two skaters. After that, we were a pair."

They were a singular pair, in their talent and their oneness. Gordeeva, who describes herself in "My Sergei" as a sheltered, solitary child, subsumed herself so thoroughly into being G&G on and off the ice that she achieved happiness in a form of splendid isolation. That attitude left her to make severe adjustments after he died.

"I learned I didn't have experience in life," she said in Milwaukee. "We skated together, we always were together, we had our own world. I never looked very much around myself or made decisions for myself.

"When I skated with Sergei, I always was showing my feelings and emotions only to him, and I didn't have to show them to the audience. Now I have to express myself in front of all these people."

Being alone also means standing on her own two feet for an entire program, which is more mentally and physically taxing than she anticipated. In pairs, there was time to rest her legs while being lifted by or holding on to Grinkov.

"I am learning now. Maybe it's sad, but I also learned to appreciate every day, not to be upset with bad weather or a late plane. It is weird but true: Life is short."

The Rachmaninoff Elegy lasts 4 minutes 5 seconds. It is long enough for Ekaterina Gordeeva to experience and express her past, present and future, all by herself.