When an airline (the aggrieved passenger didn't even want to say which one) lost Oksana Baiul's figure skates last week on a non-stop flight from Boston to Pittsburgh, she went to the arena that night to work out on the traveling-gym equipment.
Without her skates -- which inexplicably wound up in Montreal -- she couldn't perform in the ice show.
But she wanted to stay conditioned.
"Two or three years ago I'd have been happy if somebody stole my skates," said Baiul, who won the gold medal in the 1994 Winter Olympics. "But (a week ago) I was saying to (teammates), "They lost my life! They lost my life!' "
Baiul was being intentionally melodramatic, but the point was clear enough: She loves skating, and would rather spend a night on the ice than off it. That wasn't the case 15 months ago when she accidentally crashed her Mercedes into a tree near her home in Connecticut. It was well-publicized. She tested as being well over the legal drinking limit.
"I had a lot to learn, a lot of growing up to do," she said. "I'm very appreciative of what I have now."
Baiul skates tonight in a star-studded (Tara Lipinski, Michelle Kwan, Nicole Bobek, Surya Bonaly) figure-skating show at The Crown. It is the Campbell's Soups Champions On Ice 1998 Tour.
Baiul led the new wave of adolescent ice queens. She was Lipinski before Lipinski was Lipinski.
It was four years ago that the 16-year-old Baiul skated flawlessly to a narrow Olympic victory over Nancy Kerrigan.
But to Baiul, in some ways, it seems like four-score and seven years ago.
"This is my sixth (professional) ice tour!" she said.
She is one of the crowd favorites in the ice show. Although she beat the American Kerrigan, she also beat the odds.
"I went to the building (in Lillehammer) just to skate for my (late) mother and my family," Baiul said. "I wanted to be good for them. I had no clue of what was going on. I was not even trying to be the best. I didn't go there to be first, second or third."
She does not make excuses for her drunk-driving conviction. She tells her story without any trace of a woe-is-me attitude. She knows she is blessed, even though the personal side of her life has not had the fairy-tale appearance of her youngest years on the ice. Her mother and father divorced when she was 8 months old, and her mother worked three jobs so Oksana could take skating lessons and have the "best stuff in the Ukraine." Her mother died before seeing her daughter become a world champion and Olympic gold medalist.
Nowadays, it is the "veteran" Baiul who watches over Lipinski. "I've told Tara, "If you have any questions, ask me,' " said Baiul, smiling. "I know how she feels. I've been there. Sometimes I look at her, and I feel so sorry for her. The other day, she had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to fly to Atlanta to do some publicity and then come back and skate in the show. It's been unbelievable for her."
The crowds are always huge for the tour that immediately follows the Olympics, and this year is no exception, Baiul said. The skaters are a third of the way into a 59-city tour (3 1/2 months).
As demanding as that is, it's more fun than remaining an amateur. "Skating the same two programs and nothing else got to be so boring for me," Baiul said. "As a 16-year-old kid at the Olympics I didn't know anything. As an amateur my big goal was to go out there and hit six triple jumps. I didn't think about anything else. I didn't begin to learn how to skate until after I turned pro, and it's taken me four years to realize what being a professional is all about. It's completely different."
How is it different?
"You put everything you've got into a program -- the music, the costume, the skating," she said. "I go out there and skate for the people. I say a prayer before I go out there. "Please help me give everything I've got, on the inside and the outside.' It takes a couple of hours to come down (after a show). It's not hard physically, but it is hard mentally. You want to give everything you've got.
"And I love it."
