by Robyn Doolittle

Famed Russian champion joins cast of CBC show, will get competitive — soon

On a recent weekday afternoon, 39-year-old Ekaterina Gordeeva is practising at the Upper Canada College rink in Forest Hill. The photographer needs a shot, but Gordeeva is tired after a long practice. She sighs with exhaustion, points to a spot on the ice and skates off in the other direction. At full speed, she rounds back, picks into the ice, and her tiny frame launches into a huge split jump four feet in the air. As soon as she lands, she skates off in the other direction again. This time coming back into a textbook flying camel spin, change layback spin, change sit spin.

Four frames and three minutes later, the shoot is done. That’s Gordeeva — efficient perfection.

More than a decade before Jamie Salé and David Pelletier won Olympic gold with their Love Story routine, there was “G and G” — Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov, the husband and wife Russian pairs team that dominated figure skating for 8 years.

To fans, they were the beloved two-time Olympic champions and four-time world champions, whose on-ice chemistry and technique made them living legends.

But when Grinkov collapsed at practice in November 1995, dying of a fatal heart attack in Gordeeva’s arms, their own tragic love story would touch millions around the world.

For the past 15 years Gordeeva, known as “Katia,” she has performed in ice shows as a solo skater, but Sunday night she returns to the ice as part of a couple in CBC’s Battle of the Blades.

The CBC has not yet announced who Gordeeva — considered to be one of the most talented skaters in pairs history — will be skating with on the show. Internet speculation pairs her with fellow Muscovite Valeri Bure, the “Russian Pocket Rocket” who played for the Montreal Canadiens and Calgary Flames.

“He’s a great partner. He was out practicing on figure skates without me so he’s getting quite good,” said Gordeeva, not confirming the identity. “So far the strategy is just to practice and have fun. We still haven’t been with everyone, so I’m not feeling competitive yet.” That will come, she says with a smile.

Two years ago, Gordeeva performed in a similar Russian reality show, Ice Age 2, where she and actor Egor Beroev took the title.

Working with a hockey player is much more enjoyable, she said.

“On Ice Age, those guys have never skated. My partner had never been on the ice before.

“(Hockey players) know what speed is like. They know how to hold their balance,” she said. “With athletes, they come for practice. They warm up. They skate. They’re ready to practice. For those guys it’s different. Actors, they come to talk. They break for coffee. They want to talk about music. So I feel much more comfortable now.”

Gordeeva, who was once named one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World,” began skating at age four. By age 11, she as paired with Grinkov. In 31 competitions, they took 24 titles, never placing below second.

Gordeeva lives in California with her husband, Olympic champion men’s skater, Ilia Kulik, and two daughters, 18-year-old Daria and 9-year-old Liza.

Her book, My Sergei: A Love Story was a bestseller and inspired a CBS docudrama. But she has turned her mind to her new challenge, which sees her facing off against, among others, reigning Battle champion Salé and old rival Isabelle Brasseur.

“It meant half of my life and all my skating career. It was a great time, but it was long ago now. It will always stay in my heart and my memory,” she said.

“But I don’t want to keep thinking all the time what happened 15 years ago, I need to keep moving.”

by Beverley Smith

Ekaterina Gordeeva, the waif who delighted Canadians at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, is now 39, a mother of two and fascinated by her next task: skating with hockey players on the second season on the CBC-TV hit show Battle of the Blades.

It won’t be easy in some ways for the two-time Olympic figure skating champion from Russia whose love story with partner Sergei Grinkov enchanted North Americans, even more so after his death from a heart attack at 28. That was 15 years ago.

Now married to 2002 Olympic men’s champion, Ilia Kulik of Russia, Gordeeva lives in California and admits it will be difficult for her to leave their nine-year-old daughter, Lisa, for the two-month commitment to the Battle of the Blades.

Her other daughter, Daria, (Sergei’s child), is 18, has left the nest, and is applying to get into college for perhaps a fashion career next year. She stopped skating when she was 13 or 14, at about the time she entered high school. Kulik has been teaching Lisa to skate.

After chief judge and show director Sandra Bezic called Gordeeva and offered her a job on this season’s show, Gordeeva admitted she had to give it some thought before she committed. She skates in just five to 10 shows a year.

“I didn’t want to be far away from home for so long,” Gordeeva said by phone from Los Angeles on Tuesday. She skated in a similar show in Russia two years ago, called Ice Age, but there, she was skating with an actor who had never skated before at all, and Lisa was with her.

Battle of the Blades must be easier, she thought, and besides, if she yearned for home, it wouldn’t be as far to fly from Toronto as it would from Moscow.

She agreed.

After a four-day boot camp (which wasn’t part of the Russian Ice Age show), Gordeeva has been paired with fellow Russian and hockey player, Valeri Bure, the younger brother of NHL star Pavel Bure, who played for a series of NHL teams, and won Olympic silver and bronze while playing for Russia in 1998 and 2002. It’s decidedly ironic.

Bure and Gordeeva attended the same school and the same Red Army Club in Moscow. Gordeeva was in the same class as Pavel.

“[Valeri] is four or five years younger than me,” Gordeeva said. “He remembers me in school. I remember him, too. I saw them together. I knew him, not very well, but … after that, I lost track of him after all these years.”

She said “it’s very cool” to be associated with him again.

They have lots to talk about. Bure retired in 2004 and now has a boutique winery with his actress wife, Candace Cameron, in the Napa Valley. “He has a great family,” Gordeeva said. “I met them. Valeri is a very nice person, very down to earth, very family oriented. It’s very cool to talk to him.”

As for the premise of the show, Gordeeva finds it amusing that big strong hockey players are matched with figure skaters. “Usually you think hockey players don’t even look at figure skaters,” she said. “And here they are face to face with each other and they have to deal with each other.”

But they are all adults and athletes who travel a lot and perform on ice. “We have a lot of things in common,” she said.

When Gordeeva skates these days, she skates solo, although she’s been known to skate pairs with her husband, Ilia. But she is world renowned as a pairs skater, and has no fear when somebody hoists her into a lift – even if they don’t have as much experience as her famous partner did.

“I feel comfortable with it,” she said. “And that’s why I decided to give it a try.”

She has already watched coaches teach the hockey players to doff their hockey skates for figure skates, with dangerous toe picks, and then in a couple of days, after some off-ice lessons, give it a go on ice with their partners.

Producers of the show promise more high-risk routines this year. And tiny Gordeeva is up for it.

On Sept. 26, CBC will air a show that details the boot camp experience. The following week the competition starts, with the finale on Nov. 22.

Many thanks to oravaskvirel for the transcript.

Link to the video

This is her first performance, which took place one year after his death. Her husband and partner, Sergey Grinkov, the two time Olympic champion in pair skating died 15 years ago, in the fall of 1995. On this footage you can see his widow, Ekaterina Gordeeva, skating her first solo performance. For the first time in her life she is skating here alone. It took her one year before she found courage to step on the ice and share her pain with the audience. She was looking for a support and spectators did share her grief with her.

Katia: “It was a good chance for me to show my feelings on the ice, through a performance”.

This performance became Katia’s first step into a different life. Her previous life, which was abruptly cut off, had been an endless woman’s happiness.

Katia: “I was always sure of him. And now, when so many years passed, I realize how difficult it is to encounter this in life, to experience this… The feeling of confidence is what a woman would want to find in a man. There are not so many women who can say this about their men”

Their romance started on the eve of the most important sports event, the first Olympics in their lives. 1988, Kalgari, when everything coincided: the first Olympic gold medal and the first love in the lives of Gordeeva and Grinkov. It was simply impossible to hide such feelings or conceal them from other people’s eyes.

Katia: “The pleasure we were getting from each other and from skating with each other was conveyed [to other people]”.

Everything in their lives was developing very quickly, as if there were premonitions of a soon misfortune. They got married, their daughter was born already one year after the Olympic games. Then there was their second Olympics in 1994. The amazing lifts Gordeeva and Grinkov were doing took the audience’s breath away. Nobody could even guess that the obligatory elements that the skaters were doing so beautifully and effortlessly were approaching the tragic end. To all appearances, already at that time any physical exersice was probably strongly counter-indicative to Sergey’s health. However, nobody knew about it. Neither Katia and Sergey did.

An interview.
“What are your plans for the future?”
Katia: “I think that we will continue to skate, raise our daughter. We will try to bring her up now by ourselves, without [relying too much on the] help of her grandparents. There are many [interesting] things awaiting us in the future. We hope so.”
Sergey: “Yes. I think that we need to take some rest before we decide what we shall do in the future”.

However, Katia would be raising their daughter alone.

Katia: “About half a year before it happened, he suffered from the pain in his back. The pain was so strong that sometimes he could not skate. We did injections and were checking his back all the time but the pain did not go, no matter what we tried.”

Artur: “Already before it [happened], when we were competing together in Lillehammer where they were first and we were second, I noticed how [abnormally] pale he was after their program. White as a sheet. I thought that they might have been not [properly] prepared physically. A thought slipped through my mind that something could have been wrong with his health. But then I thought it could be caused by him being nervous: it often happens that a person may look very pale when he is nervous. But there definitely were signs, which probably went unnoticed in due time”.

When other people several times told Sergey Grinkov that he looked too pale, he dismissed the observation, saying that for example he had not slept properly. In fact, there could have been numerous insignificant reasons [for the occasional paleness], as nobody could even imagine that a two-time Olympic champion who was accustomed to sweating from morning till night could have some health problems. However, the life had an opinion of its own and in one and half years after their triumph in Lillehammer…

Katia: “He lied down on the ice. I was absolutely sure that something happened to his back. It was only our coach, Zoueva, who immediately realized that something went very wrong”

When Marina Zoueva rushed to Sergey, she took it in at once: [something has happened to] his heart. Sergey did not breathe. An ambulance arrived very quickly, less then in ten minutes. It took other ten minutes to bring Grinkov to intensive care. However, any efforts were already useless. The last words Ekaterina Gordeeva heard from her husband still on the ice were “I feel very bad”. A massive infarct. Doctors could not rescue him. They said that a day before he did survive another micro-infarct, which nobody noticed: neither Ekaterina, nor coachers, nor Sergey himself. His heart stopped before his skates were taken off.

Katia: ”During the first weeks I felt a shock and could not believe it. I woke up in the morning, the thought struck me again, I asked myself a question, if it was true or not”

Sergey Grinkov died at 28. Katia was left with a four-years old daughter Dasha on her hands.

Katia: “First of all – a guilt. Of course, there was my guilt. I don’t understand why but I was guilty for Daria and Sergey’s mother…”

It was very difficult for Ekaterina to live through that tragedy. Her close people were advising her not to keep the pain inside and Katia decided to write a book as a tribute to her husband. Every day throughout one year she was remembering all her life with Sergey.

Katia: “I was getting the load off my mind [when writing the book], which made me feel very tired. But later I was realizing that I needed it anyhow. I would anyway do it at some point of my life. May be not in a form of a book. May be this process would take more time then, but since it happened “artificially”… I needed it”

The feeling of responsibility was another factor, which prevented Katia from shrinking to herself or breaking down. She was responsible for her daughter before herself, Sergey’s mother and Sergey himself. Gradually, step by step Ekaterina Gordeeva returned to normal life.

Katia: “After 3, 4 or 5 years I undestood that I must move on. [I was] struggling to turn the page. But only after 10 years I realized that I was not constantly thinking of him and stopped comparing [other men] to him”

Moscow. Filming the Ice Age show. Time is healing. Katia’s story proves this fact. She was doing what she was supposed to do: raising her daughter, skating new programs. And life itself showed her the road to take. Eight years ago Katia gave birth to the second daughter. Her husband is a famous skater, an Olympic champion Ilia Kulik. They live in America and together raise their daughters, Liza Kulik and Dasha Grinkova. Daria Sergeevna Grinkova.

Today, the schedule of Ekgaterina Gordeeva is very tight and booked for many months ahead. She is still in strong demand and she is happy. She did not forget Sergey Grinkov but learnt to live without him. The former, happy life lives in Katia’s memories. Warm and tender memories.

Katia: “He [lives] in my memory or I anyway feel that somehow he is near to me all the time. This goes without saying. This will never change and I don’t want it to change”

Ekaterina was on Russian TV on August 7, 2010 as part of the “Love for Life” programme where she also talked about Sergei.

The video was posted on youtube by gordeeva.ru (many thanks!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNptSwEJnJQ

Translations, summaries can be found in the forum (many thanks to all the contributors):

http://www.gg-corner.de/GGboard/viewtopic.php?t=4106

According to some posts at FSU (Figure Skating Universe) Ekaterina might participate in CBC’s “Battle of the Blades”.

CBC is the Canadian TV station and “Battle of the Blades” is a TV reality show where former NHL players (ice hockey) are teamed up with female skaters to perform skating routines.

Basically, the men do know how to skate – with hockey skates – and now have to adapt to figure skating boots and blades, which isn’t that easy [g].

CBC has set up a web-site for the show at

http://www.cbc.ca/battle/

If you check out the gallery and check out the photos dated August 10, 2010 I think there’s an Ekaterina picture on one of the “balloons” in the background. It’s on the pic with the headline “Introducing…” (Kurt Browning and 3 ladies with the furthest on the right side laughing)…

Hi there,

Just wanted to say a quick “hello”! I’m all well, but extremely busy. Sorry for no current updates. However, I hope everyone is doing fine and that you all enjoy the news which are being shared in the Forum!

Have a great day!
Su-jan.

According to the web-site of Czech singer Helena Vondráčková, Ekaterina (and Ilia Kulik) are scheduled to appear in the skating show show with the singer on the following dates:

September 20, 2009: Bratislava
September 21, 2009: Kosice

http://www.vondrackova.net/index-cz.php

Discuss this topic in the forum: http://www.gg-corner.de/GGboard/viewtopic.php?t=3861

Update: June 27, 2009: The shows have been cancelled.

On May 28, 2009 Ekaterina celebrates her 38th birthday. Congratulations!