December 1995
From Sport Express (Russia):
HE LIVED AND DIED ON THE ICE
by Elena Vajtsekhovskaya
translated by Olya Smolyanova
Last Saturday, Sergei Grinkov Was Buried at the Vagankovskoje Cemetery
The funeral service for Sergei Grinkov was held last Saturday on the CSKA ice. The priest Father Nikolaj, who baptized little Katuusha Gordeeva (REPORTER'S MISTAKE.OS), twenty years later married her to Sergei and a year later baptized Dashenka served a sad mission. I remembered the words of Sergei's mother, Anna Fillipovna. When her neighbor asked why the casket was not taken to Sergei's home despite a Russian tradition, she sadly remarked: "CSKA was his home."
Indeed, most of the figure skater's life was spent at the CSKA skating rink. His parents took him to the club, where at eight years old he for the first time met four year old Katia, and, according to friends, was very much against the coaches' decision to pair them up several years later. In 1984, 13 year old Gordeeva and 17 year old Grinkov, won their first Junior World Championship. The line of their lives was determined. The only thing that caused problems to the coaches was the independent personality of the future great athlete, who was everything but obedient. In kindergarten, he once decided to check whether he could find his own way home. So he took off. He was found late at night, after turning the entire city of Moscow upside down, by his own mother a policewoman.
School brought in a whole range of new problems. Grinkov's signature smile drove teachers nuts. His parents were often called "to the carpet": "He is making fun of us Please take the necessary measures" Sergei took the necessary measures himself by locking himself in the bathroom and practicing "serious" facial expressions in front of the mirror for hours, and later demonstrating his most creative findings to his mother and sister.
Sometimes it seemed as though sport was a mere game to him. "As long as I remember Seryoga, he was always considered this funny guy,' remembers Olympic champion Natalia Bestemjanova, "At the same time, no athletes were luckier than Gordeeva and Grinkov. They worked like fanatics but never showed off their titles. We, figure skaters, have a tendency to show off, but Sergei and Katia always remained who they were. Even after turning professional, they were the only ones who not only didn't lose a bit of technical quality, but rose to an entirely new, higher level of skating."
It was impossible to get close to the grave at the Vagankovskoye cemetery: an ocean of people and an ocean of flowers. "Do you remember our conversation a year ago, in Birmingham?" Bestemyanova's partner Andrei Bukin turned to me. Then, after the World Championship, the three of us talked until dawn about the difficulties of sports life. "Just ten days ago we skated together in Albany,' continued Bukin "at the traditional meet of Olympic champions. We joked that Katia and Sergei had to represent the entire Soviet pairs skating: Elena Valova and Oleg Vassiliev don't compete together anymore, Artur Dmitriev is training with another partner, Ludmilla Belousova and Oleg Protopopov again could not agree with the organizers on the money issue. Katia and Sergei represented two Olympics - Calgary and Lillehammer, and right after the competition, they took a bus to Lake Placid because their scheduled ice time was at 8 am the following morning..."
Olympic champions Scott Hamilton, bronze medalist Paul Wiley, the IMG management came from Lake Placid on Saturday; Olympic champions Oksana Bajul and Victor Petrenko arrived from Simsbury; Alberville champion Artur Dmitriev drove the whole night from St. Petersburg "all to say good-bye to their dear friend. Everyone's mind refused to accept what was happening.
"He never complained about anything," repeated Artur over and over, "no other skater was as healthy as he was. Even in professional sport, when your entire training consists of ice rehearsals, Sergei continued to jog, refine his elements on the floor. And always with a smile, always with joy, no matter how difficult the work was."
"If only we knew that Seryozha had had a heart attach the day before," said Marina Zueva, Gordeeva and Grinkov's last coach,'That day, he went onto the ice as if nothing was wrong. The only thing that caught my attention was that he was dragging his left leg a little bit. We thought that it was because of his back injury. Prior to that, Sergei went through a medical examination in Moscow and then in America, before getting insurance. The doctors said everything was normal. His cholesterol level was a little bit high, but nothing threatening. The day before his death, I was taking special CPR courses and suddenly, when Seryozha started falling to the ice, I realized that these were the symptoms the cardiologists were telling me about. The last thing I remember was screaming "Call 911. But even the minute and a half after which the paramedics got to the ice were not enough to save Sergei."
"Mommy, please write long long letters to me" reminded Sergei before each departure to the States, "and make Natashka write too." He rarely phoned home, only to remind about letters if there was an occasion for someone to hand carry them. Or to conduct an interrogation to his sister Natalia: "How is the mother? Is she dressed well? Make sure you are all right..." Who else would take care of his women after his father died?
"He was radiating kindness," wrote Sandra Stevenson, a British journalist covering figure skating for over thirty years, "which very rarely happens in this sport because athletes are so focused on themselves. This wonderful aura magnetized everyone who at least once spoke to Sergei."
When the news about Sergei's death came to Simsbury, where the figure skaters lived and trained for the last year, the owner of the Russian restaurant "Babushka" had a nervous breakdown. Sergei and Katia dined there only once.
In 1991, when Grinkov's shoulder injury (which ultimately forced them to quit amateur skating) led him to surgery at the Moscow Sport and Dance Injury Center, the entire medical staff fell in love with him right away. His room became a club house. "When I looked at his joints, I realized that Sergei never spared himself and always trained at the top of his abilities," said Sergei's doctor Arkhipov. "The same was true for Katia, though. She entered our hospital three times - from incredibly intensive training, she kept getting stress fractures in the bones of her foot. But very few people knew about that."
"He was a great actor and died as an great actor, " remarked Bukin. Grinkov wasn't an actor. He simply lived on the ice. Nobody knew what was going inside him when he was alive. Nobody except for Katia. We were left to follow their dialogue within the limits of the skating rink.
...Gordeeva and Grinkov's last program was skated to Verdi's "Requiem" which they performed in Albany ten days prior to Sergei's death...
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