February 12, 1996
From Sports Illustrated:
GOING IT ALONE
by E. M. Swift
Katya Gordeeva always felt safe in Sergei Grinkov's arms. Now, embracing his memory and the sport they loved, she tells how she is finding her way.
Ekaterina Gordeeva pulls her station wagon into the nursery school driveway like any other Simsbury, Conn., mom. She has always had a doll-like quality about her--small-boned and porcelain-complexioned--but now an air of brittleness and unshakable sorrow have been added to the mix. She is 24 years old and a widow, a treasured ornament dropped upon a hardwood floor.
Katya, as she is known to her friends, has always been stronger than her 5'1", 90-pound frame suggests. When she reaches the front of the waiting line of cars, a small blonde girl stands holding a teacher's hand. The girl is Daria, Gordeeva's three-year-old daughter. She is towheaded, round-faced, with a wide, crooked smile you recognize. It is her father's smile, and the sight of her mom has brought it to light. Gordeeva smiles back, a spot of color radiating from her translucent cheek.
Mother and daughter greet each other in Russian as Daria, who is called Dasha, scrambles into her seat in the back. She has had a bang-up day in school, that much is clear. "You have to smile for her, however you are feeling," Gordeeva says, glancing back to catch Dasha's eyes, "because she's always smiling for you."
It has been 11 weeks since that terrible day in Lake Placid, N.Y., when, in the midst of an ordinary practice, her husband and skating partner, 28-year-old Sergei Grinkov, collapsed on the ice from a heart attack. Gordeeva and Grinkov--two-time Olympic gold medalists, four-time world champions, the most universally adored pairs skaters of all time--were working on their new Stars on Ice program, preparing for a 50-city tour. Their choreographer, Marina Zoueva, who had worked with them their entire career, had flown down from Ottawa, and just the three of them were on the
ice. They were polishing a section in which Grinkov would throw Gordeeva, then speed up to lift her after she landed. She felt his hands slip around her waist, but Grinkov didn't perform the lift. She thought it must have been his back, which had been troubling him of late. He stopped skating. "Then he was feeling dizzy, and he held on to the boards," Gordeeva says. "He lay down very quietly. Marina stopped the music. I kept asking what's happening, and he didn't tell me."
Grinkov never spoke again. The emergency medical team arrived within minutes and tried to revive his heart right there on the ice, but he had stopped breathing. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
An autopsy later determined that two of the arteries to his heart had been blocked. The 5'11", 175-pound Grinkov, who had always been in superb shape, suffered from an undiagnosed coronary artery disease, a condition he had probably inherited from his father, who had died at age 56, after his fourth heart attack. When Katya was told that Sergei had died, Marina, who had never left her side, suggested she go in and say goodbye. "He can still hear you," Katya remembers her saying. Sergei was wearing his skates, and as she spoke to him she unlaced them and slipped them off.
The had skated together for nearly 14 years, since she was 11 and he was 15--a couple of great-looking kids thrown together by the old Soviet sports system. They were hardly ever apart. Even before their marriage, in April 1991, G&G, as they were affectionately known in the skating community, spent more time together than either did with his or her parents. In ballet classes. Traveling. Training. Competing. Eating. "He always, always took care of me," Gordeeva says. "I don't even know the feeling of what it's like to see your husband go to a different town or a different country for business. It only happened one time. Sergei had a shoulder operation before our wedding. He went to Princeton, in New Jersey, and I was very, very worried. This is the only time I met him at the airport, and I brought with me one rose. After this, we never leave from each other again."
Until death do us part. And how to tell little Dasha, who looked so much like Sergei and had been her father's joy? The day Grinkov died, Gordeeva's parents, who were visiting from Moscow, were taking care of Dasha in Simsbury, where Gordeeva and Grinkov had lived since October 1994. They flew to Lake Placid with G&G's agent, Debbie Nast of IMG. Katya's mother, Elena, suggested maybe they should tell Dasha that her dad was away training. But a teacher from Dasha's school told Katya it was important that she explain to her daughter what happened before someone else tried. Katya was told not to be afraid to use words like "dead" or "not coming back." And not to expect Dasha to cry or even, necessarily, be upset. "After I told her, Dasha asks, 'But how can we see him again?'" Katya recalls. "So I said, 'He'll come to you when he wants to see you. He's like a little angel now. Also, you can see him in your dreams. But he'll never come back.'"
There was never any question where the funeral would be. "Sergei had a Russian soul," Gordeeva says. "He only felt comfortable there." Before the body was flown to Moscow, Nast arranged for a wake in Saranac Lake on Nov. 21, the day after Grinkov's death, so other skaters--and a more close-knit group of athletes than the fraternity of professional skaters is hard to imagine--could pay their last respects. Gordeeva went in first. Grinkov looked as if he were sleeping, as if he were almost ready to smile. "That was a time when I felt very peaceful," she says now. "It was a chance to show our good friends that Sergei was still beautiful. In my mind that will always be the last day I had with Sergei."
After the peacefulness of the wake, the funeral at the Red Army Club arena in Moscow four days later was a madhouse. Everything was rushed. Everywhere was crowded. Father Nikolai, the Russian Orthodox priest who had christened Gordeeva when she was 18 and married her at 19, performed the service. Father Nikolai used to talk to Katya and Sergei before competitions, assuring them they were God's children, win or lose. Now God had taken Sergei back.
When Katya visited the home of Sergei's mother, it was filled with relatives, some of whom she had never met, many of whom were hysterical with grief. A few of them were critical of Katya for burying Sergei in his favorite shirt and slacks instead of a coat and tie. Grinkov's mother had never seen G&G compete outside of Moscow, and she had little conception of the fame her son had achieved. She blamed skating for his death. She didn't understand that his heart condition had been a time bomb that had nothing to do with how hard he trained or how well Katya took care of him. "It was very hard," Katya says, the memory of the visit bringing her to tears.
For five weeks Gordeeva remained in Moscow. Zoueva had given her a list of things to do--the ballet, the circus, a gallery, the symphony--and she carried them out almost robotically. She spent a few days alone in the one-room apartment where she and Sergei had started their married life and where they stayed when they visited in the summer. She felt close to him there. But she decided it wasn't the best place for Dasha, who stayed instead in the bustling four-room apartment that Gordeeva's parents shared with Katya's 20-year-old sister, Maria.
Gordeeva felt lost. "Since I was four years old, every day I wake up, I put my skates on," she says. "But now, when I wake up every morning, I think, Why do I wake? My parents were there to take care of Dasha. I didn't have anything to worry about. All I was doing was dealing with my feelings, and this was killing me."
She was alternately angry, confused, even contrite. "It is easier for me to believe I didn't deserve this happiness longer, that it's my mistake, than to think that God was so ungenerous as to take Sergei," she says. She thought back on all the programs they had done in their career. Each had had a theme that corresponded to the point in their lives at which they found themselves. Springlike happiness was the theme when they skated in the 1988 Olympics, dressed in powder blue. Performing in '89, the year they fell in love, Gordeeva played a girl changing into a woman. In '90 they skated to Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. In '94, when they won their second gold, their program was a celebration of woman as the foundation for all mankind. At one point, skating to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Grinkov got on his knees before Gordeeva, the young mother of his child. Always, they seemed to be skating only for each other.
Then in 1995 Gordeeva and Grinkov skated to Verdi's Requiem. And the last program they ever skated together was Pocahontas. "You know this story?" Gordeeva asks. "He has to leave on his boat and he cannot take her with him."
It was if it were all somehow fated. Then Zoueva called. She told Gordeeva that the cast of Stars on Ice, including Scott Hamilton, Paul Wylie, Oksana Baiul and Viktor Petrenko, along with Brian Boitano and other skaters, was giving a benefit in Grinkov's honor on Feb. 27 in the Hartford Civic Center. They wanted Gordeeva to walk out and take a bow. "Katya told me, 'I want to skate. I have to skate,'" Zoueva recalls. "I said, 'All right. You must skate for Sergei.'"
Zoueva had always believed that Gordeeva could be a beautiful singles skater and had told her that when Grinkov was having problems with his back. She is no great jumper--Gordeeva does only two triple jumps, the toe loop and the Salchow--but no one is more graceful or artistic on the ice. Gordeeva asked Father Nikolai if skating would be inappropriate during a period of mourning. He assured her it wouldn't. More than that, he told her, she should skate, since she loved it.
Gordeeva had left her skates in the States, so she called Petrenko, who lives in the same condominium complex in Simsbury, and he sent them to her. On Dec. 15 she went to the Red Army Club to practice for the first time since Grinkov's death. "It helped very much to be again touching the ice that was so dear to Sergei and me," she says. "I missed his arms around me. It is so difficult to skate alone, with no one taking care of you on the ice. But it was good that I saw coaches and young skaters smiling. Life was going on. That was the first step."
By New Year's, she was actually laughing again. It has always been a special day to Katya. It was on New Year's 1989 that Sergei first asked if he could kiss her. This year, her parents had a small party at their new log home, outside Moscow, built with funds Sergei and Katya had given them after winning the '94 Olympic title. At the party Katya met some of Maria's friends. "The new life is coming," she told herself.
Shortly thereafter Katya and Dasha went home. To Simsbury. "This condiminium is the first place Sergei and I lived in that really felt like our home," she says. Dasha's room was decorated by Sergei, who surprised them by wallpapering and hanging the pictures and mirrors. "His father once built a house," she says. "I thought maybe Sergei would someday build a house for me."
It will be a long time before her memories of him dim. "I feel sometimes like he's only out of the room, or that I can reach him on the phone," she says. She wears his wedding ring on a chain around her neck and has Dasha, who has Sergei's shocking blue eyes and long eyelashes, as a daily reminder of the man she still loves. Katya sometimes puts her face right up against Dasha's, so they stare into each other's eyes, and asks, "Can you see your father? I can."
Elena is living with her now, helping care for Dasha. Katya is skating daily, working on a piece Zoueva created in honor of everyone who has had to pull themselves up after a tragedy. She cuts a haunting and evocative figure, ghostly and beautiful as she glides soundlessly to the music of Mahler. Her singles career should flourish. After the benefit show she may skate again this winter for Stars on Ice. And an endless supply of roles awaits her in this age of the figure skating boom: in Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Nutcracker on Ice. Financially, she will be fine.
The one thing she cannot picture is a return to pairs skating. "I cannot even think of someone else's arms around me, touching me," she says. "Since I was 11, I touched only Sergei's hand. Never anyone else's. This way I can still think of Sergei around me when I'm skating."
And skate she will. Gordeeva has accepted that much. "Sergei was a man first and then a skater," she says. "Probably not like me, who was a skater first. Then a woman. Then a mother. I wish I was not like this. I leave all my strength, all my power, all my feelings on the ice. If I'm not happy on the ice, I'm not happy at home. I will try to change this, to live more for Dasha. I give too much on the ice. I always did."
the G&G corner - Copyright © Su-jan Yip, September 1996 - 2007