Joy Goodwin - The Second Mark: Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold

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Copyright 2004 by Joy Goodwin

Map copyright 2004 Jeffrey L. Ward

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goodwin, Joy.

The second mark : courage, corruption, and the battle for Olympic gold / Joy Goodwin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. SkatersBiography. 2. Winter Olympic Games (19th : 2002 : Salt Lake City, Utah) I. Title.

GV850. A2G65 2004

796.912dc22 2004041664

ISBN 0-7432-4527-X
eISBN 978-1-451-60383-5

To Jim and B.

PART ONE
The Partners

PART TWO
The Arena

In China, what Americans call the last name is actually pronounced first. So the family name (Shen, Zhao, Yao) precedes the given name (Xue, Hongbo, Bin). Yao Bins surname is Yao; he would therefore be called Mr. Yao or Teacher Yao in formal address.

Xue is pronounced shoo-way, but when pronounced quickly it blurs into a one-syllable word. Jie is pronounced jee-ay, also blurred into one syllable. Zhao is pronounced like jowl without the l; Yao is yowl without the l.

Chinese women do not take their husbands last names; thus Jing Yulan (Ms. Jing) is the mother of Zhao Hongbo, and Lu Manli (Ms. Lu) is the mother of Shen Xue.

Shen Xue is often called Xiao Xue (pronounced shao shoo-way) by those who know her best. The endearment translates imperfectly as Little Xue, but its true meaning is somewhere between young, little, and a simple diminutive.

In Russia husbands, wives, and children typically share a last name, but while the womans surname has a feminine ending (Tamara Mosk-vina, Nina Ruchkina), the mans surname has a masculine ending (Igor Moskvin, Sasha Ruchkin). Though Russians often address each other using the patronymic, I have omitted this detail from the book for simplification.

Most Russian first names have a diminutive form, which is used by friends and family: Yelena becomes Lena, Alexander becomes Sasha, and so forth.

Berezhnaya is pronounced bair-ezh-NIGH-ah. Sikharulidze is pronounced seek-har-u-LEED-zah. Shlyakhov is pronounced shlee-AH-hoff.

In Quebec, many women do not take their husbands last name after marriage, so Murielle Bouchard (moo-ree-ELL boo-SHAR) is the wife of Jacques Pelletier and the mother of the Pelletier boys.

Pelletier is pronounced pell-tee-AY, and Sal is pronounced sal-AY, with emphasis on the last syllable. Gauthier is pronounced go-tee-AY. Benot Lavoie is pronounced ben-WAH la-VWAH. Paquet is pronounced pa-KETT. Sayabec is pronounced say-BEC.

Marie-Reine Le Gougne is pronounced MAH-ree REN le-GOON-ya. Didier Gailhaguet is pronounced di-di-AY guy-a-GAY. Ottavio Cinquanta is pronounced oh-TAH-vee-o cheen-QUAN-ta.

St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad during the Soviet era. It became St. Petersburg again shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

When practical, I have converted figures into American currency, weights, and measures.

Prologue

Salt Lake Ice Center
February 11, 2002
8:34 P.M.

Y ELENA B EREZHNAYA places one white skate on the ice, bears down on the narrow blade, and surges forward. Before her the freshly made ice stretches out for two hundred feet. The ice is white, very white, bright as snow under a strong sun, but surprisingly there is no glare. From high at the top of the arena, light filters down in a way that warms the long white expanse and suffuses it with a soft glow. Berezhnaya pushes away from the barrier for the six-minute warm-up, and for a few strange seconds she sees no one ahead of her or beside her and experiences the peculiar sensation of skating alone at the Olympics. Then the other skaters come into view. Here are the Chinese pair and the Canadian couple, and here is her partner, Anton Sikharulidze. With two gliding steps she merges seamlessly into the fast-moving queue of skaters circling the perimeter of the rink.

From high up in the stands, the brightly costumed skaters circling below look like a school of tropical fish. The arena itself resembles a giant fishbowl. A four-foot barrier encloses the rink. Normally, the first row of spectators would sit just a few feet behind the rink barrier. But in this rink there is a solid wall rising thirty feet above the ice on three sides. This retaining wall has been painted in soothing marine blues and greens, and for the skater down on the ice the sensation is one of being inside a deep bowl whose sides rise up well above your head. Somewhere in the vast space above you, seventeen thousand people are murmuring, fidgeting. Their sounds of anticipation drift down in one large overhead mass of nervous energy. Up in the stands, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder among the Chevrolet dealers and Coca-Cola executives, are more than twenty of the sports former champions. They are here primarily because the skaters now on the ice represent the greatest collection of talent ever assembled on a single night in pair skating. The Chinese, the Canadians, and the Russians are generally considered to be three of the six best pairs in the sports hundred-year history, and that is why, for the past three years, experts have been predicting that this Olympic final will be the greatest pairs competition ever. Every past champion, every great coach wanted to be in the building for this one.

For the moment, however, the worlds best pair skaters are pretty much skating forwards and backwards. Within the sport this activity is known as basic stroking. It is the purest form of skating, and it is the only part of Yelena Berezhnayas extensive repertoire that she shares with the aristocratic skating enthusiasts who first contested the World Championship on a frozen pond in St. Petersburg in 1896. The simplest movements of skating can be the most difficult to perfect, and few ever achieve absolute mastery over the pure glide. Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze are better at basic stroking than anyone in the world and as good as anyone, ever. Their technique is so singularly exquisite that a few of the former champions up in the stands tonight are looking forward to the first minute of Berezhnaya and Sikharulidzes warm-up more than any other part of the competition. These same past champions will tell you that while they achieved great things in their careers, their one lingering regret is that they could never move over the ice in the way that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze are moving now.