This One Figures To Be on Ice

By KURT ANDERSEN

When we 're skating well, there 's this magic

The synthesis in figure skating of fairy-tale lyricism and plain physical power has always been problematic. Today, however, the split personality is more fractious than ever. Skaters take sides. "Athletics in men's figure skating has been neglected," says World Champion Scott Hamilton. "Sure, there's some dance in it, but we have to be athletes first. They call it an Olympic sport, not an Olympic art, don't they?" The puckish young man is one of the most accomplished skaters in history, but his view runs counter to that of the Establishment. Since Lake Placid the sport's traditionalists have tried to curb daredevil virtuosity in the shows: a new rule will strictly limit the repetition of triple jumps by skaters in Sarajevo. "Skating had got off the track, and we had to get it back on," says one top U.S. skating official. "Skating is spins, body line and interpretation, as well as athleticism."

Hamilton does not require any such reminder. At a recent practice session, he inspected his landing track after each jump, intent for 1 Yz hrs. that every one of them be absolutely fine and clean. For all his spartan talk about pure athletics, Hamilton in action is more than just physically powerful. With his miniature, muscular body (5 ft. 3 in., 115 Ibs.) wrapped in a plain, spangle-free uniform, there is something of the playful otter about him. All good skaters make it look easy, but Hamilton's skating looks inevitable, as if he cannot help but spin and leap across ice.

Of all the Americans in Yugoslavia, Hamilton, 25, is closest to a shoo-in for a gold medal. He finished fifth at Lake Placid in 1980, but since September of that year, he has won all his competitions, including four U.S. and three world championships. For all his easy-looking successes, Hamilton has had the inevitable emotional kinks to straighten out. "You have all these idealistic values about what a champion should be," he says, "and suddenly you're thrust into living up to it. I felt I could never let down. I drove myself crazy. I was terrible to myself and everyone around me." His coach helped him to accept his fame. "I realized that I didn't have to be what the champions before me had been. I could be me."

He was a taunted runt as a child in Bowling Green, Ohio. His growth had been stunted by Shwachman's syndrome, a disease that interferes with normal digestion. But Hamilton, at age eight, serendipitously found a therapy: ice skating.

He was no prodigy, but his prowess became a cocky defense against teasing.

Hamilton still buys teeny shoes (size 51A) and clothes in boys' sizes, but his attitude toward his sport is grownup. "You live, you hope, for 100 years. You are only a top skater for ten. So that is the perspective." He knows that his insular, single-minded life has been severely Limiting.

"I'd like to come away from the Olympics, take a full breath of air and know that I've done everything I wanted to do."

Hamilton's charmed career has allowed him such equanimity. For the women, much younger than he, it is harder. Carlo Fassi, who coached queenly Peggy Fleming and girlish Dorothy Hamill, looks askance at the current, let's-get-physical trend in women's skating. "Elaine Zayak came along," Fassi says of the 1981 U.S.

champion and 1982 world gold medalist, and "everybody started trying to add triples whether they could do them or not.

Even if they don't fall, they do the same triple seven times. That's boring." Rosalynn Sumners, a more conventionally feminine skater, agrees--rather pointedly. Competitions had become "a jumping contest," says Sumners, who has now beaten triple-jumping Zayak for the U.S. title three times and won the 1983 world championship after Zayak, injured, dropped out. "They weren't looking like ladies."

Zayak, the spunky bounder from Paramus, N.J., Sumners, the graceful princess from suburban Seattle, both with a chance to win the gold. It is tempting to couch their competition in Sarajevo as a grudge match. "Sometimes I think they'd like us to skate out on the ice, take ten paces and shoot guns at each other," Zayak said last year. For all their manifest differences, Zayak and Sumners have a lot in common. Both are blond teen-agers (18 and 19, respectively) about 5 ft. 2 in. Both dealt badly with their early championship celebrity and turned plump: Zayak went from 115 to 138 after her injury, Sumners gained 15 pounds. Neither is exactly poised: Zayak speaks in a squeak punctuated by giggles, while Sumners burbles Like a placid Valley Girl.

"I was a spoiled brat," admits Zayak.

She quit the sport last summer--for ten days--when it seemed that an ankle fracture would wreck her career. "I had so much to learn. Dealing with the defeats made me grow up. I'm sure there are easier ways, but this," she laughs, "seems to be the way I've got." Her coach can only agree. "She's fought back a long way," says Peter Burrows of his rambunctious prize student. "Her spins are crisp and really fast, she's jumping Like she was in '81. It's all there. I just hope the judges let themselves see it." The Olympic judges just might, despite the new Limit on triple jumps. "It's up to me to get my act together and do it," says Zayak. "As far as I'm concerned, it's no big showdown."

They had something of a preliminary showdown last week. The rivalry, conceded Sumners in Salt Lake City, "is stronger than ever." Despite her victory and Zayak's misfortune at the nationals on Saturday, the Olympic outcome remains uncertain. In November Sumners inexplicably lost a European competition; her coach, Lorraine Borman, argues that Sumners may have needed that loss to fuel her come-from-behind gumption.

Sumners' performances are sweet and sculptural. In her trademark maneuver, she follows a kind of swooping, swanlike glide with the difficult IVi airborne spins of a double axel. Some fellow Olympic team members are concerned, however, that the sheltered teenager has not mastered the inner game of figure skating. Says one: "I really wonder if she's got the emotional strength to be what she wants to be." The determinedly upbeat Hamilton points to the difficulty of withstanding the pressure at the top. "She has the physical capabilities," he says, "but emotionally it's very, very difficult. I hope she doesn't let the emotion take over." Sumners admits to an extreme, storybook am bition. "I want to be the greatest queen ever," she has said. The stakes for her at Sarajevo are enormous: a silver medalist who joins an ice show could earn $2 million less than a first-place winner.

The Carrutherses, brother and sister Peter and Kitty, may not be aiming quite so high, but the sheer pleasure they derive from the sport seems unsurpassed. The U.S. champion skating pair has never placed better than third in world competition. But Kitty adores Peter, he is reverent of her and both are dauntless performers. (Defying preposterous odds, they are the separately adopted children of a Massachusetts engineer and a teacher; Hamilton too was adopted, also by teachers.) Skating pairs are a unique entity in sports, competing neither individually nor as members of a large team. Their event is all a matter of synchrony. Like other ice-skating pairs, Peter, 24, and Kitty, 22, are in sync off the ice as well. If they were not ingenuous, the Carrutherses would be treacly, awful. "When we're skating well," says he, "there's this feeling that is magic, a strange force we have together." Kitty: "It's almost supernatural." Peter: "We love skating ..." Kitty: "Together."

As skaters, though, they are nearly ferocious, perhaps more athletic than artful.

They do a special one-handed lift with Kitty spinning prone, and in Yugoslavia they may attempt a quadruple throw:

launched by Peter, Kitty does four mid-air spins, a maneuver never tried in competition. "At this level," says their coach, Ron Ludington, "so little separates any of the pairs that something like the quad may be just enough to make the difference." The quad is dangerous, but Kitty craves the thrill. "I love the feeling of being thrown," she says. "It's born into you. If you're afraid, you'll never be able to do it."

Fearless or phobic, most skaters are also romantics, including the superathletes among them. Says Hamilton: "I'd like everybody--Rosalynn and Elaine, Peter and Kitty--to come away from this year satisfied with what they've done, and ready for the rest of their lives." Zayak, for her part, is not thinking much beyond the Olympics, the grand chance to redeem her string of failures. "It's made me mad," she says, "and when I'm mad, watch out!" --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by B.J. Phillips with the U.S. figure skating team

With reporting by B.J. Phillips