Sharon Barker: The Girl Who May Challenge Tiffany Chin for the Gold

On her way out the door each morning before the crack of dawn, Sharon Barker can’t help but notice the poster hanging in a hallway of her family’s home in Woodland Hills.

It is a picture of a lone figure skater and on it are the words:

How high I am

How much I see

How far I reach

Depends on me

It is a creed to which Barker, 14, seems to have dedicated her youth.

Some day, she hopes, the skater on the poster will be her. She is the U.S. novice ladies champion, but she wants more than that. She dreams of winning an Olympic gold medal and joining an ice show, but even that may not be enough.

“I want to get known for doing something different,” she says, flashing the smile that she hopes will light up television screens throughout the world in the winter of 1988. “I want to invent something--to get known like Dorothy Hamill with her flying camel.”

Those are lofty aspirations, especially for someone who might spend the next three years smiling, spinning and triple jumping in the considerable shadow of Tiffany Chin.

Chin, 17, of Toluca Lake, is the undisputed queen of American figure skating now that former world champions Rosalynn Sumners and Elaine Zayak have retired from competition and signed professional contracts.

Fourth at the Winter Olympics last February in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, Chin is expected to lay waste to the women’s division in this country during the next three years in much the same way Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton dominated the men’s division between 1980 and 1984.

But Barbara Roles Williams, Olympic bronze medalist in 1960 and one of Barker’s coaches, says Barker is “on her way up-- fast .”

Barker’s parents seem to agree. They say they spend about $15,000 a year for the youngest of their two children to pursue her dream.

It’s 8:30 on a Saturday morning, and it’s cold inside the Olympic Ice Arena in Harbor City. Norman Barker can see his breath as he speaks.

“Can you imagine coming in here every morning?” he asks. “You’d freeze your buns off.”

And yet, he sends his daughter off to the rink six days a week.

For almost eight years now, Sharon Barker has followed basically the same regimen:

--Up at 4 a.m.

--On the ice by 5:30. She trains at rinks in Burbank, Culver City and Harbor City.

--Off the ice at 10 and on to the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies, a magnet school in Reseda.

--School until 3:10, then homework and/or more skating until 6.

--Aerobic dancing and Nautilus work after that. Then dinner, and off to bed by 8 or 9.

On Saturdays, she skates for about four hours. Sundays are “vacation” time.

“I put skating before anything else,” Barker said. “I don’t really think I’m getting deprived of anything. It’s my life. . . . If I quit skating, I don’t know what kind of life I’d have.”

Still, aren’t there mornings when she just doesn’t feeling like getting up at all?

“Lots,” she said. “But I tell myself that if I don’t skate, (then) when I go to competition and do something bad, that one day when I didn’t get up is going to affect my competition. . . .

“You get used to it.”

Barker was born in England and moved to Woodland Hills with her family when she was 2. (She could skate for England in international competition if she chose to, but her mother said that would only be “an out” if Sharon failed to make the U.S. Olympic team.) She started skating three years later when her mother took her to the rink at the Topanga Plaza.

After that, she was hooked. It was about the time of Dorothy Hamill’s heyday, but Barker said she wasn’t aware of the 1976 Olympic gold medalist.

“I didn’t care about that,” she said. “I didn’t watch TV, except to watch cartoons.”

She simply enjoyed skating, and she badgered her mother into taking her again and again.

When she was 7, she won the first competition she entered.

The Barkers then started hiring coaches. Wendy Halber Olson has worked with Sharon for about five years; Williams has worked with her for about a year. The Barkers spend about $50 a day on lessons and ice time, they say. Travel expenses to and from competitions are added on top of that. Sharon goes through two pairs of skates a year--at $600 a pair. Skating dresses, complete with beads and rhinestones, can cost up to $800 each, but the Barkers get a break there. Angela Barker makes all of her daughter’s outfits, and also earns a little extra money on the side by making clothes for other skaters.

“You don’t think you’re going to get hooked into it, but that’s exactly what happens,” said Norman, a director of computer systems for Blue Cross. “You’ve got to be in bed by a certain time. . . . Your whole life changes.”

Sharon, who is 5-1 1/2 and weighs 98 pounds, started watching her weight and, for the most part, stopped eating sweets and red meat. “You have to be kind of anorexic-looking on the ice,” her mother said.

Three years ago, before her 12th birthday, Sharon started thinking seriously about the future.

“I started wondering, ‘Am I just skating for fun, or am I going to do something with it--make it a career?’ ” she said. “I decided I wanted to try for the Olympics.”

Last February she won the U.S. novice title, then moved up to the junior division. A stress fracture in her right foot put her in a cast for three months last summer, but in November she won the Southwest Pacific regional junior championship in Culver City. A month later, she won the Pacific Coast sectional title in Berkeley.

Last week, the stress fracture had healed so well that, when first asked, she couldn’t remember which foot had been injured.

And now, after she competes in the junior division at the U.S. championships next week in Kansas City, she will move up to take on Chin and the other senior women.

“She’s at a good age,” Williams said. “She’s still young enough to keep improving a lot, and with girls, they don’t last a long time in this sport. Usually, 18 or 19 is probably a top age. Twenty at the oldest. . . .

“Their bodies change. They get interested in other things. And, in the United States, because they’re not subsidized, it’s expensive.”

Barbara Roles Williams has coached several Olympians, including Lisa-Marie Allen, who finished fifth at Lake Placid in 1980. She is a former Olympian herself, and a former U.S. champion.

She says of Barker: “I can see the same kind of dedication and hard work--willingness to sacrifice--that I remember going through, so I can really relate to that when I work with her. I can see that she’s putting in the right kind of effort and energy.”

Williams describes Barker, a brown-eyed blonde, as “bubbly” and “very energetic” and says “she’s got a good personality for the sport because she’s outgoing and intelligent. She really has the ability to concentrate. That’s a real necessity in this sport.”

Another strong point, Williams said, is Barker’s competitiveness.

“When she gets out to do the actual performance she goes full bore into everything,” Williams said. “She doesn’t hold back. She doesn’t have to make decisions in the middle of everything because she trains well and she’s prepared. . . .

“Quite honestly, I think she hasn’t begun to reach her potential. If that’s a weakness, I think that’s her only weakness. And it isn’t really a weakness. It’s just a matter of developing. There’s just so much more that she can do. . . . She’s just a young girl and she’s on her way up-- fast .”

Fast enough to catch Chin and the other senior ladies?

“I don’t think she’s somebody you could compare with Tiffany at this time,” said Chin’s coach, John Nicks. “But as with a lot of talented juniors, she’s capable of making remarkable progress in a short time. I’m sure I’ll be taking her into account in years to come.”

Barker said she has thought a lot about being in Chin’s shadow, “but I just have to go out there and do what I can do. . . . It’s another three years before the next Olympics and she may burn out.”

If she does, Barker will be more than happy to take her place.

FIGURE SKATING: THE COST Sharon Barker, 14, of Woodland Hills, hopes to challenge Tiffany Chin for an Olympic figure skating gold medal in 1988. Here is a breakdown of some of the costs to her family of that quest:

Lessons and ice time: $300 a week

Travel espenses: $5,000 last year

Two sets of skates a year: $600 a pair

Rhinestone-studded skating dresses: Up to $800 each. Mrs. Barker makes her own.