THE COMEBACK OF TIFFANY CHIN : After Muscle Therapy, 3 Months Off, Young Skater Gives It Another Whirl

A funny thing happened to Tiffany Chin on her way to the 1988 Olympics. She stopped skating.

She didn’t see any ice that wasn’t in her tea, didn’t trace any figures that weren’t in her Spiral notebook. Long program, short program? The difference between “60 Minutes” and “Diff’rent Strokes.”

You remember Tiffany Chin. She didn’t win a medal at Sarajevo but, at 16, certainly hadn’t been expected to finish as high as fourth. Yet her combination of strength and artistry and--let’s dare to be sexist--her exotic beauty in those Olympics surely announced this country’s superstar-to-be. The stories all said to wait until 1988.

And then that funny thing happened to the national champion. Her mother noticed it first in everyday things. Tiffany couldn’t cross her feet when she sat down, for instance. When she rode a bicycle, her legs flew out sideways. “She didn’t walk the same way I did,” Marjorie Chin said.

Of course, riding a bicycle around the Toluca Lake neighborhood is not something anyone needs to do well to win an Olympic figure skating medal. But these simple activities gone awry were precursors of something more disastrous in the life of a young skater.

In the year after the Olympics, Tiffany steadily, however slowly, regressed as an ice skater. It was almost impossible to see, but her jumps were lower. She was falling more, too. She fell even in the World Championships, where she finished a disappointing third. She was on her way to becoming the superstar-who-was.

So her mother did something drastic and controversial during the summer, something that would prove her daughter’s determination more than any competition. She pulled Tiffany off the ice for three months.

Tiffany’s skates were put away. Until she could cross her feet and ride a bicycle normally and walk like her mother--and do a triple spin without an accompanying pratfall--she would be frost-free.

It was a tough move to justify, and Marjorie was not entirely comfortable with it. What would the figure skating community think of a mother who pulled the darling of the Winter Olympics out of training? What did she know?

Here is how she justified it: “If she is not good enough, this country deserves another one. Until then, it’s up to me to make her good.”

It took a battery of doctors to confirm what Marjorie Chin had suspected--that Tiffany’s muscles, from her feet to her thighs, had somehow gotten out of whack. A Cybex, which monitors muscle strength, revealed a muscle imbalance of 22 degrees. Anything more than 8 or 9 degrees is considered trouble. Average is 3-4 degrees.

Tiffany, looking back, believes it all started with a bad habit.

When doing those wonderful midair spins, a skater must first jump, then rotate.

Tiffany said she was anticipating the rotations and thus using different muscles in the jumps. That caused some muscles to strengthen unnaturally and others to atrophy. The condition was aggravated as she continued to compensate for the imbalance.

It all gets very technical at this point, and an evening with the Chins is filled with talk of various muscle groups and orthopedic structures, all of it incomprehensible to almost anyone without a medical degree.

But everybody from Dr. Robert Kerlan, who diagnosed the condition, and Ray Hall, a doctor of chiropractics who now oversees Tiffany’s therapy, agreed on the problem and agreed that she was skating her way out of contention and into some kind of corkscrewed pretzel-like shape.

The solution was therapy, specialized exercises to correct the muscle imbalance. Beyond leaving the ice, where she customarily skated five to six hours daily, that meant three hours each day on various devices of torture.

The family den, which contains a big-screen TV, the better to watch videotapes of the Sarajevo Games, now is cluttered with a treadmill and gym apparatus.

Tiffany is back on the ice now, but she said the three months off were tough, and not just because of the therapy.

“I was at a point where I was supposed to be enjoying myself,” she said of her skating.

Knowing that, she was a tough convert. She had been so determined to enjoy herself that she quite naturally resisted her mother’s new line of training. “I had to be forced to see it,” she said.

“I knew I wasn’t as consistent as the year before, but I still thought I could do it. I was so used to always pulling it off when the competition came.”

Had she won in the World Championships, she said, it might have been impossible for anyone to take her off the ice. “If I had pulled off the Worlds, I wouldn’t have been able to accept it,” she said.

But with a third place instead, she was eventually convinced that she needed time off, and now is grateful for it. “I was dying a slow death,” she said. “What did I have to lose?”

The therapy is working--has worked. Hall said she is “80% opened up,” and Tiffany is testing herself on the ice once more, about four hours a day.

She is probably not where she was in 1984, but is on her way. She recently went to Denver, in fact, to begin training with Don Laws, Scott Hamilton’s former coach, to see if she can get ready to defend her U.S. figure-skating championship in February.

If she seems competitive, and she thinks she will be, she will compete. Otherwise, she will train with longer-range goals in mind, such as the 1988 Olympics at Calgary, Canada.

Whatever happens, Marjorie Chin discovered something about her daughter beyond a muscle imbalance.

“I never thought she wanted it bad enough,” she said. “I always felt she achieved so much on talent. She had never experienced any wanting, it seemed to me. I always wondered if that was missing. People would watch her and say, ‘Oh, you can tell she loves skating,’ but that never impressed me.”

And then this funny thing happened where her career was interrupted, with no guarantee that it could be resumed with any of her former style.

Young athletes such as Tiffany, well, the dropout rate can get high. Marjorie Chin remembered one top skater who simply quit, and once when the therapy got especially frustrating--for mother and daughter--Marjorie said in exasperation, “Why don’t you just do what she did--go to school, be beautiful?”

But Tiffany said, no, she wasn’t going to do that, and anyway, she had already improved so much.

“Now, at least, I am satisfied she had genuine wanting in her life,” her mother said.

The getting is to follow.