TEAM BORTZ : Tarzana Skater Depended on Family in Title Quest

Seven years ago, a Valley housewife decided to give her little girl skating lessons at a Topanga rink and took along a friend’s pint-sized daughter who had nothing better to do. Today, the housewife’s little girl has given up skating, the rink is closed, and the friend’s daughter is still pint-sized--but also the junior ladies’ national figure skating champion.

Cindy Bortz is 14 now, a high school freshman from Tarzana, and she has been doing nothing better these days than skating circles around her competition. She is among the elite corps of young skaters who are considered the future of American figure skating. Bortz’s coach puts her among the “the next generation”--skaters who will wear the red-white-and-blue glitter costumes in international competitions on the scale of the 1988 Winter Olympics.

Go figure. “No one puts a child in skating for something like this to happen,” said Nancy Bortz, Cindy’s mother. “It just happens.”

Another thing that happens when you have a world-class child is this: Your child isn’t the only one getting up before dawn every morning. You are doing everything your child is doing except the figure eights on the ice.

Go figure. One day the kid is bugging you for something to do, and the next she’s dragging you off to a five-hour practice practically every single day for years. But the strange thing is, you’re having a great time.

Nancy and her husband, Steve, who were high school sweethearts at Hamilton High in West Los Angeles, look on the experience as an opportunity to help their daughter be the best she can be without joining the Army.

“When a child shows potential, it takes a parent to follow through, but it’s a real family effort,” Nancy said, making sure to point out that her 11-year-old daughter, Beth, makes a contribution “by being very supportive. She’s a fabulous sister.”

Cindy recognizes her parents’ selfless role. “This is a team sport,” Cindy said. And when Cindy wins, the team wins. “You can’t push yourself every day,” she said. “You need someone helping push.”

Pushing Bortz the other day was her coach, Wendy Halber-Olson, a member of Team Bortz for the past six years. Halber was instructing Bortz during a practice one morning recently at the Pickwick ice rink in Burbank. As Bortz skated to her own tape of classical music, it was difficult to imagine her competing against the giants of international skating. Bortz is only 4 feet, 8 inches tall and 80 pounds, barely tall enough to see over the boards, but doctors expect her to grow to at least 5 feet. Her size--or lack of--is actually an asset on the ice.

“It’s easy to jump if you’re petite,” said Halber-Olson.

And jumping is Bortz’s speciality. She can execute triple lutzes, triples toes and triples flips, all extremely difficult even for veteran skaters. When she won the junior ladies title last month in Uniondale, N.Y., it is believed that she was the first junior lady ever to land a triple lutz in the nationals.

“Cindy always has had so much discipline and she’s always listened to me,” said Halber-Olson, a competitive skater for 10 years before becoming a coach. “She’s also very intelligent. I’ve been able to teach her something new every week.”

What Halber-Olson has been emphasizing recently is school figures, the compulsory fundamentals that television networks ignore in favor of the flashy freestyle competition. But figures count for 30% of a skater’s total score. In the nationals, Bortz easily outperformed her competition in both the long and short freestyle events, but had been only fifth after the figures.

“Our main objective this year is to get her up in the figures,” Halber-Olson said. “But figures haven’t been as easy for her as freestyle.”

Bortz’s biggest test will take place this May when she tries to move up to the senior ladies division. To make it, she’ll have to impress three judges from the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. who will evaluate her in figures and freestyle.

“If I work hard on figures I’ll probably pass,” said Bortz, a pixie with a bouncy Mary Lou Retton personality.

If Bortz can pull it off, she will have made a rapid rise through the ranks. Only a year ago she was competing in the novice group, coming in second at the nationals. Most skaters stay two years in a division, but Bortz sailed through novice in a year and is expected to do the same in juniors.

She can take another important step in two months. By winning the junior ladies, she qualified for international competition for the first time. She finds out in May whether she was selected to represent the U.S. team in an junior world international meet taking place in Canada in December.

Halber-Olson attributes Bortz’s ascent to what she calls “an exceptional amount of ability.” Bortz also seems to possess the requisite discipline and dedication to succeed in skating. For the last two years, her daily regime has been similar to the grind necessary to enter the international skating scene. But it’s also the opposite of the life style of most of her fellow freshmen at the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies, a magnet city school.

Every morning during the school week, Cindy’s alarm goes off at 4:30. Anyone with kids knows it is almost impossible to pry them out of the covers on the first try. But Cindy usually gets up without the need for a cattle prod and even packs her own orange and rice cake for the rink. She’s driven to practice by her father, a distributor of petroleum products. On the ice at 5:15, she practices freestyle under the watchful eye of her pro until 9. Then she stakes out her patch of ice for an hour of tedious, intricate figures.

Nancy Bortz usually picks up her daughter from the rink and drives her to school. But if Nancy is working at her job as office manager for an orthodontist, she calls on the services of the eldest members of the team, and gets her parents to do the chauffeuring.

A B-average student, Cindy finds time to do homework during school, finishing it when she returns home at 3:30. She doesn’t watch television and goes to bed at 8. On Saturday morning, she practices from 6:30 to 9. Her practice schedule varies on Sundays.

In addition to skating practice, Cindy does aerobics at home every day and takes at least one class in jazz dancing and ballet every week. She also watches her diet carefully, eats sensibility and avoids sweets. Boys are not a major part of her life.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a normal childhood, but we’re trying our best,” Nancy said. “She talks on the phone, goes to the mall, and if she wants to have a friend over for the weekend, we try to encourage her to have a school friend instead of a skating friend.”

A lot of people might think that Cindy has missed a lot of the fun things of childhood, but she doesn’t look at it that way.

“As my skating goes along, it gets more and more involved,” she said, “but I get more and more into it. Everything just builds and builds.”

Does she ever get tired of it? “Sometimes,” she said, “and then I’ll take a break. But when things are going good, you don’t even get sick of all the hard work.”