U.S. Olympic Festival : Despite Fall, Bowman Has a Healing Leg Up on Men’s Skating Field

If this were the movies, the star would break his leg and the understudy would step in, save the show and become an overnight sensation. Darned if that almost didn’t happen here in the men’s figure-skating competition in the U.S. Olympic Festival.

Only in Christopher Bowman’s case, it’s the understudy who has broken his leg.

This competition had seemingly given Bowman a chance to shine in the absence of world champion Brian Boitano, who withdrew with a knee injury. But the lingering effects of a broken leg six months ago have shown in Bowman’s performances here.

After winning the compulsory figures Friday, Bowman prepared to rack up points in what he does best, free skating. Fate strikes again--in Saturday night’s short program in the Summit, Bowman fell on a combination jump early in his program. With just a few weeks of practice since his injury, he’s still a long way from being back.

Bowman finished third in the short program but retained the overall lead going into today’s men’s finale, the long program.

He and his coach, Frank Carroll, are hoping for better luck today. With Bowman’s medical history, you can bet that no one will wish him luck by saying, “Break a leg.” It would bring back painful memories.

Bowman, 19, of Van Nuys, was putting together his best season last year but was continually bothered by a sore right leg. There was just a slight bump on the leg, and he thought it might be the result of new skates.

It persisted. “It got to the point where I couldn’t walk,” he recalled Saturday.

What Bowman had was a stress fracture of his fibula, a result of a training regimen in which it was commonplace to do 35 triple flips, landing on his right leg. Bowman ignored the pain and went to the nationals this year, hoping for a spot on the team going to the world championships.

After the short program in the nationals, he was second and in pain. It was then that skating officials approached Carroll and said, “We can barely stand to watch.” Carroll pulled Bowman out of the competition. Neither knew at the time that Bowman had been skating on a broken leg.

The story doesn’t end there, although all concerned wish it had. Bowman had a cast on his leg for months. Soon after it was removed, he began riding his bike for rehabilitation. It was then, while riding home from practice, that he was clipped by a pickup truck.

Doctors in the emergency room removed a bicycle spoke that was embedded in Bowman’s left calf. The resultant internal bleeding was “kind of messy,” according to Carroll.

Bowman can talk about that time in a dispassionate tone, somehow. He sees it as a small setback in what he hopes is a long career. Mainly, Bowman is not one to dwell on the negative. He’s a young man who wants to have fun.

Carroll, who has coached Bowman since the skater was 5, gets one of those exasperated looks when asked about Bowman’s fun-loving nature.

“Christopher has never been easy,” he said. “He wants the fun and he hates the drudgery. He’s very, very high-spirited. He a very typical boy. He’s very mischievous; he’s the first one to play a practical joke. All of the things that can drive a coach crazy, he can take into a long program, and the judges love it.

“He loves to flirt. If some girl is in the arena when he’s practicing, God help you. He’ll free-skate up a storm to impress her. There have been competitions where he’s been at the snack shop talking to some girl and they’ve called his name to skate.”

Bowman does little to play down the image. During an interview, he apologized several times for yawning. “Out late,” he says. Still, he wouldn’t do much that he thought would hurt his skating.

Said Carroll: “If I’m very, very angry at Christopher, I might keep him off the ice. It’s the only tool I have.”

In fact, Bowman has resisted several forces that would have kept him from skating. “At one point, when I was about 10, my parents wanted me to quit skating,” Bowman said. His parents told him they were concerned about competitive skating’s all-consuming requirements.

“They offered to buy me a horse, they gave me piano lessons,” Bowman said. “I was bored to tears. I’d sit at the piano and cry, ‘I want to go skating.’ I love skating, I just love it.”

Why not? Bowman has been performing since he had his first acting job on the television show “The Good Guys,” before he was a year old. “I guess I played a baby,” he said.

In fact, Bowman got his guild cards for the film and television unions before he got his driver’s license. Recently, he has appeared on two episodes of “Little House on the Prairie” and continues to perform in hundreds of commercials.

With his show-business experience, perhaps Bowman can be the master of his own movie ending. In his version, he breaks his leg, comes back in triumph, wins the gold medal and drives into the sunset with the girl.