A Skater Who Figures to Strike Olympic Gold

For the Winter Olympics, it’s X minus 10 months and counting.

For hundreds of athletes around the world, that countdown is measured in terms of hours--the endless hours still to be endured in preparation for their events.

The image is distinct. These are people named Sven or Erik or Ivan, big-boned, fair-haired, with the arms of a lumberjack and the legs of a weight lifter, toiling away in isolation in some wind-swept wasteland in pursuit of the gold. It’s Ivan Drago, Rocky Balboa’s last opponent, on skates.

Put figure skater Christopher Bowman of Van Nuys next to these people and he could pass for the team mascot.

His coach, Frank Carroll, thought Bowman looked like “a wind-up doll” the first time he saw him. That was understandable. Bowman was 5 1/2 at the time.

Fifteen years later, cute might still best describe the 5-10, 145-pound Bowman. Yet he has a chance to dominate his Olympic sport beyond anything the Svens or Eriks or Ivans of the world could ever dream of.

That is, if you consider figure skating a sport. A lot of people think it’s more show business than snow business, that they ought to give out Tony Awards or Grammys rather than gold medals to these people.

But an Olympic sport it is, and Bowman is one of the best in the world at it, “the heir to the throne,” says Carroll, who places Bowman second in this country behind former world champion Brian Boitano.

And anyone who doubts the athletic skills and courage required to be a figure skater should have been on Long Island a little more than a year ago when Bowman competed in the sport’s national championships.

He was in pain. Lots of pain. He had a bump on his right leg that had bothered him for weeks. But he knew that if he could finish in the top three among the U.S. men, he would win a spot on the American team heading for the world championships.

So he competed, the perpetual smile on his face interrupted more and more by a grimace that appeared every time he put pressure on his right leg.

It got so bad, he could barely walk. Even the judges began to grimace just watching him.

Finally, before the final day of competition, skating officials came to Bowman and Carroll with an offer: If Bowman would sit out and rest the leg, they would almost guarantee him a spot in the world championships.

“I was pretty upset,” Bowman recalled. “I had worked awfully hard to get there.”

But Bowman agreed to bow out. It was only after he came home and had X-rays that he learned he had skated on a fractured leg.

“It was amazing,” Carroll said. “He did a triple flip into a double loop jump, in which all the weight is on the right leg.”

A wind-up doll he’s not.

The story got worse before it got better. Bowman was in a cast for five months. He earned his spot on the world team, but couldn’t compete. And soon after the cast was removed, while riding his bicycle near his Van Nuys home, Bowman was clipped by a truck and wound up in a hospital with a spoke from the bike sticking out of his left calf. There was some internal bleeding and nightmarish visions of years of skating gone down the tubes.

It all had a happy ending, however. Bowman recovered, went on to win a gold medal at the 1986 Olympic Sports Festival, finished second at this year’s nationals behind Boitano and finally made it to the world championships where he placed seventh, fourth in the freestyle, an excellent finish for a first-time performer.

Boitano should be America’s main man on the ice in next year’s Olympics, but he’ll be 24 at that point, old for a figure skater. Bowman, 20, figures he’ll have the ice to himself the next time around.

And that will make it all worthwhile for his parents, Joyce and Nelson.

They had their doubts for a while. It all started on a shopping trip to a Van Nuys mall, hardly the launching pad for landing in the Winter Olympics. But 5-year-old Christopher spotted the ice rink in the middle of the mall, and he hasn’t been the same since.

For awhile, it was cute. Little Bowman, a natural ham, would steal many of the shows he was in with his antics. His parents laughed, bragged about their little prodigy and obtained the services of Carroll, who has worked with such world-famed skaters as Linda Fratianne and Tiffany Chin.

Carroll remembers one of the first things he taught Bowman was “how to tell his right foot from his left.”

Great stuff until the Bowmans saw the cost--financially and otherwise.

There were those thrilling 5 a.m. trips, taking their son to a nearby rink, and the return trips after school the same day.

And as Bowman grew, so did the expenses. There was a coach to pay, equipment to buy and trips to take. Soon, the bill was up to $35,000-$40,000 a year.

There were dividends, the highlight of Bowman’s early years being the gold medal in the 1983 World Junior Figure Skating Championships in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.

Fortunately, Christopher was an only child, but the burden was still pretty heavy. His father, who made a living repairing equipment for a petroleum company, was forced to moonlight as a repairman of office equipment.

His parents tried to interest young Bowman in Little League, piano and swimming. Anything. He liked them all, but not enough to give up the ice.

He did fall in love with a second career--acting. He got jobs doing commercials, has appeared in “Little House on the Prairie” and “Archie Bunker’s Place” and plans to do more.

But all this is secondary. Skating remains No. 1. Bowman works out five to six hours daily in a Burbank rink, far from a single flake of snow.

He still looks more like a wind-up doll than a blown-up Ivan or Erik. But someday, he just might be towering over them all.