Can You Make Up Stuff This Bizarre?

Suppose a paperback writer approached a publisher with a preposterous plot. The subject is skating. The scene is the Winter Olympics. A winsome young woman from New England is assailed by a crazed stranger before a performance. Unable to skate, she must sit helplessly as her nemesis, a saucy spitfire from the Pacific Northwest, spins, wins and grins.

But when police investigate, the winner’s ex-husband and bodyguard are accused of a conspiracy to hire the crazed stranger. And one report, probably erroneous, even had the skater herself suspected of complicity.

The plot sickens.

So maybe the publisher pushes the author out of the office.

Or maybe, just maybe, the publisher gets the agents of Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone on the phone and begins haggling over the movie rights.

Is truth truly stranger than fiction? Let me tell you about a worst-selling novel of 10 years ago, “Death Spiral,” written by one Meredith Phillips and published by Perseverance Books of Menlo Park, Calif., which happened to coincide with an actual Winter Olympics that was held that year during happier days in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. Let me tell you the story in a nutshell and then you tell me which, truth or fiction, is the nuttier.

“It’s a cold war on ice,” reads the back cover, “as love and defection breed murder at the Winter Olympics. Who killed world champion skater Dima Kuznetsov, the ‘playboy of the eastern world’--old or new lovers? Hockey right-wingers? Jealous rivals? The KGB? Will skating sleuth Lesley Grey discover the murderer before she herself is hunted down?”

Oh, that unlucky Lesley Grey. It was a dark and stormy night. And this was one tricky assignment, even for the most hard-boiled of skating sleuths. Yet the most bizarre twist to me is a blurb on the paperback that invites readers to come along for a merry spin on this rink of danger and intrigue, the one that reads: “Meredith Phillips understands the competitive skating world, and writes an intense and gripping story about it. If you like skating, you’ll love ‘Death Spiral.’ ”

Who is this quote from?

It is from Richard Dalley, a former figure skater who was among the competitors in those 1984 Olympic Games, where he and his partner, Carol Fox, placed fifth in ice dancing. Dalley already was a mature 26 when he and his skatemate, who was nearly a year older, returned home to their birthplace of Detroit from their world travels. Their story was neither intense nor gripping. All of their spirals had been pleasant ones.

Ten years later, Richard Dalley was the event director of last week’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships right there in Detroit, the rotor city.

Talk about one for the books.

From now on, should anyone author a mystery about figure skaters and request a blurb from Richard, chances are it will be unprintable. The poor guy had done a splendid job preparing everything for the arrival of the most skillful skaters in the land.

Then a snowstorm hit. Then the blizzard knocked out heat and electricity in a headquarters hotel. Then one of the defending dance champions, Renee Roca, collided with another skater at practice and broke her left wrist. Then popular pairs skaters Natasha Kuchiki and Rocky Marval were denied a trip to the Olympics by the peculiar judgment of the judges.

All of which paled next to the biggest story on ice, the unfathomable ambush of Nancy Kerrigan by some cretin with a crowbar. Followed by a citywide police dragnet. Followed by the triumphant performance of Tonya Harding, the hard-talking, hot-rodding, pool-playing asthmatic (and fiction writer’s dream) whose sentiment toward Kerrigan was principally the desire to “whip her butt,” a skater who speaks not the demure language of an ice princess but the snap-crackle-pop talk of a hockey player.

All the elements are there, including winter’s. Great comedy. Great tragedy. In one corner you have Kerrigan, the welder’s daughter whose mother is legally blind. In another corner stands Harding, who overcame coughing fits to qualify for the Olympics and then say: “I made it! I’m the Tonya Harding that everyone always believes in.” And betwixt and between stand some highly unusual suspects, who could be falsely accused or could, depending on the outcome, turn Tonya’s victory from a possible Olympic one into an astoundingly Pyrrhic one.

Who, in fact or fiction, could have foreseen such a thing?

Disfigure skating.

This could be the most amazing story of this or any other year, this story of a possible conspiracy to keep a skater from skating, this story of a run-by kneecapping, this story that will make me refrain from ever again calling any other story implausible.

I saw a “Twilight Zone” once. It was about a boxer. Lee Marvin was his manager. The boxer was a robot. He had to box a better robot. But when Lee Marvin’s robot broke, Lee Marvin had to pretend he was a robot, climb into the ring and box the better robot.

I now believe this actually happened.