Is It the Figures or Skating? : Big Money Poses Vexing Questions and Potential Problems as Kwan’s Good Fortune Raises New Concerns for Sport

Moments after Michelle Kwan had won Skate Canada International in October, a reporter asked how she planned to spend the $30,000 in prize money. The 10th grader from Torrance seemed startled by the question, then amused as she said that she had not given the money a moment’s thought.

“Maybe,” the reporter suggested, “you could buy a bike.”

Six months and about $800,000 later, Kwan could buy a garage full of Porsches, although, at 15, she is not old enough to drive one. It is possible that she still has not given much thought to the earnings from her extraordinary season, in which she became the youngest U.S. champion since 1964 and the third-youngest world champion in history, but almost everyone else in the sport has.

No one doubts that the small fortune is a good thing for Kwan and her parents, who manage the family-owned Chinese restaurant. But opinions vary about whether it is a good thing for figure skating.

The rapidly increasing amount of money available to skaters has already had a significant impact on the sport. Some say that the change is for the better, because it attracts young athletes whose parents might have believed before they could not afford the high costs associated with competitive figure skating, but others fear that the emphasis will be on earning money instead of national, world and Olympic titles.

“I could see the same thing happening in figure skating that happened in gymnastics,” said Shep Goldberg, a Redondo Beach agent who represents Kwan and Mary Lou Retton, the gymnastics star of the 1984 Olympics.

“Before Mary Lou, the gymnasts did what they did for the joy of the sport. Now, there’s the cover of the Wheaties box, McDonald’s and Energizer. Mary Lou regrets sometimes that what she did changed the focus.”

Not long ago, it was essential for skaters to win Olympic medals to have even a chance of making a comfortable living as a star in one of the few ice shows featuring those who had retired from competition.

Today, there are so many tours, competitions, television specials and other commercial opportunities for professionals that even skaters who seldom set foot on the medals podium at major championships are in demand.

Thus, the debate among the sport’s officials and agents after last month’s world championships was whether bronze-medalist Rudy Galindo, a 26-year-old overnight sensation after eight years at the senior level, should cash in immediately by turning professional or continue to pursue his Olympic dreams through the 1998 Winter Games. He said that he is leaning toward staying on the Olympic path.

For Galindo, the decision might have been considerably more difficult if the International Skating Union, at the insistence of the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. and other progressive federations, had not begun sharing the wealth with the athletes. Galindo did not make half as much money as Kwan this season, but he said that he can at least afford to move out of the trailer home that he has shared with his mother in San Jose.

The money in figure skating comes primarily from television, which flirted with the sport through the Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill years and then began a steady relationship after the Brian vs. Brian (Boitano and Orser) and Dueling Carmens (Katarina Witt and Debi Thomas) ratings bonanzas during the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada. But when Tonya Harding’s friends whacked Nancy Kerrigan on the knee in 1994, television and the sport moved in together.

“Obviously, the Tonya-Nancy thing changed the whole spectrum,” Goldberg said.

Even before, the USFSA created competitions offering limited prize money and dropped the word amateur from its lexicon, redesignating its competitors as “eligible.” With other countries participating this season, what the skaters were eligible for, besides titles, was a lot of money.

In competition alone, Kwan earned $315,000. That included $140,000 from four victories in the ISU’s Grand Prix series, a concept so successful that it will be expanded next year to include juniors. In the first year that the ISU offered prize money for the World Championships, Kwan’s title was worth an additional $50,000.

But most of Kwan’s money this season was generated by Tom Collins, the man behind the ultra-successful annual tour combining professional and “eligible” stars. He started a 15-city winter tour and has expanded the summer tour to 75 cities, a number that he said might grow to 100 by 1998.

At Collins’ insistence, skaters and their agents are extremely secretive about the money they make on the tour. Figure skating insiders guess that Kwan, who made all 15 winter stops and plans to make about 60 this summer, earns $6,000-$8,000 an appearance. Most skaters are paid less, but some, such as Boitano, Kerrigan and Oksana Baiul, are believed to receive more.

Other tours also feature eligible skaters. One of them last winter, “The Nutcracker on Ice,” provided ammunition for those who believe that money is negatively affecting quality. It paid a reported $90,000 to each of the 1995 U.S. champions, Nicole Bobek and Todd Eldredge, who then failed to retain their titles less than two months later.

Bobek was unable to heal from an ankle injury because of her commitment to the tour and withdrew from the nationals before the long program. Sending a warning to skaters that they have to put competition first, the USFSA ignored precedents and failed to waive Bobek onto the team for the world championships, even though she won the bronze medal last year.

Eldredge managed to finish second in the nationals, but, taking the USFSA’s message to heart, he turned down $100,000 in offers, including one for Collins’ winter tour, and did nothing during the next two months but train for the world championships. He won.

“Everybody has learned a valuable lesson,” said Frank Carroll, who coaches Kwan at Lake Arrowhead’s Ice Castle International Training Center.

It was a lesson that Carroll, who has coached national champions Linda Fratianne, Tiffany Chin and Christopher Bowman, already knew. He, Kwan’s father and Goldberg rejected an offer from the Nutcracker.

“We didn’t even have a two-sentence discussion,” Goldberg said. “It wasn’t the money; it was the timing.”

Goldberg has been Kwan’s agent since she was 13. He was hired by her father, Danny, to handle the media crush when she finished second in the 1994 national championships and became the alternate for Kerrigan and Harding at the Winter Olympics in Norway.

Afterward, Goldberg remained because an agent suddenly was necessary in the booming world of figure skating.

“It’s business,” Danny Kwan said. “I can’t do that business.”

But even Goldberg agrees that the business is secondary to the skating.

“Everything she gets is a byproduct of the skating,” he said. “Frank and Danny sit down and map out the whole season. Then they say, ‘Shep, the rest is yours.’ ”

With her skating commitments, there is not much time left for outside opportunities. But the family is not in a rush to make money.

“Danny tells me, ‘This is not a 100-yard dash, it’s a marathon,’ ” Goldberg said. “They’re not looking to get rich quick.”

It would be understandable if they were. Danny Kwan, a former systems analyst for Pacific Bell who took early retirement when the company downsized, sold the family’s house to pay the skating bills for his two daughters. Karen Kwan, 17, finished fifth in this year’s national championships.

Estimates are that the cost to train one elite skater is more than $50,000 a year, and the Kwans, Danny said, went into debt. Michelle competed in her first nationals in 1993 in borrowed skates.

The money she has earned since, which Danny said is considerably less than it might appear because of taxes and expenses, has allowed the family to climb out of debt--with enough left over for her to put into an education trust fund. She ultimately wants a law degree from Harvard.

Between now and then, she could conceivably compete in two or even three Olympics. In 2006, she will be only 25.

But if her father ever senses she is remaining in the sport for the money, he said that he will encourage her to quit.

“It’s the purity of the sport that made Michelle a great skater, not the money,” he said. “If she can get some financial rewards out of it, fine. But you have to respect the sport as a sport.

“I understand parents who want their children to make money. Maybe they can pay training expenses for a whole year with one or two wins. But if the reason they’re in figure skating is for the money, they’re not respecting the sport.”

Besides, no one might ever have another season like Kwan’s. She won five of six international competitions. A doubled triple lutz here, a singled double axel there and her earning potential would have been cut in half or more.

“Nothing is guaranteed,” Danny said.

Ask France’s Philippe Candeloro. Among the favorites for the men’s title at the world championships after his third-place finish in 1995, he fell out of contention with a botched short program. In 2 minutes 40 seconds, insiders estimated that he cost himself $350,000 in potential prize money, bonuses and tour value.