Baiul’s Back

Oksana Baiul had decided to quit skating forever. For two months after the automobile accident that nearly took her life, the 1994 Olympic champion would sit alone in her big house in Connecticut and watch television until 5 a.m. She felt depressed and sorry for herself, even as she told friends what a great life it was.

“It was really tough,” Baiul said. “I was sitting at home, and I was saying, ‘Oh my God. One time, one time, could change your life.’ ”

Then, one Sunday night last spring, she decided on a lark to call Sara Kawahara, a choreographer she had worked with only once--on a television special two years earlier. Baiul began by saying things were fine. By the end of the conversation, she was crying.

“I don’t like skating, and I want to cry,” Baiul remembers saying. “I was really sad.”

By the time they hung up the phone, Baiul and Kawahara had become a team. The next morning, Baiul was on a plane to California. The day after, they were on the ice working on a program for an exhibition tour.

“Can you imagine?” said Baiul, her green eyes growing ever bigger, as if they were trying to hold all the things that have happened in her 20 incredible years. “She helped me so much. She was the person who put my mind and my body together again.”

Baiul participated in her first major competition this weekend since she drove her Mercedes off a Connecticut road and into a cluster of trees at about 100 mph in January. She made her return at the World Professional Figure Skating Championships at the new MCI Center.

“And right now, I just love doing it,” Baiul said. “I was lying in my head to myself that I wasn’t going to skate anymore. But inside in my heart, I knew what I had to do.”

Kawahara choreographed two routines for the world championships. While she downplays her role in heading off Baiul’s retirement plans, Kawahara admits it’s been hard work.

“It seemed like a rash decision for someone so young,” Kawahara said. “I felt so fortunate that she felt she could give me a call and track me down. It was funny, I had been thinking about her. It was just one of those kismet things.

“She’s really much stronger than when I first got her. She hadn’t skated for three months, so she had really lost all her jumps. She had no body tone. She was out of shape. For someone who skates every day of her life, when you take four months off, it’s critical. . . . Now, it’s a matter of whether she can rise to the occasion and pull it off in the clutch of the moment.”

Compared to the tiny Ukrainian teen-ager who nipped Nancy Kerrigan for the gold medal at Lillehammer nearly four years ago, the 1997 version of Oksana Baiul is barely recognizable. She has grown six inches, gained about 10 pounds, cut her blonde hair short and taken a crash course in maturity.

“I really didn’t understand what happened with me at that time,” Baiul said of her Olympic triumph. “I was a kid. I was scared. I was working hard. I skated. I did the best that I can do, and that’s it. But after that, I’m a teen-ager. I’m a kid. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to experience life.”

But, Baiul confesses, it all happened too fast, too soon. She had become the newest rags-to-riches, fairy tale story, cashing in on lucrative endorsement and touring contracts before buying a $500,000 house in Simsbury, Conn., where a handful of other Ukrainian figure skaters also lived.

She said hangers-on in the skating community would befriend her because of her generous nature and her wealth. She had no adult guidance--she never knew her father, and her mother died of cancer in 1991--and over the last couple of years was becoming bored with the sport that brought her fame.

“I was so unprepared,” Baiul said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I wish my mom, she could be here with me, she could share (the gold medal) with me.’ But at that time, I was thinking ‘I’m a big girl and I can do what I want to do.’

“I guess I got there too early, but what can I do? It’s my life. I wish I can write my life and know what was going to happen with me tomorrow. But I really can’t so I have to do mistakes. I have to learn. I guess that’s what my whole life is all about.”

The low point was the crash, which left Baiul with 12 stitches closing a cut in her scalp. Although her blood-alcohol level exceeded the legal limit in Connecticut, Baiul escaped prosecution for drunken driving because of a technicality. She pleaded no contest to a charge of traveling unreasonably fast and had to perform 25 hours of community service.

Baiul’s most jarring moment came when she looked at the mangled wreckage of her car.

“I said, ‘God, thank you for saving me,’ because that car was totaled,” Baiul said. “Totaled.

“That’s when I quit skating, and I was a mess for that time.”

Although the accident nearly forced her off the ice for good, Baiul now says it may have been the best thing that could have happened to her. She has since sold her Connecticut home and moved into a townhouse near Boston with Russian ice dancer Maia Usova--”It’s good to have someone around,” she said--and has gained a new perspective both on and off the ice.

“Before, I was so depressed. Now I can probably say I appreciate my life.

“My life,” she added, putting her hand to her chest and leaning forward to drive the point home. “Not just my skating.”