Breaking the Ice

If you want to know why figure skating is the second-highest-rated sport on television, after NFL football, then you need look no further than me. I’ve been a junkie since Peggy Fleming won the Olympic gold medal back in 1968. I am not choosy: Olympics, nationals, worlds, Skate America, even a made-for-ratings event like “Skate, Rattle and Roll” I will watch. (I actually sat wide-eyed through “Snow White on Ice.”)

“The skaters are always there for you,” my husband says charitably to explain my obsession.

I love all the escapist elements--the froufrou costumes, the music, the death spirals, the drama of which skater is going to double her triple salchow. I’ve watched so much that I’m secretly convinced that I too could land a triple lutz.

And then I was invited to see the Campbell’s Soups Champions on Ice Tour at the San Jose Arena. Produced by former Holiday on Ice skater Tom Collins, the show, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, features an international cast of 33 amateur and professional superstars. The lineup includes Tara Lipinski, Michelle Kwan, Todd Eldredge, Rudy Galindo, Ilia Kulik, Victor Petrenko and all the Olympic medal pairs and dance teams. (It will be at Long Beach Arena today, the Arrowhead Pond on Friday and the L.A. Sports Arena on Sunday.)

Tour spokesman Rocky Marval, the 1992 and 1993 U.S. nationals pairs champion (along with Calla Urbanski), picked me up at my hotel. He was in such good shape that I felt like a slug, a sensation that lasted the entire evening. I asked if he was surprised at how popular the sport has become. “Shocked,” Marval replied. “Most of us figured we’d skate and go to the Olympics, but when all this came along, well, we couldn’t say no.”

The afternoon show had just let out, and fans with special passes were lined up to get autographs. I can’t recognize actors if I run into them with a shopping cart, but I easily picked out Nicole Bobek, Surya Bonaly and Olympic bronze medalist Philippe Candeloro, who is even sexier in person than in his swashbuckling routines. Marval promised to introduce me, but first he had to put out a fire--French skater Laurent Tobel, who performs a comedy number in a pink tutu, had a bent skate blade.

“Don’t you have another pair?” I asked.

“No, just the one,” Tobel said. He seemed to be traveling light.

For athletes who command thousands of dollars a night in appearance fees, the backstage digs were unpretentious, apart from a weight room filled with $100,000 worth of equipment. “The kids, you’ve got to keep them in shape,” said Collins, who has been in skating for 50 years. “They have a lot of time between shows, and they want to take care of their bodies. We have a physical trainer, and he’s booked from the beginning of the show to the end. You’ve got to give them a little ice here, a little heat there.”

I was reminded of a stable filled with expensive race horses.

Putting on the 58-city tour is a logistical nightmare, though a lucrative one, what with 14,000-seat venues, ticket prices ranging from $40 to $55 and vendors doing a brisk business with $25 T-shirts and $15 programs (last year they sold 115,000). The skaters supply their own insurance in addition to their acts, music and costumes. The buildings control the surface, but Collins requests a minimum of 1 1/2 or two inches of ice. We try to keep it at 20, 22 degrees so it’s a little soft.”

“Sometimes they put it in right before we get there, and it’s pretty thin and you hit the cement,” said Todd Eldredge, “but mostly we’ve had good ice.” (He knocked wood when he said this. The skaters knocked wood a lot.)

In the commissary the thoroughbreds were refueling their engines at what appeared to be an all-carbohydrate buffet: pasta, bread, not a carrot stick in sight. Marval invited me to eat, but my appetite mysteriously vanished. The average age of the athletes is 20, and their average weight can’t be much more than 105 pounds.

Tara Lipinski, the 16-year-old gold medalist, sat at the next table picking at a Barbie doll-sized serving of spaghetti. She has gotten blonder since pulling off her Olympic upset but still looks like an ordinary kid you’d see hanging around a mall.

I asked how it felt to be suddenly so famous.

“People have been recognizing me from the beginning, and it slowly grew on me so it wasn’t like a big shock,” Lipinski said. But the gold medal did make an impact. “It was a big relief to know that my life goal was achieved.”

Good to get that out of the way at 16.

Lipinski, who skates last in the show, confided that the best part of touring is “every night when they announce me.” Her medal is in her trophy room in her Houston home. (I’ve never seen a real estate ad with a trophy room.) She travels with just three skating dresses--one for the opening, one for her solo and one for the finale. Like the other skaters, she does her own hair and makeup. Though she doesn’t have her license yet, Autoworld.com gave her a Corvette. The license plate is “98 GOLD.”

“I think I’ve told everything about myself,” she said, when I tried to probe deeper. “Everyone knows everything.”

Rudy Galindo, who won the U.S. nationals in this arena in 1996, is a bit more forthcoming when I ask the flamboyant skater, who stops the show with a hilarious number set to a medley by the Village People, if he’s bothered by the critical comments of television commentators.

“It totally amuses me,” Galindo said. “In front of your face they’ll say, ‘God, I love your program,’ and then they’ll go on TV and say, ‘Well, his program is not as strong as this and that.’ ”

Eldredge, the 1996 world champion, confessed that he likes touring because “you don’t have to worry if you don’t land a triple jump tonight or you come in fifth or sixth.” Even so, he’s not turning professional just yet.

Michelle Kwan, the Southern Californian who celebrated her 18th birthday on Tuesday, has been on the tour since 1994. Collins recalled, “She was a scrawny little thing with pigtails and I never thought she’d materialize into what she is now.”

“I was never scrawny,” protested the petite Kwan, who was digging into a normal-sized serving of pasta and a roll.

Seeing Kwan in person is like seeing the Mona Lisa; it’s a shock that she actually exists. I wanted to tell her that I admire the way she handled winning the silver far more than I would have admired her for being able to spin in two different directions. Instead I confessed, “I’ve been watching you so long that I feel like I know you.”

“Well, I feel like I know Tom Cruise too,” Kwan said and laughed. “People talk to me on the TV. They say, ‘Michelle, don’t do that.’ ”

She likes being the skater with whom fans have the greatest emotional investment. “It’s nice when people understand how I feel. Over the years, when they see me, they realize who I am and what I do. The first year when I came on tour, people just gave me light applause. But now when they announce my name I hear people clapping and screaming and I think, ‘Wow.’ It’s very solitary and quiet when I’m practicing, so I don’t realize how many people are watching. But it’s worth every minute when you’re able to go out there and perform. It gives you a high.”

I was pretty pumped myself when I finally settled into my seat to watch the show. The lighting is extraordinary, and the talent kept popping out from the wings like acts on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Ice dancers Elizabeth Punsalan and Jerod Swallow did a terrific routine to Frank Sinatra tunes. Both the Russian gold medal pairs team of Oksana Kazakova and Artur Dmitriev and silver medalists Elena Bereznaya and Anton Sikharulidze performed heart-stopping acrobatics. Candeloro did a “Saturday Night Fever” act that I’ve seen half a dozen times but still enjoyed. Kwan spiraled elegantly to “Reflections” from Disney’s “Mulan.” My favorite moment came when Ilia Kulik appeared in that hideous yellow spotted shirt he wore at the Olympics and did a modified version of his winning long program. (Kulik told me he was going to Maui after the tour to “forget everything, forget ice and clear my head.”)

I was depressed after the finale, when all the skaters glided around to “We Are the Champions.” I didn’t want to leave the skating world and return to reality. But I looked on the bright side. The Goodwill Games are just around the corner.

And in the real world I could get something to eat.

BE THERE

Campbell’s Soups Champions on Ice, today at 7:30 p.m. at Long Beach Arena, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Friday at 8 p.m. at the Arrowhead Pond, 2605 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim, and Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, 3939 S. Figueroa St. Tickets $40 to $55 available at Ticketmaster locations or by calling (213) 480-3232 or (714) 740-2000.