On Solid Footing

Her embrace of the English language strengthens every day, but Irina Slutskaya couldn’t find the words to express her appreciation of her husband of two years.

Sergei Mikheev teaches sports to elementary school kids in Moscow and stays home while his wife travels and trains and evolves into one of the most technically skilled figure skaters in the world. Slutskaya, 22, seemed to be saying she draws strength from his unpretentious nature and unwavering support, but the precise description eluded her, and she paused in mid-sentence.

Is it that he’s modest? Shy? She weighed those suggestions and found them wanting.

“He doesn’t say for everyone, ‘My wife wins this and this.’ He just works hard,” she said. “Of course, people know who his wife is and they congratulate him when I win something, or they are always calling. He will say, ‘You are a star. I am your husband. I sit here and you will talk with the journalists and I am a home man.’ He’s so quiet. It’s great.

“I am so happy that I’m married because I have real love. I come home and I know he will be waiting for me and I know he will come and say a sweet word for me. This is nice. I am not alone.”

Love alone won’t put Slutskaya (Sloot-SKY-ah) atop the Olympic medal podium in February. But the security and balance Mikheev brings to her life have brought depth to her skating, enhancing her athletic ability and adventurous spirit.

“Sometimes, something happens and you just come home and think, ‘I don’t want to skate anymore,”’ she said. “After a couple of days you think, ‘What can I do more? I love it. I can’t live without it,’ and you start to work harder and harder and harder.”

The results of her work will be evident this weekend at Skate Canada, one of six Grand Prix competitions this season. It’s the only one in which Slutskaya is sure to compete against U.S. champion Michelle Kwan, who defeated her for the world title last March. They might meet in the Grand Prix final in December at Kitchener, Canada, if they earn enough points through their results in Grand Prix events.

The U.S. will be also represented at Skate Canada by world bronze medalist Sarah Hughes, who finished second to Kwan at Skate America last weekend. Also notable is Fumie Suguri of Japan, who was third at the Goodwill Games in September.

Todd Eldredge of the U.S. and three-time world champion Alexei Yagudin of Russia are the top contenders for the men’s title, but Elvis Stojko of Canada will be a sentimental favorite. World pair champions Jamie Sale and David Pelletier of Canada are the class of the pairs competition, which also includes Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin of Russia. The ice dance field is led by Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz of Canada.

The women’s competition will be the showcase event because it will be a preview of the Olympics, a test of the only two women in the sport who are able to consistently blend athleticism and artistry and season their performances with maturity.

Both are solid jumpers, but Slutskaya is especially innovative. She was the first woman to do a Biellmann spin with a change of feet: While spinning on one foot, she reaches back over her shoulders and grabs the skate of her free foot. She then repeats the move on the other foot. She also became the first woman to land a triple lutz-triple loop combination jump in competition in winning the 2000 Grand Prix Final, and she improvised a triple salchow-triple loop-double toe loop combination in her long program at the world championships last March, another first.

Remarkable though it was, it wasn’t enough for her to beat Kwan’s polished performance. Slutskaya was crushed, but she soon realized brooding wouldn’t change the outcome.

“I say OK, I have things I need to work on more,” Slutskaya said. “I had lots of time for rest and relax and I forgot about everything and started work again. I had the Tom Collins tour, I made new program, I had a break, and then I started to skate again and I feel different. I was relaxed. I forgot about all that and I got a new life. For me, every season is a new life.”

She has had to restructure her life before. She blazed onto the scene in 1996, when she became the first Russian woman to win the European championship, and she won again in 1997. She was third at the 1996 world meet and fifth at the 1998 Nagano Games, but she developed weight problems and couldn’t land her jumps. She dropped to fourth at the Russian national competition in 1999 and didn’t qualify for the European or world meets.

Discouraged enough to consider quitting, Slutskaya instead renewed her commitment to her skating and to herself. She lost weight and regained her self-respect.

“I am happy that year has ended,” she said. “On one side, it is good because I can understand myself and now I don’t give myself free minutes. I don’t give myself [permission to] relax. I don’t give myself a day off, or two days off. I can lose everything.

“I enjoy skating and I understand it can be maybe four more years and I will finish, and I try to take everything I can from skating.”

Slutskaya loves to experiment in practice and has worked on a triple axel, which has been landed in competition only by Tonya Harding and Midori Ito. She won’t try it in a competition, however, until she’s sure she has mastered it.

“In practice I can do a triple-triple-triple combination. I really want to try it in competition,” she said. “But it’s different to do it for a crowd. Practice and crowd are like two different lives. When I skate for a crowd, your body is like not yours. You’re nervous. Sometimes what I can do in practice I can’t do in competition. ... I don’t want to try right now such hard things because you need time to make it [perfect]. You can do a quad or a triple axel and have a mistake on easy jumps and that’s not good. I just want to do great what I can do.”

Slutskaya worked diligently this summer to improve her presentation, practicing in Sweden when ice was unavailable at her home rink in Moscow. The preliminary results were good: She defeated Kwan in their two previous meetings this season, at the Goodwill Games in September and the Masters of Figure Skating pro-am Oct. 13, but she’s not reading much into that. “I never, before a competition, say I must beat somebody,” she said. “It’s enough for me to be skating well.”

Watching Slutskaya and Kwan push themselves and each other is among the sport’s greatest rewards. They like and respect each other, each seeing in the other a worthy competitor.

“Of course, we are fighting on the ice but not off the ice,” Slutskaya said. “She’s so great and she’s so smart. My English doesn’t give me [the ability to] talk a lot, but we are always coming together. If she wins, I say something, and if I win, she will say something.

“One year ago we went to a restaurant together with a lot of girls, and it is so nice when you can speak with people and they don’t think you’re nothing. She’s not like that. She’s always nice and smiling and she never turns around and says something behind your back.”

Someday, Slutskaya said, she would like to spend more time in the U.S. and learn the language better. But that’s for a later life, her post-Olympic life.

“Everybody asks what I am going to do in the Olympics, but I say first I must concentrate on the Russian nationals,” she said. “I need to skate well and have the first three places and after that I go to the Olympics. I don’t want to be fourth or fifth in Russian nationals. It’s so bad.

“I don’t think about winning the Olympics. I want to skate clean both programs without mistakes. If I will do it, it will be nice for myself because I really want it. On the other side, it’s sport and nobody can know what can go on tomorrow or after a couple of months.”

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Skate Canada

When: Today-Sunday.

Where: Saskatchewan Place; Saskatoon, Canada.

What: Second of six figure skating Grand Prix events, starting with pairs short program, men’s short program and compulsory dance.

Skaters to watch: Michelle Kwan, Sarah Hughes, Irina Slutskaya on the women’s side. For the men, Todd Eldredge and Alexei Yagudin.