This Russian Pair Legends of the Fall

Supported only by her partner’s hand, Tatiana Totmianina soars high above the ice, twisting and twirling with the grace and elegance of an acrobat on a high wire.

There is no safety net beneath her, though. Just a smooth sheet of ice, its simple beauty obscuring the danger of the unforgiving surface.

“If you’re scared, it’s much better not to do that,” said Maxim Marinin, Totmianina’s partner. “It’s much better to hang your skates on the wall and say OK, you’re done. But we want to keep skating, and we have to move forward. We’re not looking backward.”

If they did, they might never skate again.

Seven weeks ago, on Oct. 23, the defending world champions were doing that one-handed lift at Skate America in Pittsburgh when Totmianina crashed to the ice face-first. While the audience watched in horrified silence and Marinin hovered over her, an unconscious Totmianina lay motionless on her side for several minutes.

Their coach, Oleg Vasiliev, wasn’t as concerned at first. A three-time world champion and 1984 Olympic gold medalist with partner Elena Valova, Vasiliev has seen hundreds of crashes over the years, some even scarier than this.

But then he approached Totmianina on the ice.

“I was really scared when I got close and saw what I saw. She was unconscious and we didn’t know, is it serious? Nothing? Everything broken? Nothing broken? We didn’t know,” he said. “That hour, half an hour from that moment until we got the results of the X-ray and the CAT scan, I was very scared.”

Totmianina regained consciousness and was taken to a hospital, where she stayed overnight. Miraculously, the tiny blonde’s only injuries were a concussion and some ugly bruises on her face.

“When I woke up the next morning, I asked our coach, ‘Are we going to be ready for the Cup of Russia?’ which was the last Grand Prix event,” she said, laughing. “He was like, ‘Let’s get out of hospital and then we’ll see how things happen.”’

Though deeply touched by the concern of total strangers, Totmianina is still surprised by it. She has no memory of the horrific accident or anything else until two hours after the spill. She’s never watched footage of it, either.

“We know what happened, and there is no reason to watch it,” Marinin said.

“It’s like it would leave an imprint in your mind and you don’t need that kind of stuff. You have to throw it away and put a new feeling in your mind.”