Imagine working a long daily shift with a colleague of the opposite sex. You are both dressed in skin-tight clothes and the job requires you to touch each other. Constantly.
Could you accomplish more if you were in love with that person? Could you accomplish more if you kept it strictly business?
That’s the dividing line on which pairs figure skaters and ice dancers fall. Some teams work great as loving couples, such as Rena Inoue and John Baldwin, who made their first Olympic team this year. Some teams work great when they’re involved with other people, such as ice dancers Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, who won their third straight national title and have an outside shot at an Olympic gold medal Feb. 20.
Then again, on-ice relationships can get downright nasty, as illustrated by a tryst between Russian skaters that turned into a food fight at Spago in Hollywood.
As figure skating opens at the Turin Winter Olympics on Saturday with pairs competition, different philosophies on the fire-on-ice question will find their way to the podium.
There is no right or wrong, although there are Mr. Right and Ms. Wrong.
“For us it’s definitely an advantage,” said Melissa Gregory, who married her ice-dancing partner, Russian immigrant Denis Petukhov, and made the Olympic team. “We train together. We live together. We skate together. … We can’t imagine it any other way.”
Belbin and Agosto have danced together eight years and sweated out the 11th-hour citizenship for Belbin, a native Canadian. Yet they’re dating others and never have been involved.
“For us, I compare it to my mom, who was my first coach,” Belbin said. “And when we had lessons that didn’t go well, I’d have to get in the car with her and drive home and have dinner with her and you couldn’t let it go. It carried on the whole time. So I think it’s better for us to kind of separate that, have a good perspective: This is my job, and this is my life at home.”
For Gregory and Petukhov, their relationship started as many do nowadays. Through an ad. But no, Petukhov didn’t mention anything about piña coladas. From Russia, he advertised for a new skating partner through the unromantic International Skating Union’s website.
Gregory, 24, had gone through so many partners, she nearly gave up skating. She told her coach in 2000 that if she didn’t find a new partner by Sept. 1, she was going to college. She saw the ad, and read that Petukhov, 27, was the right height. He had the right experience. She invited him to a tryout at Colorado Springs’ Chapel Hills Mall. He flew from Kirov, Russia, about 500 miles from Moscow, and landed at Denver International Airport – on Aug. 31 at 11 p.m.
“We knew it. Immediately,” Gregory said. “The first practice, the first time we skated together. We went by ourselves. Without a coach, without family or friends. And we decided without them. By the time our coach went into the rink we were already a team.”
It sounds romantic, but even platonic couples know when they work together well on the ice. When does the heat on the ice continue off it?
“I don’t think it’s a single moment,” Gregory said. “It just kind of started happening. We have a lot in common. We really liked being around each other. We have the same interests, the same goals in life. After he came we went to California to work with a ballroom instructor there.
“That’s actually when we fell in love.”
In a little more than a year they were married.
A similar metamorphosis happened to Inoue, 29, and Baldwin, 32. Also in 2000, Baldwin was ready to give up skating. He was a singles skater of moderate success and also traded stocks in San Diego. Then he met Inoue.
“I liked how dedicated she was and the way she never complained about anything,” Baldwin said. “I complain about stuff all the time.”
They bridged the emotional gap when they forged through their first national championships in Boston in 2001 with Baldwin recovering from a broken hand, Inoue from a stress fracture. They left with an 11th-place finish but also a relationship.
“If you care about the person and the person cares about you, it can be very advantageous,” Baldwin said. “It’s not just, ‘OK, here we are. We’re going to do our work and then we leave.”‘
Then again, that also works.
The way Belbin and Agosto move together on the ice convinces many observers that they move together off it. They don’t. In ice dancing, which is one part romanticism and one part athleticism, the dividing line is thin.
Sometimes too thin. Agosto, 24, was Belbin’s 10th tryout partner.
“It just felt so different compared to all those other tryouts where sometimes I met this person who’s basically a stranger and you have to dance together which is so close,” said Belbin, 21. “Half the time I didn’t even want them to touch me.”
Staff writer John Henderson can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
