Turin – One American spent Wednesday with IVs stuck in his arm and the hours before his performance Thursday wondering if he could even make it on the ice. The other American missed a bus and was 20 minutes late.
Guess who had the performance of his life, and guess who had the nightmare.
If you guessed Evan Lysacek would get out of his sickbed to have his best-ever free skate and shoot from 10th to fourth, you know something about U.S. champion Johnny Weir that maybe even he didn’t know until Thursday.
Weir lost a shot at his first Olympic medal with a terribly lethargic free skate that dropped him from second to fifth. Matt Savoie of Peoria, Ill., took seventh.
Weir said he was livid.
“I missed the bus coming over because they changed the schedule on us,” he said. “It was every 10 minutes, and (Thursday) it was every half hour.”
Compare that with Lysacek, who, an hour after a bad short program Tuesday, began an ordeal that nearly knocked him out of the field. After a terrific free skate in which he scored a personal-best 152.58 points, the third-best program of the night, he rolled up his sleeves to show the media the pockmarks left by the IVs.
“I look like a junkie,” he joked.
Which is a lot better than he looked Tuesday night. One hour after the world bronze medalist fell in his opening element and stood 10th, he fell violently ill with the stomach flu. He didn’t practice Wednesday, instead laying in the Olympic Village infirmary tied to IVs.
However, he was so dehydrated from vomiting that his veins kept collapsing.
“Not exactly my ideal Olympic dream,” Lysacek said. “I dreamed about the Olympics for probably upwards of a decade, and it didn’t include coming down with the stomach flu, needles in my arms and basically being in a coma for a day or falling in the short program. But it became something a little bit different.”
It became about courage. On the bus ride from the Olympic Village, with every hard stop Lysacek lurched forward and nearly threw up again. Up through warm-ups he did not know if he would continue.
Yet the Naperville, Ill., native went on the ice with nothing to lose – literally – since he had nothing left in his stomach. He landed all eight of his triple jumps and skated a near-flawless program that was a shock to no one more than himself.
“Once the music started, I got this weird sense of calm and just went through one thing at a time,” he said. “And at the end I felt like I didn’t remember one second of the program.”
Weir, of Newark, Del., never fell, but his program melted away in a series of missteps and last-second changes. After a lackluster warm-up, he dumped his planned quad debut but two-footed a triple axel, dropped the last two elements of a triple combination and the double toe loop of a double combination.
He was slow and unresponsive. On a night of inflated scores, his 136.63 fell way below his personal best of 146.20.
He reached the rink by car at 9:20 p.m. for his 10 p.m. warm-up, when he normally arrives 60 to 90 minutes beforehand.
“I don’t think I ever caught up with myself,” Weir said. “I never felt comfortable enough to give a great performance.”
Weir, 21, learned plenty about his first Olympics.
“I learned I definitely want to stay in a hotel,” he said. “I learned that I can compete at an Olympic Games. I need to train better, to train for every circumstance.”
Said his coach, Priscilla Hill, about the missed bus: “I feel it was a great deal of pressure he’s never dealt with before. It just wasn’t as perfect as he’s capable of. He just had an off night. Personally, I don’t think the schedule had anything to do with it.”
