Fort Collins – Brian Boitano remembers when people fainted when they saw him, when he needed a police escort to leave the airport. It was the late 1980s, early 1990s – figure skating’s heyday in the United States.
Now Johnny Weir, who goes after his fourth consecutive national title next month in Spokane, Wash., could walk down the street of his training base in Newark, Del., and people would think he was just a college kid late for class.
What happened to the popularity of figure skating in this country?
“We need some more stars,” Boitano said Wednesday. “We don’t have any stars in amateur skating.”
Boitano, the 1988 Olympic champion, sat in the Providence Ice Center in Windsor before rehearsals for Brian Boitano’s Skating Spectacular, this Saturday at Loveland’s Budweiser Events Center. Now 43, he’s balding but can still do every stunt in his old Olympic program except the triple axel.
Joining him will be Olympians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, who won 2002 Olympic ice dancing gold; Steven Cousins, Britain’s eight-time champion; and Michael Weiss, a two-time U.S. champion, among others.
All have spent more time in the sun than any of the current skaters expected to carry the American flag in coming years. Michelle Kwan is attending the University of Denver and has not announced any skating plans. Sasha Cohen, the Olympic silver medalist in Turin, hasn’t competed seriously in nine months and may not show in Spokane.
America’s best shot at Olympic gold in Vancouver in 2010 is Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, who made Americans pay attention to ice dancing for the first time with their silver at Turin. However, the pedestal upon which America’s current best stand is curb-height compared with the likes of Boitano and others of his era such as Debi Thomas, Jill Trenary, Nancy Kerrigan and – gulp! – Tonya Harding.
“After I won the Olympics and went on tour, it was rock stars,” he said. “It was unbelievable. In ’88, that tour sold out in five minutes in big, huge buildings.”
In America, of course, winning helps. Since Scott Hamilton in 1984 and Boitano won back-to-back golds, in the past five Olympics American men have garnered only a silver and a bronze. Then again, Americans Tara Lipinski and Sarah Hughes won golds in 1998 and 2002 and, “People have forgotten Sarah Hughes,” Boitano said.
The next four years will be a good test. On paper, at least, Russia’s world domination may be softening. Its gold-medal ice dancing and pairs teams have retired and few expect Irina Slutskaya, the Turin favorite who took third, will be around for Vancouver when she’ll be 31.
Evgeni Plushenko, the fifth men’s Olympic champion from Russia or the old Soviet Union since 1992, will be there, but Russia showed little depth in Turin. Boitano, however, isn’t ready to grant the U.S. an easy road to the top of figure skating.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The Russians are motivated. They’re being paid now to stay in.”
The U.S. has done well in the junior ranks. Forty percent of the field in the 2005 Junior Grand Prix Final was American, and last week, the U.S. became the first country to sweep all four golds at a Junior Grand Prix Final in Bulgaria.
Boitano doesn’t see that as quality depth.
“The jump from junior to senior is such a different stratosphere,” he said. “You could be a bigwig in juniors and then all of a sudden you go to the bottom of the pile and have to work your way back up.”
So where does that leave the future of U.S. figure skating? Boitano says there “are possibilities,” namely Kimmie Meissner, the 17-year-old national runner-up who “has a chance to get a world medal but below that (in singles), I don’t think we have any chances of medals, really.”
Cohen said she’ll definitely be back by the 2009 world championships in Los Angeles, but Boitano thinks “she’s done” if she takes a year off. He thinks Evan Lysacek, who overcame the stomach flu to take fourth in Turin and just won the Cup of China, is “a great competitor,” and Weir, who flopped to Olympic fifth, is “popular with the judges.”
But neither, Boitano said, has the technique of the Russians or two-time Swiss world champion Stephane Lambiel, saying, “Those guys they’re competing against have been doing quads for years.”
John Henderson can be reached at jhenderson@denverpost.com or 303-954-1299.
