Colorado Springs – It’s almost midnight in Turin, Italy, and in about 20 hours Evan Lysacek would get in front of a worldwide TV audience and skate his long program in the Olympic Games. He should be asleep. He should be dreaming of landing his triple axels and having the performance of his life.
Instead, his whole body aches. He’s hot as the Olympic flame. He’s so dizzy he can barely walk to the bathroom when he throws up – repeatedly.
“I was like, I think I’m going to die,” Lysacek says.
It’s almost exactly a year later and Lysacek is sitting in an empty meeting room in the World Arena here the day before his victory in the Four Continents Championships. He smiles wryly and shakes his head, as if he survived a cruel joke. But Lysacek didn’t just survive. He thrived.
In the 13 months since the longest 24 hours of his life, Lysacek has supplanted Johnny Weir as American champion and has a realistic shot at his first world title at the World Figure Skating Championships this week in Tokyo. And why not? He got up off what he thought was his deathbed to have the third-best long program in the Olympics and finish fourth overall.
At least, that’s what he read.
“I had no recollection of it,” Lysacek says.
How much can a man learn about himself when he fights through the worst pain he has ever experienced for the best experience he has ever had? At 21, Lysacek takes that maturity into a future filled with a riveting rivalry with Weir and placement among the world’s elite.
Looking back, he recalls two painful days earlier in Turin on the morning of his short program. He feels “queasy, clammy and achy.” Welcome to the stomach flu, Mr. Lysacek. Trying to fend off nausea, he doesn’t eat all day “which was really stupid.” By the time he skates at 11 p.m. he has just enough energy to crawl into bed. His performance shows. He goes to bed in 10th place. He doesn’t think he can feel worse but he soon does. His fever skyrockets and the vomiting begins.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” he says.
The next morning at practice he dizzily gets on the ice and feels like that first day back in Naperville, Ill., when he was 8 1/2 and tried skating for the first time, hoping he could be the next great Chicago Blackhawk. He tells his coach, Hall of Famer Frank Carroll, “I can’t do this. I’m going to fall and hit my head.”
Carroll and Lysacek’s mom agree. Then Lysacek, jumping on a brief moment of lucidness, says no. He has 24 hours before his long. He’ll wait. He locks himself in his room at the Olympic Village in order not to get other athletes sick and funnels down water and energy drinks. When that isn’t working he goes to the Olympic Village infirmary, where doctors say he’s so dehydrated he needs an IV.
Nine times needles go in and nine times the vein can’t hold the fluid.
“I was like, ‘Forget it,”‘ he says. “‘Don’t give me anymore needles. I don’t care how dehydrated I am. Just send me home.”‘
After an IV finally takes hold, he’s told to return to his room and start drinking Pow- erade. It’s 1:30 a.m. So the morning of his long program in the Olympic Games he sits on his bed, guzzles the Powerade and watches “Miracle” on his DVD player.
The next evening, he arrives 30 minutes before he has to step on the ice and sits in a hallway Indian-style. Instead of a lengthy warm-up, Lysacek closes his eyes and visualizes his program. As the music to “Carmen” begins, Lysacek starts to skate. And the weirdest thing happens.
“I just switched on muscle memory,” he says. “It was sort of the same thing as nationals. I was just in the zone. No crowd. No music. Just like totally inside my head, total muscle memory.”
He nails all eight of his triple jumps and scores a personal-best 152.58. He’s in first place.
Lysacek lies down on a bench and buries himself under a blanket, skates, costume and all. He sleeps for 20 minutes.
“Many skaters get very sick at the Olympics and don’t skate well,” Carroll says. “But I’m very, very proud that he got on skates and skated like that.”
Wait. It’s not over. The stomach flu follows him like a filthy rumor, all the way to his home in Los Angeles, where he starts coughing up blood. Doctors diagnose a bacterial infection and cure him before he goes to the world championships the next month and takes his second world bronze medal.
If what doesn’t break you will make you stronger, then Lysacek could win a bench-press competition in Tokyo. He has already recovered from a stress fracture in his hip from 2004, but what do you learn from getting out of sickbed and taking fourth in the Olympics?
“I learned kind of what I had already known, that I was taught from a young age to have good sportsmanship and to give it your all, no matter what,” he says. “Sometimes it’s great and sometimes it’s not but that’s the life of an athlete.”
Now he’s on top of the world. He has a new home in the Hollywood Hills, right above the Sunset Strip, where he can walk to clubs such as Sky Bar, Privilege and Hyde. He could also have worse company than a girlfriend, U.S. ice dancer Tanith Belbin, who was voted ESPN The Magazine’s hottest female athlete for 2006.
“I’ve had girlfriends who’ve been actresses and models and students,” he says. Lysacek got to know Belbin during many tours with “Champions on Ice,” which comes to Denver May 23. “But they don’t really get the lifestyle of an athlete: ‘No, I can’t hang out tonight. I have to train tomorrow.’ We butted heads a lot, so they didn’t last very long. But Tanith knows exactly what I’m going through, and we’re going through kind of the same stuff together.”
They’ll be together in Tokyo, where they both could dance with gold medals around their necks.
John Henderson can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
