Friday, February 8, 2002
Nobody counts Elvis out
By STEVE BUFFERY -- Toronto Sun
SALT LAKE CITY -- It seems everybody involved in figure skating has a favourite story about Elvis Stojko.
Often it has something to do with his overcoming a serious injury to win a world title or Olympic medal, or his almost obsessive devotion to his fans, or his debatable choice of music.
It's all good.
My favourite story about skating's Terminator is an old high school yarn. It seems one of Elvis' schoolmates took offence to his choice of sport and teased the little guy mercilessly about being less than a man: "Where's your dress," and "You must be gay," all that high school macho nonsense.
Stojko encouraged a line of open debate with the perpetrator, but when when diplomacy failed, resorted to his martial artistic training, grabbed the guy by the throat, lifted him in the air and then pinned him into the lockers until 'Mr. Figure Skating Is For Girls' realized that Stojko did not possess a feminist bent, nor was the game for sissies.
Yes, if one thing Stojko has taught us, it's that figure skating can be a contact sport. His controlled collisions with gravity and air are anything but flighty. Stojko doesn't glide into jumps. He attacks them. One way of describing his footwork, think of Fred Astaire being trapped for a couple of months in an Okinawan dojo.
BREAKING BARRIERS
Stojko, who will retire at the end of the season, is a skater who changed the face of the sport, by breaking down barriers.
Now 29, he could have tried skating to Rachmaninov or Chopin. The judges would have appreciated that. But the Richmond Hill native felt more comfortable skating to modern music rather than to a piece composed by a dead Russian from the 19th century.
That's him, and the judges didn't like it, and though he captured three world titles and two Olympic medals, Stojko undoubtedly would have won even more if his style was embraced by those who lay down the scores.
The years he did win, victory was pretty well secured by his pushing the technical elements of skating ... landing the first-ever quad in combination with another jump, or a quad triple.
Artistically, the skating world may have turned their noses up on Stojko, but they couldn't deny his physical abilities, his trail-blazing moves.
Thankfully, that was often enough to win the day. At least in years past, before the competition began catching up.
"In my career, I wasn't just fighting to be the best, I was fighting through a lot of people against me," Stojko said recently. "Not so much fans, but critics, people in the sport. Because I believe in something and they didn't think I should believe in it that way.
"And there's people that believed in me no matter what. And I won. There wasn't a time in my whole career that I sold out, that I would change who I am to be number one. I made three world titles on my own, with no help. All the odds against me, two silver medals with all the odds against me.
"There's people behind me and those people I thank very much because this has been an awesome career, an amazing learning experience. But in the end, it was very, very difficult."
Debbi Wilkes, one of the world's leading skating analysts and a pairs bronze medallist at the 1964 world championships along with partner Guy Revell, admires Stojko for his independence, although she once lamented that she would have loved it if he had dumped one of his modern day movie soundtracks for something like Lawrence of Arabia, a classic piece, but with a masculine feel.
"I've always believed in him," Wilkes said. "His heart and courage is the kind of stuff to write books about. Few athletes are admired the way he is.
GOD-GIVEN
"He always stayed his course, even when he was swimming upstream," Wilkes added. "People were always telling him what to do, left, right and centre. But he always did what he wanted to do."
Who can forget Stojko's incredible performance in winning silver at the 1998 Nagano Olympics despite rupturing his adductor muscle? Or winning his second world title in Birmingham, England only six weeks after ripping ligaments in his ankle?
Some say Stojko was born to be a skater, that his physical attributes are God-given, and that may be so. But his former coach Doug Leigh said that while Stojko is a naturally gifted athlete, he never took anything for granted.
"Our secret weapon was, you could never outwork us," Leigh said. "That was impossible and it's as simple as that. We never wasted a second, ever.
"Our attitude toward each day was always make something work, always create something. We never lost sight of that vision," Leigh explained.
'IT WAS A BLAST'
Together for almost a decade starting in 1990, Stojko and Leigh were the team in skating, until the skater shockingly dumped his long-time coach in 1999 and trusted his training to his former choreographer Uschi Keszler.
Privately, Leigh went through more than he ever let on, but never did he bad mouth his former protege, or vice versa. When Skate Canada surprised Stojko with a video testimonial following his final Canadian championship last month in Hamilton, Stojko kept it together until Leigh appeared on the screen, and then he lost it.
"It's funny, I don't have one special moment," Leigh said, when asked about Stojko. "I look at the whole picture, the whole journey. That's the memory. It was a blast."
Salt Lake will be Stojko's competitive swan song, unless he decides to compete at a final world championships next month in Nagano. Tired and a little broken down from over a decade of grinding it out on the international circuit, Stojko is hardly anybody's pick to win the gold medal. But no one counts him out completely. A beautiful quad toe-triple toe combo in the freeskate program at the nationals in Hamilton last month proved that he is physically ready. And there is also a matter of a planned quad lutz for Salt Lake, which, if landed successfully, may help propel him on to the podium.
The thing is, for the first time in years, Stojko is completely healthy.
"I still have a little bit left for Salt Lake and it's building," Stojko said. "And I know it can be there. I'm healthy and I'm ready to go and to me I'm not an underdog, I'm a challenger and I'm ready to take on the rest of the gang.
"I'm mentally sound again, I'm physically sound again," he added. "I'm myself again. I feel ready to go, a lot different than four years ago leaving here and going to Nagano.
"It's open highway and I just push the gas pedal down and go."
2002 Games Figure Skating Coverage
