G&G

Speaking of being utterly invested in other people's lives...

I was reading some articles about the Olympics and something triggered one of those vague memories in my head. My mother was a huge Michelle Kwan fan, so I remember following Olympic figure skating pretty intensely when I was a young. I even remember buying a book from one of those school booksales about figure skating and I liked looking at the pictures of their costumes and the action shots of their spins and jumps.

Anyways, I was reading those articles and suddenly, I vaguely recalled hearing about a famous Olympic medalist husband-wife skating pair where the husband died while practicing on the ice. I looked it up on Google, and sure enough I brushed up my knowledge on Grinkov and Gordeeva. This article does a pretty thorough job of describing the story behind the pair--how they were reluctantly paired up when she was 10 and he was 14, how they won the Olympics twice together, etc. And damn, kudos to the writer (is it just me, or do people not write like this anymore?), 'cause I started getting all emotionally funny at this one part:

"Just before the performance, Zueva told her, "You should remember that Sergei will help you to skate; try to feel that he is around you."

Indeed, almost as soon as the lights flooded the ice, Gordeeva's fears vanished. "It was like I had double strength," she says. "I didn't even feel that I was skating. My arms were so free." As she glided to center ice, the audience rose and thundered their support. She hesitated, unsure whether she should acknowledge the applause; then, as the melancholy strains of Mahler's Fifth Symphony filled the arena, she began a series of lovingly choreographed gestures—her hand searching for another hand, her body, draped in diaphanous white and gray, arcing to the shape of another invisible body—that suggested she still was one of a pair. The program, choreographed by Zueva, was a wrenching dramatization of Gordeeva's struggle with grief and renewal. At the end she skated with joy, her fingers reaching toward the sky.

The performance brought the tearful audience to its feet again, and Gordeeva herself started to cry. But she took a deep breath and skated to the edge, where she scooped up Daria. The tiny blonde threw her arms around her mother's neck, and gently, very gently, as Gordeeva carried her onto the ice, patted her mother's back."

So OF COURSE I had to look up the video online. The quality was pretty bad so I didn't become super emotional about the dance, but holy moly when I listened to the speech she gave at the end about Sergei and her voice starts cracking and people in the audience start tearing up and GAHHHHHH. I didn't cry because my tear ducts have been surgically removed (I kid), but ughhhhhhhhhh if someone dramatized their story into a novel or a movie I'd be all over that stuff.