Getting back on solid ice
BENSENVILLE, Ill. – Supported only by her partner’s hand, Tatiana Totmianina soars high above the ice, twisting and twirling with the grace and elegance of an acrobat on a high wire.
There is no safety net beneath her. Just a smooth sheet of ice, its simple beauty obscuring the danger of the unforgiving surface.
“If you’re scared, it’s much better not to do that,” said Maxim Marinin, Totmianina’s partner. “It’s much better to hang your skates on the wall and say OK, you’re done. But we want to keep skating, and we have to move forward. We’re not looking backward.”
If they did, they might never skate again.
On Oct. 23, the defending world champions were doing that one-handed lift at Skate America in Pittsburgh when Totmianina crashed to the ice face-first. While the audience watched in horrified silence and Marinin hovered over her, an unconscious Totmianina lay motionless on her side for several minutes.
Some thought she was dead.
“We were so scared,” said Ellen Zurfluh, an adult pairs skater who trains at the same suburban Chicago rink where the Russians are based and had accompanied them to the competition.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an accident like that.”
Their coach, Oleg Vasiliev, wasn’t as concerned at first. A three-time world champion and 1984 Olympic gold medalist with partner Elena Valova, Vasiliev has seen hundreds of crashes over the years, some scarier than this.
But then he approached Totmianina on the ice.
“I was really scared when I got close and saw what I saw. She was unconscious and we didn’t know, is it serious? Nothing? Everything broken? Nothing broken? We didn’t know,” he said. “That hour, half an hour from that moment until we got the results of the X-ray and the CAT scan, I was very scared.”
Totmianina regained consciousness and was taken to a hospital, where she stayed overnight. The tiny blonde’s only injuries were a concussion and some ugly bruises on her face.
“When I woke up the next morning, I asked our coach, ‘Are we going to be ready for the Cup of Russia?’ which was the last Grand Prix event,” she said. “He was like, ‘Let’s get out of hospital and then we’ll see how things happen.’ “
Skate America was televised, so a clip of the crash was shown over and over. After spending four years in near-anonymity here, Totmianina and Marinin were inundated with interview requests. They did a news conference before she left the hospital, and reporters were waiting in Chicago when they returned.
Even people who don’t know an axel jump from a tire iron knew about her and the crash. As Totmianina walked down Michigan Avenue after one interview, wearing dark sunglasses to cover her bruises, a homeless man called out her name and asked how she was.
“It was very good support for us. When I was in the hospital and Max is blaming himself, we thought it would be nothing. Here people were trying to help us,” she said.
Though deeply touched by the concern of total strangers, Totmianina is still surprised by it. She has no memory of the horrific accident or anything else until two hours after the spill. She’s never watched footage of it, either.