My Sergei by Ekaterina Gordeeva, E. M. Swift Page B

right now.” He never raised his voice. If I kicked the boards
     with my skate, which he hated, he never yelled. He’d say, “Don’t put yourself down. You’re not a little kid. If you’re disappointed
     in yourself, don’t show it to people. You have to have enough strength to handle it.”
    I don’t know where Sergei got his equanimity from, because his mother was not this way at all. Probably his father had this
     same mentality. It’s why all of Sergei’s friends were proud to know him. He was capable of being as wild and crazy as anyone,
     but when he needed to be strong, he was strong. I saw in Sergei what I was missing in myself, what I was looking for in myself:
     confidence, stability, maturity. It’s why I idolized him so much, why I considered him beyond me and unattainable. He was
     just a man for my dreams.

    Stephan Potopnyk

In Love
    I didn’t eat properly in the fall of 1988. I suppose I was
trying to lose some of the weight I’d put on as my body was maturing. My guess is I wasn’t getting enough calcium in my diet,
     but whatever the reason, I suffered a stress fracture in my right foot, which was diagnosed in November.
    My father had driven me to the hospital, and he wouldn’t talk to me the whole way home. I was crying, very upset. My foot
     was already in a cast, and I remember thinking that I shouldn’t have said anything about it, that I should have just kept
     skating with the pain, which was endurable. That’s the way my father made me feel. The cast would stay on for a month, then
     it would be another four weeks before I could get on the ice. It put the entire season in jeopardy, but this time off the
     ice ended up being a very important period of my life. If I had been healthy, I wonder if things would have turned out as
     they did.
    I began studying English two days a week with a tutor. I had forgotten everything I’d learned in school, and even had to memorize
     the letters again. But this was the international language, and I knew it was something I had to do. With my injury, I now
     had the time. My mother had two grammar books she had saved from when she’d studied English in school, and they helped me
     a great deal. I had also made a friend in California, a man named Terry Foley, who had sent me a pair of gold earrings after
     we won the gold medal. He was an engineer with McDonnell Douglas, and during the summer he had come and visited us in Moscow
     with his three daughters. I wrote him letters a couple of times a month in English, and he would send back my letters with
     corrections. This, too, helped me to learn.
    Sergei either visited or called me every day. Sometimes he came over to dinner, and once I made him a cake. I began to think
     of myself as someone special in his eyes. My cast came off in mid-December, but the foot was still too painful and weak for
     skating. Marina told me that ballet exercises were good for rehabilitation, and I went to Navagorsk to work with her on them.
     I also lifted weights, swam, and practiced lifts with Sergei. He, of course, was also skating and used to run through the
     new program Marina had created for us by himself.
    I went down to the rink to watch him one day in late December. It made my heart ache to have to stand on the side while Sergei
     skated through our program without me, and silly as it sounds, I worried every day that he might suddenly decide he was not
     going to wait for me to get healthy and would choose a new partner.
    “You look so sad, Katuuh,” he said to me, skating over. “So, you’d like to skate?”
    “Of course I’m sad. Serioque, you’re jumping so well, and when I finally get on skates, I won’t be able to jump even two inches
     off the ice.”
    He smiled his wonderful, warming smile. “Come on. I’ll give you a little ride.” And with that he lifted me in his arms and
     skated me all through our program. It was like flying, and my heart was beating so loudly I was sure he could hear it.