Show and Tell : Tiffany Chin Uses Her World-Class Experience to Help the Next Generation of Ice Skaters Find Firm Footing

NORTH HILLS —  “I learned that life does not end. Life goes on and I will be 21 and 24. And 30, someday. That, itself, has given me a lot of strength.”

--Tiffany Chin, February, 1987, on losing her national championship to Debi Thomas.

A decade removed from American darlingdom, Tiffany Chin lifted her skate to step off the shimmering ice surface, an act as natural for her as exhaling.

“Every time you turn around, there’s always another one.”

Chin, 27, was speaking of young figure skaters, precocious take-on-the-world figure skaters, as she once was, before a muscular disorder clipped short her competitive career at the national championships in 1987. But she might as well have been referring to moments of fame, of which Chin--fourth in the Olympics at 16, national champion at 17--experienced more than her share. In her honor, strangers proposed marriage, companies offered endorsement opportunities, a trainer christened a horse and pundits forecast Olympic gold.

When Chin’s allotted “15 minutes” passed, the top half of her hourglass had sand to spare.

That sand has long since fallen, but Chin doesn’t yearn to turn the glass. Her time has gone. Today and tomorrow belong to someone else.

Now, nothing would please her more than if such a someone enrolled for the first annual “Train With the Champions,” an eight-hour-a-day instructional camp at Iceoplex, Aug. 21-24.

Said Juliana Kenny, Iceoplex’s skating director: “With the small amount of students that have entered right now, about 20, the camp should be outstanding.”

Participants will receive hands-on guidance from more than 15 instructors, notably Chin, three-time Olympic gold medalist Irina Rodnina and Peter Carruthers.

Carruthers, a 1984 silver medalist in pairs competition, is reminded of time’s passage whenever he watches the evening news.

“I went into that land, Sarajevo, and my dream came true,” Carruthers said of the 1984 Winter Games in what was Yugoslavia. “Looking at the terrible war in Bosnia now, I can’t believe that was the nation, a place with so much social unrest, that I took a medal out of.”

But 1984 was no ordinary year, as Chin discovered.

*

The site was Providence High in Burbank, the year 1985. Parachute pants were still in vogue, Reagan still President, the Soviet Union still the enemy.

And an auditorium rocked for a star-spangled girl.

Four days after winning the national title, 12 months after tantalizing Sarajevo, Tiffany Chin sipped coffee before meeting her ebullient classmates and told a reporter she had not sacrificed too much of her childhood for skating.

Three years later, she was supposed to be in Calgary, skating toward a gold medal, mesmerizing crowds, wowing judges. Instead, she sat with another reporter, expressing regrets. It wasn’t worth it, she said. She wouldn’t want her child to become a competitive skater.

“No way,” she said then. “I’d want my kid to grow, to go to college, to become a whole person. There’s so many traps in skating. Once you’re ensnared, you can never find your way out.”

*

Today, what ensnared her physically and emotionally between 1985 and 1988--from a rare muscular affliction to incessant verbal and written attacks on her mother, Marjorie, for overtraining her--has been untangled and shelved away.

Chin is accepting of the past, if not nostalgic. She doesn’t miss amateur competition but, oddly enough, the rigorous training for it, which was the facet most believed she would regret.

She resolutely believes her mother, a strong-willed Chinese immigrant who often drove her 150 miles to practice, was well-intentioned and misunderstood. And though she admits to spending numerous nights bleary-eyed, wondering if she could fend off the inevitable end, today that memory elicits a giggle, not a tear.

“I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I hadn’t tried coming back [in 1987],” Chin said. “But as my mind went ‘go-go-go,’ my body was going ‘no-no-no.’ ”

So Chin turned pro, and performed with Holiday on Ice. And she reconsidered her position on skating.

“If I could give advice to parents with young kids, I would say, at all costs, do it,” said Chin, whose training reportedly cost her parents more than $200,000. “Even when it is seemingly impossible, it will be worth it in the end.”

She has, it seems, found her way out after all. Now, through “Train With the Champions,” she will try to show the next generation of skaters a way in.

“You take all of your own experience when you teach,” Chin said. “You understand their moves, and their excuses.”

A new book by sportswriter Joan Ryan, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” is critical of overtraining young female athletes in gymnastics and figure skating, encapsulating the public’s demand for them as: “Keep them coming, and keep them young, small and more dazzling than the ones we already have.” Chin’s story seems consistent with Ryan’s thesis: a classic case of too much, too soon.

Except that Chin is not unhappy. Or anorexic. Or uneducated.

And she doesn’t believe other young skaters have to be either.

“This sport is not a monster,” Chin said. “It’s what you give to it and take from it that matters.”

Carruthers, like Chin (whom he has known for 15 years), has done much of both. He turned pro with his sister, Kitty, after the Sarajevo Olympics. After five years with Ice Capades, he skated for Discover Card Stars on Ice for five more.

While Chin found the travel and limelight of professional entertainment unnerving, Carruthers relished the 12 shows per week for sellout crowds worldwide.

“It didn’t become monotonous,” Carruthers said. “It was a challenge to better yourself for each audience.”

Now living in Westlake Village with his wife of seven years, Dina Pitts, Carruthers serves as a color analyst for Turner Sports and USA Network. He believes his broadcast experience will benefit campers at Iceoplex.

“I’ve spent so much time skating that, when you’re in the booth, you have to do slow-motion replay to see techniques of jumping and spinning down up close,” Carruthers said. “It’s like being in a classroom on every broadcast.”

Of course, Chin too has spent a lot of time skating, perhaps more than even she realizes.

“I’m surprised when I talk to kids, and they know about me, and what I have done,” Chin said.

She may yet do more. Chin has considered re-entering professional competition, some time after the camp concludes.

“Just to see if I can still do it,” Chin said, laughing. “To see if I can defy gravity.”

And defy time.