SPECTATOR SPORT
RATHER like the people who attempt the ink-blot test and find themselves thinking about nothing but sex, when I go to cover the ice-skating, I think of little but Katarina Witt. Last weekend, I went to Lausanne to find myself watching the coronation of the new world champion, a 14-year-old girl who was brought up in a place called Sugarland, Texas.
I suffer from a strange sexual deviation myself — I find females incomparably more attractive when they have passed puberty. And there was never any doubt in any- body's mind that Katarina had experienced that happy event.
If I sound lascivious, even a trifle smitten, then it is all completely intentional. I mean, it is exactly what Katarina herself intended. When she took to the ice, there was not a single male in the audience who was in any doubt that she was skating just for him.
She could skate, too — double Olympic champion, a performer of extraordinary grace and conviction. And lovely too. Skat- ing is full of lovely women, but Katarina had something else as well. It was the power to make men fall in love with her instantly.
I remember it well. She looked at me, adored me, and inevitably was adored back. It was at a press conference. Usually at press conferences I am silent, but I was happy to make an exception for Kati. I asked her a reasonably inane question.
Love on ice
Simon Barnes
Most press conference subjects stare out over the heads of their audience. Not 'Cata- rina. Her eyes sought mine like a heat-seek- ing missile. She locked onto me, looked at me, released the nuclear weapon of a smile. And, taking heavy casualties and sustaining irreparable damage, I surrendered. To my shame, to my pride, I asked another ques- tion, of a banality shocking even by press conference standards. I just wanted to see if she would do it again. She did. I was more or less stretchered off.
I watched her skate her last hurrah before the Winter Olympics of 1994, a sad comeback in a way, for she had lost the power of her legs, and her jumps barely cleared the ice. But all the rest of her pow- ers were intact and she relied on them as never before.
It is extraordinary, this power that very few women have over men. And there was no doubt that Katarina knew the extent of her power, knew it to the last inch and rev- elled in it, knowing that her victims did the same. It was not that you had to believe it was true love, she made you willingly fall in love with love's illusion.
Katarina Witt was a product of the East German sporting system. As one of the great ambassadors of that sporting regime, she had her every move moni- tored by Stasi, and I mean every move. When the Stasi files on Katarina were made public, they included the famous line: '24.00-00.07. Sexual intercourse.' Who was that man of iron control, that person of ice who could last seven whole minutes with such a creature? What was going through his mind? Was he reciting the names of every player in the football team he supported when a boy?
It is better not to dwell on such things. They are not to be taken seriously. For I think it is true that, on the whole, 'Catarina did not truly adore me. I think she was just pretending. And I was happy to go along with the pretence, knowing that the moment gave different and fleeting pleasures to us both. She has forgotten me, not I her.
But she will not have forgotten the power she had over me, over every other suscepti- ble nitwit. 'I saw her at a skating champi- onship recently,' someone told me in Lau- sanne. 'Not skating, just watching. And very sad, complaining that she had no friends, only acquaintances.' I often write about the cruelty of sport, but there are plenty of other kinds of cruelty.
Previous page
