For Silverstein, Skating Again Is Victory Enough

TURIN, Italy, Feb. 18 -- From the outside, everything looked perfect. Just 15, Jamie Silverstein won the world junior ice dance title with her partner Justin Pekarek. "We have seen the future of ice dancing, and their names are Silverstein and Pekarek," a journalist wrote after watching them in 1999. The couple was as "smooth as its edges on the ice," wrote another.

A year later, they moved up to senior skating, competing at events around the world. They finished an impressive 12th at the world championships, and the plaudits continued.

The whispers had just begun to start.

Silverstein was getting thin. Too thin.

By the fall of 2000, Silverstein was out of the sport, dealing with anorexia and bulimia. For four years, she did not skate. She went into therapy, graduated from high school and went to Cornell. When she decided to return to figure skating last winter, it seemed like folly. Yet -- and this amazes her still -- she is here.

In the Olympic compulsory dance, Silverstein and new partner Ryan O'Meara finished 18th. They are not medal favorites in the competition that resumes with Sunday's original dance. They are not earning praise, and likely won't come near the top 10.

But they are here.

"I'm proud of myself for having made it," Silverstein said. "It's a really big personal victory for me."

For a long time, she said, she wanted to blame the skating. But it wasn't just that. In 1995, when she was 11, she moved with her mother and brother from her hometown of Pittsburgh to Bloomfield Hills, Mich. There, she met Pekarek, two years her senior, and their careers took off. They became only the second U.S. couple in 22 years to win a world junior dance title. Silverstein recalled becoming suddenly popular in her public high school, chatting on the phone with 1998 Olympic gold medal winner Tara Lipinski.

Reigning world silver medal winners and U.S. teammates Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, in sixth place after the compulsory dance, skated in the same Detroit rink.

"When we first got together . . . she and her former partner were rising stars," Agosto said. "We really looked up to them."

Yet as their accomplishments mounted and their path to stardom seemed to grow shorter, her problems quietly and slowly surfaced. To this day, she doesn't quite understand why she stopped eating. She talks about having felt pigeonholed as a female, channeled by society's expectations into traditional roles, and she describes her divorced mother's Olympic aspirations as greater than her own. She found the expectations thrust upon her and her partner overwhelming.