Knife Dancer

How Does a Girl Fly on Ice? She Never Looks Down

TURIN, Italy

At the nexus of femininity and artifice lies figure skating, with its perfect sparkling creatures fluttering above the ice like hummingbirds.

Ice beings. Watch them in practice. Four women skating and they come within inches of colliding, but somehow, they don't. They skate backward, seeming to have a preternatural sense of where the barrier is. They look as if -- well, not as if they own the ice, but as if they're of the ice. We imagine that delicate and porcelain-skinned Sasha Cohen wasn't born the way the rest of us were. Instead, she just appeared one day, full-formed and gorgeous with skates already attached her feet, delivered to an ice pond somewhere Up North not in the beak of a stork but on the back of a Zamboni.

Cut to: Oksana Baiul at 1994's Lillehammer, realizing she has won the gold, her face framed by pink feathers and twisted in a tearful howl of joy, her hand clapped to her throat as if to say, All this for me?

What does women's figure skating look like? In truth, it looks oddly like Miss America. Before you harrumph that figure skating is a sport and Miss America is a beauty pageant, consider how many years and how many workouts and how many voice lessons and how many costume changes go into being a pageant girl, and then consider how much work it takes to make the whole thing look easy. That's the same thing figure skaters do. They try to make the near-impossible look effortless.

U.S. ice dancer Tanith Belbin jogs slowly with her partner, Ben Agosto, around a hallway Saturday before hitting the ice for a costumed practice. She wears workout clothes and, below the neck, looks entirely an athlete. From the neck up, she looks like she's about to hit a Vegas stage: Her makeup is done, her hair pulled back in a low bun accented with a sparkly red flower.

She could perform in a track suit and kneepads, but then it wouldn't be magic. It would just be sport.

Figure skating dedicates itself to illusion -- to tan stockings that conceal all sexiness and spontaneity, to ice dancing costumes made of strips of glittery fabric that appear to barely cover a skater's body, but in truth are anchored by mesh panels. Female figure skaters wear an awful lot in order to look like they're not wearing much.

"It's fun to kind of get yourself in the mood, get yourself in the character," says U.S. ice dancer Melissa Gregory, who has planned one of her programs with husband Denis Petukhov to Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet." They wear pink fairy-tale clothing for this practice, like Renaissance royalty; he's in a vest and billowy sleeves, she's in a dress with a corset back and a princessy cap on her head. They are a sort of fairy-tale story themselves, having met online five years ago while both were looking for figure skating partners. He flew from Russia to meet her and they married five months later. She was just 19 at the time.

(They're broke, by the way. Ice dancing is not a lucrative lifestyle. And if you want to talk about problems, there's another ice dancer here, Jamie Silverstein, who gave up skating for four years after developing anorexia, in part because of the pressures of the sport. But let's not talk about problems. Let's talk about perfect triple salchows.)

Figure skating is fairy-tale theater. We've come to love it this way, come to love the look of those smooth legs, and the mesh sleeves that seam a skater's arms like a doll's. All that flash distracts us from the bruises. With every curtsy, every forced smile after a fall, even as the commentator says, "Oh, dear," they convince us they're different sorts of beings from us. Ice beings.

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