Oksana Baiul - Career

Career

As a child, Baiul was interested in ballet but was not considered thin enough so her grandmother took her to skating lessons, saying it was ballet on skates. Her grandfather was also supportive of her skating which she began at age three in Dnipropetrovsk. She was coached by Stanislav Koritek until he was offered a coaching job in Toronto, Canada in March 1992 – he accepted due to problems in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In August 1992, his father, Alfred – the vice-president of the Ukrainian skating federation – called Galina Zmievskaya, working in Odessa, to take on Baiul as a student. Her other coach in Odessa was Valentin Nikolayev. She represented FSC "Ukraine" (Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk).

Prior to the 1993 World Championships in Prague, Baiul crashed into the boards and displaced disks in her back and neck. At the event, she stopped practicing and consulted a Czech doctor. She decided to compete and won the World title at age 15. Because it was too late to try on a new pair of skates, Baiul competed with a pair that had crooked blades.

At the 1994 Winter Olympics, Baiul was second to Nancy Kerrigan in the short program. During a practice session before the long program, Baiul collided with Germany's Tanja Szewczenko, sustaining a wrenched lower back and a small cut on her right shin from her left skate blade that required three stitches. She received two Olympic-approved pain-killing injections of anesthetics in her lower back and shoulder which enabled her to compete in the free skate. Baiul placed first and won the Olympic gold medal ahead of Kerrigan. During the announcement of her as the winner, overstressed Baiul fell into hysteric tears in front of TV cameras. In addition to her Olympic title, she was also named Merited Master of Sports in 1994.

Despite their status as Olympic champions, Baiul and Viktor Petrenko faced the same difficulties back home in Odessa as their fellow Ukrainians, living in a financially strapped country where even meat was a luxury and utility outages were a common occurrence. Conditions at their rink in Odessa had deteriorated severely due to the lack of financial support from the government for figure skating since the breakup of the Soviet Union. They had no working ice resurfacer, so coaches and skaters often had to resurface the ice by hand. The conditions influenced her decision to turn professional after the 1994 Winter Olympics, even though she was only 16 years old at the time and had competed in only four major international events (winning the two highest ranked — World Championships and the Olympics – and finishing second in the European Championships in 1993 and 1994). Her coach and surrogate mother, Zmievskaya, negotiated a very profitable contract for her to tour the United States following the Olympics, an opportunity she could only take advantage of as a professional.

In May 1994, as a 16-year-old, Baiul signed an agreement with the talent agency William Morris Endeavor. In November 2011, her manager, Carlo Farina, discovered accounting and collection discrepancies at WME. After collecting $9.5 million from the company, she filed a lawsuit in November 2012 for an additional $1 million in compensatory damages and more in punitive damages.

Following the Olympics, Baiul was plagued by physical ailments that affected her skating ability. She required arthroscopic knee surgery in the summer of 1994, after which she was advised by her doctor not to return to the ice for two months. Due to the million-dollar touring contract signed by her coach/manager/surrogate mother, Zmievskaya, Baiul ignored doctor's wishes and was skating again in two weeks; she was performing again in six. This move, along with changes in her maturing body, drastically hindered her jumping ability.