[johnnyweir-ru]

в течении 2004-2006 гг. Сара Бреннен брала у Джонни интервью, из которых создана неизданная детская книга, посвященная Джонни. Сара публикует ее по частям - пока вышло две. Кусочки книги сопровождаются иллюстрациями Сары.

FLYING OVER THE ICE - part one
By Sarah S. Brannen




From 2004 to 2006, Sarah Brannen spent extensive time interviewing figure skater Johnny Weir, his family, his coaches, and his training mates.

Flying Over the Ice is an unpublished children’s book about how Johnny first learned to skate. It won the runner-up Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Work-in-Progress grant in 2006. The following is an excerpt from the book.


Johnny Weir sat alone, behind a door in the dark. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t feel his left leg from the knee down. His foot had hurt so much a few hours earlier that he knew he couldn’t land even one jump on it, let alone a do whole figure skating program. As a last resort, the American team doctor had injected it with lidocaine. Now Johnny felt as if he didn’t have a left foot at all.

On the other side of the door was a sheet of ice surrounded by thousands of people, all watching forty-two men compete for the title of 2005 World Figure Skating Champion. Johnny could hear the music playing as the skater before him went through his program.

I trained all year for this, thought Johnny. I trained for nine years for this. And now it’s going to end without a medal, without anything. Earlier in the day he had decided to withdraw from the competition. He knew he couldn’t possibly skate well. But it was the World Championships, the year before the Olympics, and he couldn’t quit.

It was time. He got up and walked through the door, into the glaring white light of the arena. The previous skater finished, to polite applause. People saw Johnny and started to clap and shout his name. The applause grew as people cheered for him. Johnny took off his skate guards and stepped on the ice. He stood at the boards, looking down, breathing deeply, in and out.

“If you want to do this, you can,” said his coach. “Your body is perfectly trained. It will know what to do. You can trust it.”

Johnny didn’t believe her. But he had decided to skate, no matter what. He turned, looked at the crowd, and skated onto the ice.

Riding

All his life, Johnny knew he would go to the Olympics some day. Until he was twelve years old, he thought it would be as an equestrian, riding a horse over a course of jumps.

The Weirs lived in the flat, open farm country of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Johnny’s parents, John and Patti, had grown up together in the same small town there. Johnny’s grandparents boarded and trained several horses on their farm, and John had taken care of them and ridden in shows as a child. Johnny loved the horses. As a baby, he stood in his crib and watched the horses running in a field behind his house.

When he was older, Johnny’s father built a ring of small horse jumps in their back yard. Six-year-old Johnny used to invite friends over and hold “competitions.” Everyone, including his little brother and the family dog, took a turn running around the course and leaping over the jumps. Johnny always won. “I was extremely competitive,” he said. “I always imagined I was in the Olympics.”



When Johnny was eight, he was finally old enough for real riding lessons on ponies. He was so small that he couldn’t even reach up and put the bridle over the pony’s head, but he loved his first lesson and he couldn’t wait to go back. He was a natural rider, and he soon started learning to jump. “I liked the speed of jumping,” said Johnny. “Your hair’s flying, and you just fly up in the air.”

It was hard for the family to afford Johnny’s expensive lessons, but Johnny’s parents wanted their sons to have every opportunity and they gave up whatever was necessary to pay for his riding. Johnny competed in his first horse show, in Appleton, Pennsylvania, just a few months after starting to ride, and he won. From then on, he went to shows every two or three weeks.

"It was dead serious,” said his mother. “His goal was always the National team and the Olympics. ” When Johnny was nine, his parents and his grandmother bought him a dappled gray pony named My Blue Shadow. Shadow was “green,” meaning he was still being schooled and learning how to compete. He and Johnny took to each other right away. Shadow was not very well-behaved with most people, but Johnny could get him to do anything.

Johnny went to the riding ring every day after school. Every other weekend, he braided Shadow’s mane and tail and washed his hooves. In the morning, the whole family left before dawn and drove to the show where Johnny and Shadow were going to compete. Afterward, Johnny gave his little brother Brian his ribbons and boosted him into the saddle before he led Shadow to the trailer. Brian, always called “Boz,” loved going to horse shows and cheering for Johnny, and he liked to ride on Shadow’s back at the end.

When he wasn’t riding, Johnny lived in a world of his own. “I was crazy,” he said. “I did things my own way. I was always running around pretending to be a boat or an animal or something.” He used to pretend he was speaking in foreign languages, babbling in made-up words that no one else could understand. He liked to play alone, just as he liked the individual sport of riding.

As far as Johnny and his family were concerned, he was going to keep riding until he was grown up, and his ultimate goal was the summer Olympics. It had never crossed their minds that Johnny’s destiny lay on a skating rink, not in a riding ring.

Skating

In the winter of 1994, it seemed that everyone in the country was talking about a strange and terrible incident at the United States Figure Skating Championships. The national champion, Nancy Kerrigan, had been hit on the leg by an attacker who wanted to keep her from skating. No one knew if she would recover in time to compete at the Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. Johnny and his mother were fascinated by the drama and all the kids at Johnny’s school were talking about it. Nine-year-old Johnny couldn’t wait to watch the Olympics on television.

On the big night, Patti let Johnny stay up late to watch. He made a nest of pillows on the floor and curled up in front of the television, wrapped in an afghan. He was fascinated. “I thought it was a glamorous world of people who wear sparkles and pretty costumes and skate around and jump really high in the air and spin really fast. It was intriguing,” he said later.

Early the next morning, Johnny tiptoed down to the basement in his pajamas, looking for his roller skates. He put them on and imagined that he was standing in an ice rink in front of a big crowd. He tried to spin. He could glide on one foot, so he tried lifting one leg up high in a spiral position. He tried a jump. He loved it.

The roller skates were so heavy that his legs flew up over his head when he fell. Johnny was tiny and skinny, which is actually perfect for a figure skater, although he didn’t know that yet.

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FLYING OVER THE ICE - part two
By Sarah S. Brannen

In part 1, nine-year-old Johnny Weir competed seriously as an equestrian, but was also fascinated by figure skating. He copied what he saw on TV on his roller skates.


“Look at him. ”

Johnny watched every skating competition on TV. He watched his tape of the Olympics so many times it wore out. In the summer, he roller-skated on the driveway. He gathered his family for an audience, then pretended to skate a program and took a bow. He skated a second program, pretending to be a different skater. Then he became a judge and chose a winner. Johnny wore out the toe stoppers of his skates, and his mother had to keep buying new ones.

Most of all, he liked to jump. He taught himself to do several different, difficult jumps. “I made my dad videotape me at one point. I did what would be, on the ice, an axel and a double toe loop,” he said.

He kept riding as much as ever. Johnny and Shadow competed together all summer. But Johnny wasn’t progressing as fast as he had in the beginning. It was getting hard to go into the ring every day and just do the same thing over and over again, without getting better.

The next winter, Johnny’s parents gave him a used pair of dance boots and blades; Johnny’s parents didn’t know anything about skating but they had seen the skates at the local ski-and-skate exchange and they knew Johnny would love them.

A week of stormy weather had turned the cornfield behind Johnny’s house to a sheet of ice. The next day after school, Johnny went outside and put on the new skates. He stepped onto the field. The sky was gray and the air was very cold. The boots were stiff and squeezed his toes. The blades felt sticky on the ice compared to the smooth wheels of his roller skates. Johnny concentrated on standing up. Carefully, he started to stroke. Push with the right leg. Put the right foot down. Push with the left leg. Put the left foot down.

He was skating! Johnny stayed out until it got dark and his fingers were numb. Riding lessons were canceled that week because of the storms, and Johnny skated every day. He loved the quiet field and the dark gray sky.

From the kitchen window, Patti watched Johnny on the field, skating, jumping, turning and gliding.

“You’ve got to get that kid some lessons,” said a neighbor.

“He can’t skate and ride too!” said Patti. “We can’t afford that.”

“But… look at him.”

Lessons

Johnny had never been inside a skating rink. It was crowded, echoing and noisy. The air smelled like Zamboni exhaust and rubber and frozen water. The other kids in his class were hanging onto the boards at the edge of the ice and looking nervous. Johnny skated out to the middle. The ice was smooth and slippery, not like the cornfield. He looked at the older kids doing complicated spins and jumps. I want to do that too, he thought.

The instructor taught the class some beginning moves: how to fall and get up, swizzles and sculls. For the next week, Johnny practiced hard on his roller skates, working on what he had learned in the class.

After his second skating class, during the free time, he started trying to jump. He hurled himself into the air and felt himself spin around. “I remember the day I landed my first axel,” he said. “There was no one around except Elizabeth (the instructor). She looked over and saw what I was doing. I jumped, and when I landed I was on one foot, and I was gliding, and I was so excited! I was like, ‘Did you see what I did?’ I didn’t know how many times I had turned. I thought I had done a triple! And she said, ‘You just did an axel.’ When I look back on it, it was such a huge moment for me, not that it was winning anything, or getting ovations, it was just pure excitement that I did something.”

Most people need a year or two to learn an axel jump. Johnny had taught himself in a week.

Elizabeth skated over to Johnny’s mother. “Mrs. Weir, Johnny needs private lessons.”

Patti laughed. “He already has four riding lessons a week. We don’t have time for more skating lessons!”

“Well, let me teach him once a week,” said Elizabeth. “Look at him.” Johnny was racing around the ice, trying one jump after another. “Let me show you what he can do.”

“Ok,” said Patti. “We’ll try it.”



Decision

After that, Johnny had riding lessons four times a week and skating three times a week. There wasn’t enough time for both skating and riding.

Johnny could hardly bear to think of selling Shadow. But he was learning exciting new things in skating all the time. Everyone said he could be a champion skater. One afternoon a riding magazine came in the mail and he sat down and read the whole thing. When his parents got home, he looked at them with tears in his eyes.

“I’m going to give up riding,” he said.

Johnny and Shadow rode in one last competition together. Afterward, Johnny undid the braids in Shadow’s mane and put him in his trailer, and then he had to say goodbye. Johnny put his arms around Shadow’s neck and buried his face in his mane. He cried for a long time.

Johnny Coaching in Delaware in 2004

The next day, his coach asked him if he was ready to learn a new jump. Johnny skated as fast as he could and hurled himself into the air.

“Try it again,” said his coach.

Johnny jumped again, and again, and again…

Johnny Weir started private lessons around his eleventh birthday, and he learned fast. He passed the preliminary moves and free skate tests at the end of 1995. Five years later, he won the 2001 world junior title at the age of sixteen. He went on to win the U.S. National championships in 2004, 2005 and 2006. He finished fourth at the World Championships in 2005 and won the bronze medal in 2008. He competed at the Winter Olympics in 2006 and 2010.

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