TV: August 7, 2010 – Russian TV: Love for Life
Many thanks to oravaskvirel for the transcript.
This is her first performance, which took place one year after his death. Her husband and partner, Sergey Grinkov, the two time Olympic champion in pair skating died 15 years ago, in the fall of 1995. On this footage you can see his widow, Ekaterina Gordeeva, skating her first solo performance. For the first time in her life she is skating here alone. It took her one year before she found courage to step on the ice and share her pain with the audience. She was looking for a support and spectators did share her grief with her.
Katia: “It was a good chance for me to show my feelings on the ice, through a performance”.
This performance became Katia’s first step into a different life. Her previous life, which was abruptly cut off, had been an endless woman’s happiness.
Katia: “I was always sure of him. And now, when so many years passed, I realize how difficult it is to encounter this in life, to experience this… The feeling of confidence is what a woman would want to find in a man. There are not so many women who can say this about their men”
Their romance started on the eve of the most important sports event, the first Olympics in their lives. 1988, Kalgari, when everything coincided: the first Olympic gold medal and the first love in the lives of Gordeeva and Grinkov. It was simply impossible to hide such feelings or conceal them from other people’s eyes.
Katia: “The pleasure we were getting from each other and from skating with each other was conveyed [to other people]”.
Everything in their lives was developing very quickly, as if there were premonitions of a soon misfortune. They got married, their daughter was born already one year after the Olympic games. Then there was their second Olympics in 1994. The amazing lifts Gordeeva and Grinkov were doing took the audience’s breath away. Nobody could even guess that the obligatory elements that the skaters were doing so beautifully and effortlessly were approaching the tragic end. To all appearances, already at that time any physical exersice was probably strongly counter-indicative to Sergey’s health. However, nobody knew about it. Neither Katia and Sergey did.
An interview.
“What are your plans for the future?”
Katia: “I think that we will continue to skate, raise our daughter. We will try to bring her up now by ourselves, without [relying too much on the] help of her grandparents. There are many [interesting] things awaiting us in the future. We hope so.”
Sergey: “Yes. I think that we need to take some rest before we decide what we shall do in the future”.
However, Katia would be raising their daughter alone.
Katia: “About half a year before it happened, he suffered from the pain in his back. The pain was so strong that sometimes he could not skate. We did injections and were checking his back all the time but the pain did not go, no matter what we tried.”
Artur: “Already before it [happened], when we were competing together in Lillehammer where they were first and we were second, I noticed how [abnormally] pale he was after their program. White as a sheet. I thought that they might have been not [properly] prepared physically. A thought slipped through my mind that something could have been wrong with his health. But then I thought it could be caused by him being nervous: it often happens that a person may look very pale when he is nervous. But there definitely were signs, which probably went unnoticed in due time”.
When other people several times told Sergey Grinkov that he looked too pale, he dismissed the observation, saying that for example he had not slept properly. In fact, there could have been numerous insignificant reasons [for the occasional paleness], as nobody could even imagine that a two-time Olympic champion who was accustomed to sweating from morning till night could have some health problems. However, the life had an opinion of its own and in one and half years after their triumph in Lillehammer…
Katia: “He lied down on the ice. I was absolutely sure that something happened to his back. It was only our coach, Zoueva, who immediately realized that something went very wrong”
When Marina Zoueva rushed to Sergey, she took it in at once: [something has happened to] his heart. Sergey did not breathe. An ambulance arrived very quickly, less then in ten minutes. It took other ten minutes to bring Grinkov to intensive care. However, any efforts were already useless. The last words Ekaterina Gordeeva heard from her husband still on the ice were “I feel very bad”. A massive infarct. Doctors could not rescue him. They said that a day before he did survive another micro-infarct, which nobody noticed: neither Ekaterina, nor coachers, nor Sergey himself. His heart stopped before his skates were taken off.
Katia: ”During the first weeks I felt a shock and could not believe it. I woke up in the morning, the thought struck me again, I asked myself a question, if it was true or not”
Sergey Grinkov died at 28. Katia was left with a four-years old daughter Dasha on her hands.
Katia: “First of all – a guilt. Of course, there was my guilt. I don’t understand why but I was guilty for Daria and Sergey’s mother…”
It was very difficult for Ekaterina to live through that tragedy. Her close people were advising her not to keep the pain inside and Katia decided to write a book as a tribute to her husband. Every day throughout one year she was remembering all her life with Sergey.
Katia: “I was getting the load off my mind [when writing the book], which made me feel very tired. But later I was realizing that I needed it anyhow. I would anyway do it at some point of my life. May be not in a form of a book. May be this process would take more time then, but since it happened “artificially”… I needed it”
The feeling of responsibility was another factor, which prevented Katia from shrinking to herself or breaking down. She was responsible for her daughter before herself, Sergey’s mother and Sergey himself. Gradually, step by step Ekaterina Gordeeva returned to normal life.
Katia: “After 3, 4 or 5 years I undestood that I must move on. [I was] struggling to turn the page. But only after 10 years I realized that I was not constantly thinking of him and stopped comparing [other men] to him”
Moscow. Filming the Ice Age show. Time is healing. Katia’s story proves this fact. She was doing what she was supposed to do: raising her daughter, skating new programs. And life itself showed her the road to take. Eight years ago Katia gave birth to the second daughter. Her husband is a famous skater, an Olympic champion Ilia Kulik. They live in America and together raise their daughters, Liza Kulik and Dasha Grinkova. Daria Sergeevna Grinkova.
Today, the schedule of Ekgaterina Gordeeva is very tight and booked for many months ahead. She is still in strong demand and she is happy. She did not forget Sergey Grinkov but learnt to live without him. The former, happy life lives in Katia’s memories. Warm and tender memories.
Katia: “He [lives] in my memory or I anyway feel that somehow he is near to me all the time. This goes without saying. This will never change and I don’t want it to change”
