Janet Lynn could still be out there, skating exhibitions, sharing in the quasar-bright attention that has exploded into every corner of her sport in the last several years.
Peggy Fleming is out there, and she is older, and Dorothy Hamill is out there, and she is only a couple of years younger. A big part of the reason Fleming and Hamill remain so universally alluring is they have never left the spotlight after winning their Olympic gold medals.
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It wasn’t that way with Janet Lynn, the daughter of an Evergreen Park pharmacist. She was faster on the ice than Fleming, twice as elegant as Hamill and the greatest skater who never won an Olympic or world title.
The items missing from her resume and her status as a person gone from ice rinks into a black hole have not diminished her stature within the sport, where many think Lynn is the greatest skater ever. Period.
In her book “A Passion To Skate,” noted choreographer Sandra Bezic said, “If an angel could skate, she would move like Janet.” Bezic’s most famous student, Brian Boitano, reacts with breathless awe to videotapes of Lynn’s performances. Linda Leaver, Boitano’s coach, said, “Janet made skating into an art form at the highest technical level.”
Lynn once was the world’s highest-paid woman athlete and the subject of several stories a year in this newspaper. The stories stopped in 1983, when Lynn and her family were living in Littleton, Colo.
The only significant mention of her in these pages over the last 15 years was a story reprinted from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in November 1989, when Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum honored Lynn with the Full-Time Homemaker Award. That was six years after her last public performance.
In Japan, where she won a bronze medal at the Sapporo Winter Olympics a quarter-century ago, Lynn virtually is venerated for how she reacted to the major mistake in her free skate program. She has made nearly two dozen trips to Japan in the last 25 years and has become both an ambassador for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and a spokeswoman for McDonald’s Japan.
Elsewhere, she is something of a cult figure, the woman whose failure to reap her deserved glory led figure skating to change its rules, the woman who lives in anonymity outside Detroit, the woman so private she asks that her children’s names and ages not be used in this story. In the late 1970s, when the first three of her five sons were born, there were stories and pictures about the babies in the Tribune.
After retiring from skating for the second time in 1983, Lynn has found satisfaction in her deep commitment to Christian faith, in her marriage of 22 years and in raising her children, three of whom now are in college.
Her secretiveness owes in part to the nature of her husband’s government job, but Lynn also has found the shadows comforting. She had needed psychological counseling the first time she gave up skating, when her only sense of identity came from the sport. She later admitted being afraid to leave her house and talk with neighbors.
The attention on figure skating now is so great it has penetrated even the black holes. What was once a cult sport, celebrated every four years in the Olympics, is everyday–sometimes thrice-a-day–fodder for TV programmers.
Janet Lynn, 44, the woman who won five straight U.S. titles, is allowing herself to be caught sidelong in what she called the “powerful spotlight on the skating world right now.”
“My skating has been praised over the past few years in ways that I could never have imagined, especially since I was not seeking such praise but have been quite preoccupied in another arena,” Lynn said in a telephone interview last week. “The loving hugs of a child who has struggled and made progress while learning a lesson in discipline or a lesson of life is a priceless treasure which goes far beyond any adulation.”
She had been giving such lessons through her skating, even if the 18-year-old girl who competed in Sapporo was not conscious of her influence until later. Hers was a joy of skating so unfettered by judges’ marks or scoring systems that Lynn was able to smile after falling on a flying sit spin in the free skate at the 1972 Winter Games.
That reaction so affected the Japanese that she is the only skater shown in the Japanese Olympic highlight film. The impression she left is so indelible that the message Lynn wrote on the wall of her Olympic village room–“Peace and Love”–never was erased.
“When I went back to Sapporo two years ago, an older man came up to my son and shook his hand 5 minutes, weeping and thanking him for what I have done,” Lynn said. “That 4 minutes of a performance 23 years before could have that kind of impact is providential.”
Japanese still ask Lynn to autograph pictures of her sitting on the ice after the fall and ask how she could have smiled at that moment. A Tokyo hotel employee once thanked Lynn for sharing the idea “there is hope, even in failure.”
Lynn thinks the fascination with that episode comes from something cultured in the Japanese. It is the same thing that led Midori Ito to apologize to her country after winning “only” a silver medal in 1992, when she became Japan’s first Olympic figure skating medalist.
“In the Japanese culture, not losing face is important, and to them there is a sense of almost being ashamed if you fail,” Lynn said.
Lynn went into the Sapporo free skate with no chance at the gold in a system where compulsory figures then counted for 60 percent of the final score. She was too far behind Austria’s Trixie Schuba, the paint-by-numbers free skater who was the Rembrandt of figure-eights.
“When I knew I couldn’t win, I was very distressed and sad,” Lynn said. “I went back to the Olympic village, and I began crying and arguing with God, saying, `I wanted to do it for You, my nation and my coach. I feel like I am such a huge failure.’
“I gathered myself all I could and thought, `Perhaps there was a bigger purpose to my skating, to show God’s love and express the gift for skating He gave me.’ Because of that attitude, when I fell, I was able to keep smiling. The next day, I was an instant heroine in Japan.”
Lynn won the Olympic free skate with a perfect 6.0 from the Swedish judge. She won the free skate at the 1971 world championships, with two 6.0s, and the 1972 world championships.
The scoring system reduced the consequence of those triumphs. Lynn won no medal at the 1971 worlds and was third at both the Olympics and worlds in 1972; Schuba, no better than 7th in the free skate at any of those events, was gold medalist in all three.
“I have no regrets,” Lynn said.
It was the sport’s leaders who felt remorse. Before the 1973 season, Lynn’s last as an amateur, the International Skating Union reduced the value of compulsory figures to 30 percent and made two free-skating programs worth 70 percent.
Ironically, Lynn was second in compulsory figures at the 1973 world meet and came undone in the short program–worth 20 percent–created on her behalf, falling twice on double axel jumps and placing 12th. She finished first in the free skate (with two 6.0s) and second overall.
A few months later, Chicago sports impresario Arthur Wirtz proclaimed Lynn the next Sonia Henie–whom Wirtz also had turned into an ice-show star 40 years earlier–and signed her to a $1.45 million contract with the Ice Follies. Lynn would earn barely half of what was a record contract for a woman athlete because exercise-induced asthma forced her to quit skating in her third year on tour.
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Food allergies turned out to be a cause of the asthma, and a change in diet allowed her to resume skating in 1980. After five years of not being able to exercise at all, Lynn was lured by Dick Button to the professional championships he was reviving after a seven-year hiatus. Button’s ex-wife, Chicagoan Slavka Kohout, had been Lynn’s coach for more than a decade at the Wagon Wheel in Rockton.
The 1983 World Professional Championship, which Lynn won, would be her final competition.
“I retired again for the sake of taking care of my children and supporting my husband,” Lynn said.
Her husband, Richard Salomon, had just entered the training program for his new career in 1983. She had begun skating at age 2. Her father had sold his pharmacy and moved the family to Rockford when she was 8 to get her closer to the Rockton rink. She finished ninth in the 1968 Winter Olympics at 14. She shortened her name from Janet Lynn Nowicki to Janet Lynn before the 1972 Winter Games to have a ready-made stage name as a pro skater.
She gave up the sport cold turkey at age 30. For a woman whose soul had been formed and expressed on the ice, it was a dramatic decision.
“Skating has a very strong pull on me emotionally,” she said. “To do right by my children and my family, I had to disconnect myself from skating so I wouldn’t be distracted. I had to take all the knowledge and creativity I learned in skating and transfer it to the world of being a wife and mother, a world that doesn’t get enough esteem today.”
Lynn’s emotional pull on the sport has remained equally strong despite her having become almost totally detached from it. The next two generations of skaters, including those like Boitano, too young to have seen Lynn during her Olympic days, and those like Tara Lipinski, born a decade later, have come to revere her skating.
“As soon as the music starts,” Boitano said, “you can see an energy go into her body in a way that’s spiritual. When she smiled, it wasn’t a false smile just to connect with the audience, it was an inner glow emerging.”
Lynn skated to a variety of demanding music–Debussy’s lyrical “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” Beethoven’s powerful “Leonore Overture No. 3,” Ravel’s percussive “La Valse.” She achieved a subtle harmony with each piece in a way that made her skating seem effortless. And she was a formidable jumper as well.
“There is no one like her now,” Leaver said. “Janet was so far ahead of her time in bringing emotions to the ice and becoming an open book to the audience. She flowed to the music like no one had before or since.”
Last March Lipinski became the youngest world champion in history. Not long after that, she had a chance meeting with Lynn at the suburban Detroit rink where Lipinski trains under Richard Callaghan, and Lynn occasionally goes to skate. Callaghan has told Lipinski her joy for skating recalls what Lynn showed on the ice.
“The fact that Mr. Callaghan and others have said I remind them of Janet Lynn is an incredible honor,” Lipinski said. “I only hope that I can one day skate to her level.”
At 14, Lipinski attained a level, world champion, that was beyond Lynn’s grasp but not her reach. Janet Lynn was not a mere star but a quasar, glowing with primordial energy on the edge of consuming shadows, transcending time and space in a universe of her own singularities.