John Zimmerman’s trip to Utah can be best described in his words–as “a long odyssey.”
It began in an unlikely place for a figure skater, Montgomery, Ala., and included stops in Springfield, Ohio; Birmingham, Ala.; Atlanta; Indianapolis; Lake Arrowhead, Calif.; and Hackensack, N.J.
It figures Zimmerman’s girlfriend would not be a local sweetheart from any of his hometowns but an Italian figure skater, Silvia Fontana, who also is competing at the Winter Olympics.
It also figures that Zimmerman didn’t mind making a cross-country trip for a one-hour tryout with the skater, Kyoko Ina, who would become his skating partner. She will be competing in her third Olympics, but her first with Zimmerman when the pairs event begins with the short program Saturday night at the Salt Lake Ice Center.
“When we started together, she felt comfortable and I didn’t know what to expect,” Zimmerman said.
“She was already at this level. Anything for me was upward. I would sit back and think, `She’s taking a huge chance.'”
Ina, a New Yorker, and Zimmerman, an Alabaman, have been portrayed as the City Mouse and the Country Mouse. Bridging the differences between her Type-A personality and his Southern detachment took them more than three seasons since their partnership began after the 1998 Winter Olympics.
Until this season they had skated like ships passing in the night instead of as a couple.
“John and I have been on a roller coaster for three years,” Ina said.
Although they finished seventh in the last two world championships, Ina and Zimmerman have skated well enough this season that they could wind up with a medal in what appears a wide-open competition for the bronze.
Reigning world champions Jamie Sale and David Pelletier of Canada and 1998 Olympic silver medalists Elena Bereznaia and Anton Sikharulidze of Russia figure to battle for the gold. The Chinese pair, Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, are favored for the bronze, but two other Russian pairs and Ina-Zimmerman also are in contention.
Ina-Zimmerman and Bereznaia-Sikharulidze have the same coach, Tamara Moskvina, in Hackensack, but they did not train together immediately before coming to the Games. The Russians went with Moskvina to North Logan, Utah, while the U.S. team worked with her husband, Igor Moskvin, in Colorado Springs.
“We didn’t want to train with them because it would be like competing every day,” Zimmerman said.
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Moskvina said Friday that Bereznaia no longer is suffering from the sunburn and windburn she picked up Monday during a snowmobile expedition and trip to a tanning salon.
“Her lips are bigger because they are burned,” Moskvina said. “That should make her smile better for the judges and audience.”
Zimmerman, 28, also has been dealing with an injury sustained in an unusual way for a skater: He broke the index finger on his right hand while catching a football not long before January’s U.S. championships, where he and Ina won a third straight title.
The finger remains in a splint but Zimmerman said it does not affect any of the movements, the throws, twists and lifts, that are part of pairs skating.
Football has been part of his life as long as skating. He played youth football in Alabama and acknowledged his embarrassment over the recent sanctions against the University of Alabama football program.
“From the time I was 4 it has been football, NASCAR and skating,” Zimmerman said. “I thought that was pretty much the way things go in life. Then I realized not everyone else skated. There were only about seven people in Montgomery who did.”
When Zimmerman was 8 his family moved to Ohio, where his father, a car salesman, had grown up. Zimmerman had to quit skating for more than a year because a downturn in car sales meant the family could no longer afford his sport.
Then it was back to Alabama, shuttling between Birmingham and a coach in Atlanta. Zimmerman moved to Atlanta with his mother for a year, during which he worked 40 hours a week at the rink to pay for his 20 hours a week of ice time.
That left no time for schoolwork, so he returned to Alabama, finished high school and switched from singles to pairs skating.
“The triple jumps weren’t happening,” Zimmerman said of his decision to quit singles.
He had two partners and three new addresses–Indy, Nashville and Lake Arrowhead–before pairing with Ina, who had finished fourth with Jason Dungjen at the 1998 Nagano Games.
Neither would commit to remaining in Olympic-style skating after these Games. Whatever they did, Zimmerman said, they would continue the skating odyssey together.