Don Markus
January 1998
FAIRFAX, Va.--The recreational skaters had cleared the rick at the Fairfax Ice Arena last Friday afternoon. The Zamboni had smoothed the ice. Music by Beethoven was piped in, and Michael Weiss began to warm up, getting himself mentally staked for another try at the most challenging moment of his career.
He was preparing to make history.
This was unofficial, of course. It was just a practice session leading up to theis week's U.S. Figure Skating Championshi[s, beginning tonight in Philadelphia and ultimately, to next month's Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. But in a sport where points are deducted for the most indiscernible imperfection, practice literally makes perfect.
Especially if you are trying to do something nobody has ever done in competition.
"Watch this," Greg Weiss said, leaning over the sideboard as the youngest of his 3 children skated by. "He's going to do it."
The quadruple toe loop became the signature jump for Weiss ar last year's nationals in Nashville Tenn., byt according to those who counted most, the signature was a tad sloppy. Though to the naked eye it looked as if he had landed it cleanly---in other words on the edge of one skate and totally balanced---those belonging to the judges ruled otherwise after looking at videotape. They said that the edge of his other skate brushed the ice on descent.
Todd Eldredge ook his 4th U.S. Championship.
Weiss, who was 5th going into the free skate, went home in 2nd place.
"It was," Weiss said a few days later, "very dissapointing.
Instead of attempting the same nearly impossible jump that only a handful of foreign male skaters have tried successfully, Weiss is raising the stakes with a quad lutz. It is figure skating's equivalent of 62-home run season, the 101-point basketball game, the 24-foot pole vault. Maybr even more revolutionary.
It requires jumping off the outside edge of the right skate without taking a quarter or half-turn wsed to launch the quad toe loop, then taking 4 complete revolutions off the ice rather than the 3 1/2 or 3 3/4 mid-air spins. It is a jump that could either continue to propel Weiss toward the top of the list of legitimate Olympic contenders or push him back among the wannabes.
"Right now I'm not one of the favorites at the Olympics," Weiss said after another recent practice session. "At the Olympics, there are going to be 3 or 4 [former] world champions. I have a pretty good reputation among the judges for having good style, so I have to do something special to put me over the top."
Weiss has inched toward the periphery of the sport's highest perch, having completed the steadt climb from U.S. Junior champion in 1993 to World Junior champion in 1994 to his current status as a solid second behind Eldrege among American male skaters headed into tonight's short program at the CoreStates Center. Barring a mafor upset in this week's competition, Eldrege and Weiss will represent the U.S. in Nagano.
"At this point, I feel a lot more ready earlier than I was last year," said Weiss 21 who finished 7th at last year's world championships after his narrow miss in Nashville. "So I'm expecting good things this year. As the competition gets closer, you go out and work on just landing every jump. You basically try to peak correctly."
For Weiss, it means landing all of the 7 other triples in his long program as well as the quad lutz. But since the lutz comes first, less than a minute into the 5 miute routine, it couls mean the difference between just swinging for the fences and jacking one out.
"The lutz is so monumental for me," said Weiss, who admittedly hits only one of 10 of them perfectly cleam in practice."If I were to go out there and hit it, it would just be a big accomplishment. It's getting consistent, but I thrive on lot of adrenalin at the competition."
Weiss is different from a lot of the world's elite male skaters, taking almost a jock mentality into a sport where few ventured athletically outside the rink. He grew up playing soccer, football and hockey in Montgomery County. He discovered skating at the age of 9 tagging along with one of his 2 older sisters at the rinkin Wheaton.
"I was good at something finally."said Weiss, who by 13 had finished 2nd in the novice division of the U.S. Championshi[s. "It was an attentin-getter. People tppk notice and I wanted to do it more."
At 5 feet 8 and 160lbs, Weiss combines more athleticism into his programs than many of competitors. It was suggested in a recent book about the sport that Weiss has gone to great length in his programs to potray a different image.
"Our family being athletic and [Michael] even now being into body-building, macho is an over statement but he's always had that manly type image and tha's what he tries to project in his programs,"said Greg Weiss, a former world-claa gymnast who competed in the 1964 Olympic Games. Weiss spends as much time, if not more, working out at the family owned gym than he does on the ice, conbining riforous weight training that has enabled him to bench-press nearly twice his body weight and pliometric excercises that has given him the leg strength and flexiblility to make so many difficult jumps, including a couple of triples in a quick session.
He also is different in that aside from longtime coach Audrey Weisiger, Weiss' entourage consists solely of family and friends. Come to the Fairfax Ice Arena on any Friday night in the past few months and you would have seen Weiss and wifr Lisa Thornton, who is one of his choreographers, along with his parents, his wife's parents, his sisters, a brother-in-law and many their friends in attendance.
First they watch Weiss do his long program , played to the music from the movie of Beethoven's life, "Immortal Beloved." Then they fo chow sown at a Chinese retaurant down the street or a local pancake house. It's the pull of family and practice and working out that keeps Weiss home when others are on the road, performing ice shows.
"If the competition isn't there for me, I'd rather be training and staying at home," said Weiss, who only in the past year has been in demand for the appereances and the endorsements that help pay the bills.
Back on the ice, Weiss has finished his warm-ups. He skates backwards to pick up a head of steman before launchinf the quad lutz. As he lifts off the ice, his body spins quickly. 1,2,3,4 turns and then touch down. A few small shavinfs are scraped, but the landing is clean.
"YEAH! WAY TO GO!" Greg Weiss yelled, pumping his fist, then dropping an empty cup on to the ice as he applauded.
