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G and G actually won the world's heart before they won each other's. When the two Russians earned the gold medal at the 1988 Calgary Games, she was just a 16-year-old sprite and he a mature man of 21 who embodied both power and elegance. They projected themselves not as lovers but as older brother and little sister--siblings who could skate in perfect unison and perform a quadruple twist. It was after Calgary that they fell in love, and in 1991 they married in Moscow. Katia gave birth to their daughter Daria in 1992, but they continued to skate together professionally. For Lillehammer in '94, G and G returned to the amateur rank, and they were so transcendent that they won the gold despite a couple of slips. According to John Nicks, a U.S. Olympic coach, "the change in their relationship into a loving, caring, mature union changed their skating for the better."
They had settled in Simsbury, Connecticut, the site of the International Skating Center, enjoying an idyllic life and training with American and other expatriate Russian skaters--many of whom accompanied Katia and Daria to Moscow for Sergei's funeral on Saturday. One of those was Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton, who offered this sentiment last week: "Kurt Browning once said the only flaw in G and G's program was that it wasn't long enough. The same can be said for Sergei's life."
Their friends expect that Katia will return to Simsbury after the traditional Russian Orthodox 40-day mourning period and resume her skating, probably as a solo performer--she could never find Sergei's equal. "The perfect pair," says commentator and two-time Olympic gold medalist Dick Button. "They had everything. He was the perfect husband; they had the perfect career, the perfect marriage."
The word perfect often came up in descriptions of G and G. But at a private wake in Lake Placid the night after her husband's death, the Washington Post reported, Gordeeva told her fellow skaters, "Maybe it was too perfect."
--Reported by Lawrence Mondi and Susanna Schrobsdorff/New York and Elaine Rivera/Lake Placid