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The smart handicappers predicted that Kitty, 22, and Peter, 24, would win friends but not influence judges, six of whom came from Europe (three from the East bloc) and all of whom frowned on the more robust American style in pairs skating. But as happens when no confirmed champion operates from a position of strength, the Soviets and East Germans overreached themselves in technical ambition. Only Valova and Vasiliev managed to skate a short program free of bobbles. The Carrutherses, meanwhile, skimmed through the wreckage, their bloopers merely those of timing, not of standing upright. When the smoke cleared, they were tied for second going into the free skating. "Did we expect it?" Peter asked later. "Are you kidding?"
It was a golden opportunity. Make that silver. Two days later their coach, Ron Ludington, the last American pairs medalist (bronze in 1960), summed up the free skating: "I'd call that walking right through the door, wouldn't you?" Wouldn't anybody? On the big night Valova and Vasiliev held their gold-medal lead on a more difficult program. Nurtured, like the Protopopovs, in the Leningrad school, they showed its hallmarks: coolly cerebral slow passages alternating with flashy jumps and lifts. But the performance of the young Soviet pair, Larisa Selezneva and Oleg Makarov, with whom the Carrutherses were tied, was the crucial one. Though Kitty and Peter had not watched it, there are some things that are impossible to hide from, even in the basement of an ice-skating arena. Said Kitty: "We could hear the crowd, and I knew they had missed. That made me more nervous. I thought of all the hundreds of times we've skated that program in practice, doing it perfectly day after day, but then I thought, 'Oh, but this is the only one that counts.' " With a huge American contingent cheering them on (Hamilton later referred to it as a "hockey crowd going 'Grrr, kill 'em!' "), they went out to skate for the medal. "The music was so loud and the crowd was so loud that we couldn't hear," recalls Kitty. "I always count the camels [the number of revolutions in a special spin] for Peter, and nobody can tell. But this time I was just screaming them." Peter adds, "It didn't matter, though. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that we were so symmetrical, so as one, that it was as if something had taken us over and bonded us." They gave the competition its most emotional moment, forgetting the required protocol of bowing to judges and crowd in favor of a tight embrace that lasted almost a minute at center ice. Said Kitty: "When you get every single thing you worked for and dreamed of together ... well, we just wanted to enjoy that moment together for as long as we had it."