The loveliest Olympic sport, figure skating, actually preceded the first Winter Games by 16 years, debuting in the summer of 1908. Attention quickly centered on the women (skating people prefer you to say ladies), though dimpled Sonja Henie was just 15 in 1928 when she won the first of three gold medals that launched her multimillion-dollar movie career. In at least two respects, the blond Norwegian starlet of Sun Valley Serenade is still the ideal. East Germany's Katarina Witt, reigning world and Olympic champion, is ( studying to be an actress. And U.S. Challenger Debi Thomas, Witt's primary competition in Calgary, likes the sound of multimillions.
From Tenley Albright's time in 1956, through the princess phases of 1960's Carol Heiss (who made less than multimillions in Snow White and the Three Stooges), of 1968's Peggy Fleming and of 1976's Dorothy Hamill, Americans got to feeling sort of proprietary about the ladies' gold necklace. "But now it's been twelve years since we've won it," says Thomas, with a look of eagles, "and I'm going to fight to bring it back." Unballing her fists, she mutters to herself, "If I can keep my head screwed on, I just know I can win the gold."
It is a remarkable head. In a 40-year flashback to Albright and Dick Button, a Harvard doctor and lawyer who won gold medals in their free time, Thomas, 20, is a Stanford premed student with an out-of-fashion perspective. "Maybe I have different values, I don't know," she says. "But I think my outlook on life has been my advantage. Things like the importance of an education and being whatever you can be give me an inner strength to pull things off on the ice."
Like most wisdom, hers can be traced to a loss. "At 13 years old, I had three triple jumps, and I thought, 'I can't be beat.' But I didn't even make it to the sectionals, let alone the nationals. Right then I decided I wasn't going to put the rest of my life on the line in front of some judges who might not like my yellow dress. That was the year I did correspondence school: you know, mail-it-in junk. I didn't learn a thing, and I wanted to learn everything."
By the way, Thomas is black. But she seems to regard her race as the merest coincidence. When she hears the term role model, she cringes. "I never felt I had to have a role model," she says. "It was like, 'O.K., I want to be a doctor, and I want to be a skater, and I'm going to.' I didn't think I had to see a black woman do this to believe it's possible." Her burgeoning mail tells her that in spite of herself, she has been an inspiration to young black women and is about to become a nationwide, if not a worldwide, symbol. "If so," she says, "I have to be glad."
In fact, Thomas had a very strong role model in Janice, her mother. Most of the skaters have strong mothers, and most of the mothers have mink coats. "But my mother's not a rink mom," says Debi. "She works." She's a programmer-analyst in California's Silicon Valley, divorced from Debi's father since 1974. "A coach once advised Mom to rent a fur coat just for the nationals, but I did all right that year without the fur coat." Janice Thomas laughs and says, "They tell you it's to attract sponsorship money, as well as to look a certain part when you're away from the arena. I told them, 'Too bad.' I didn't want them changing me either."