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With the nationals won, Thomas packed up her 1984 Toyota and drove from Denver to Boulder, where practice ice has been made available. She is supposed to be on a sabbatical from Stanford but could not resist several courses last semester at the University of Colorado. "I'm used to a suicidal load, calculus, chemistry and stuff -- I whale on it. I took German here just for fun, and I've had a blast." Of course, her study of German is not entirely ! idle. "I want to speak a little of it to Katarina. She's all right, I like her. I can't exactly say we're friends, but we've been able to sign each other's programs. 'Good luck. May the best man win.' "
Underscoring her sixth straight European championship with seven perfect sixes, Witt is poised to go out on top at 22. East Germany's system of athletics may be the acclaimed model of scientific selection, but Witt ended up the sweetheart of Karl-Marx-Stadt for the purest reasons: her kindergarten happened to be next door to the skating hall, and her parents were softhearted. In Valley Girl German (Rhine Valley), she explains, "I bugged them until they finally gave in and registered me for skating classes. They never thought it would go so far."
So far that Witt's imposing coach, Jutta Muller, has dragged her husband Bringfried into Witt's service. He wrestles her bundles of fan mail that bulge with impassioned letters from both sides of the Berlin Wall, including the marriage proposals of "U.S. boys," from locations, Witt says, "you'd never think cared about figure skating." Considering her appearance, this is a possibility. "If she were an American," the U.S.'s Fleming once said, "her face would be everywhere. I mean, look at her."
Decidedly not an American, Witt is proud of her distinction as the "worker's hero" and thinks of herself as a "diplomat in warm-ups." Talking in Karl-Marx-Stadt with journalists, including TIME's James Graff, she says, "When I do well, coming from a socialist country like the G.D.R., other countries have grounds to respect us. It is the working people who provide the basis for me to pursue skating at all. In a way, by skating and appearing on television, I'm saying a little danke schon to the public." Her "you're welcome" comes in the form of a shimmering wardrobe, a pleasant apartment and a white Wartburg sedan, for which she did not have to wait twelve years. "When you do well, you simply have certain privileges," she says. "That's true everywhere."
Looking forward to an acting career, she has already started glancing back. "I've been skating for 16 years; it's been my whole life from morning to evening. I think for the first time it will be hard for me." A self-described flirt, one who professes to be "naturally lazy," Witt nonetheless will miss the metronome discipline of Muller. "When you do something special," Witt says, "you become someone special too." But: "Skating gets harder as you get older because you have a name to lose."
Describing the one she could lose it to as "hard to get along with," Witt might be referring to the juicy fact that both Thomas and she will be registering at Calgary under the same assumed name: Carmen. Independently, they selected music from Bizet's opera, and naturally neither would give a thought to changing. As an archetypal character, Carmen has been interpreted in a thousand ways, but this will be the first time one of them will survive.