Back home on Cape Cod a week later, Mary and her husband, Evy, watched ABC’s telecast of the German competition. When it ended, Evy was certain where Kirk’s problem lay. “It’s the music that’s killing her,” he said. “There’s no power to it–nothing that makes your hair stand on end or that makes you want to cry.” Evy knew that the months spent on the belly-dancing routine were wasted. They would have to fashion a new program–and, with the Olympic trials looming, do it quickly.
The next day Mary nervously broke the news to Kirk, who had not only chosen the music herself, but had also selected her own choreographer. But after five months of practice and that single competition, Kirk herself sensed the program might be a mistake. The relentless musical beat demanded constant choreographed body movements. By midway through the program she was already exhausted, slowing her spins and jeopardizing her jumps. The Scotvolds had tried to simplify it by paring down the belly-dancing shtik, but that just eliminated the fun. So Mary proposed a radically different musical style: Saint-Saens’s “Danse Macabre,” an elegant piece that would take advantage of Kirk’s extensive ballet training and show off her long arms and fingers. When Kirk agreed, Mary raced from the rink to cut a four-minute version, the duration of the ladies’ free skate. “Don’t worry,” Evy shouted after her. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
In truth, they had anything but. The Olympic figure-skating trials, which will be held in Los Angeles this week, were then just seven weeks away. Most of Kirk’s rivals have been working on their program for the trials since spring. And Kirk, who finished fourth at her first Nationals last year, already faced an uphill battle for one of the three Olympic spots allotted the American women. Two places are virtually conceded to world champion Michelle Kwan and Sarah Hughes, who at 16 has emerged as a gold-medal contender. To make the team, Kirk would have to best both 2001 U.S. bronze-medalist Angela Nikodinov and highly regarded Sasha Cohen, whom Jenny defeated for the world junior title two years ago.
While figure skating has increasingly seemed a jumping contest, the music remains critical, providing a framework for all the jumps, spins and spirals. With very little variation in the jumps performed by the top competitors, the artistic presentation can prove decisive. A pumped-up crowd, clapping to the beat of the music and cheering, has been known to sway judges.
As the Olympic trials approached, the last thing Kirk could imagine was cheering crowds. After performing the belly-dancing program “a bazillion times,” she could do it blindfolded. While she learned the new program within a week she was almost visibly thinking her way around the ice, appearing tentative and, at times, awkward. “I just have to work harder and harder, and hope I can feel comfortable with it,” she said. “But I have to accept that it may never feel really ready until I go out and do it under pressure.”
The switch was made slightly easier because the jumps and other moves remain identical and in essentially the same order. Like all skaters, Kirk tackles the toughest jumps early, when she is fresh. Both combination jumps–a triple-double followed by the difficult triple-triple–come within the first 50 seconds. By the 90-second mark, she will have attempted six of her nine leaps. The choreography is essentially layered on top, with movements, gestures and facial expressions added to reflect the musical mood. Unlike Kirk’s previous program, the new one has a slow middle section, during which she does a lot of gliding–“edges” in the skating vernacular–while catching her breath enough to help her execute a triple jump in the final seconds, hoping to impressing the judges with her stamina.
The judges’ current obsession with jumps is the bane of choreographers like Mary, who prizes the artistic over the acrobatic. “By the time you do the seven triples, the double axel, the four spirals and everything else that’s pretty much required of the skater, there’s very little time left for beautiful choreography,” she says. But the emphasis on jumping has always served Kirk well. Since moving from gymnastics and ballet to the ice at the age of 9, she has been, her coaches say, “a jumping machine.” But now, in this new routine, she is, for the first time, struggling to land her jumps. She has grown three inches and added 10 pounds in the past year, transforming her from a stickpin of a girl into a slender young woman; the physical changes disrupted her rhythms.
All these challenges have been made more formidable since August, when her mother died after a long battle with cancer. Patricia Harris, who had separated from Jenny’s father when she was pregnant, had been her daughter’s biggest booster. She helped Jenny choose music and costumes. On the weekend of her funeral, Jenny placed her world junior gold medal in the coffin and said her goodbyes. By Monday, she was back on the ice. “I told myself, ‘Yes, this horrible thing happened, but I’m lucky to have something really important in my life’,” says Kirk.
But skating couldn’t be her only concern. Unlike most elite skaters, who either drop out of school for the Olympic season or are tutored at home, Kirk goes to a public high school and, as a senior, had to face the daunting pressures of SATs and college admissions. Balancing school with long training sessions is tough enough. Then for the first time in her skating career, Kirk began to suffer nagging foot injuries, forcing her into physical therapy and preventing her from trying out her new program at any late-season competitions.
Kirk’s coaches knew it would be hard, with all that she was facing, to keep her on track. Though her father and stepmother proved very supportive, the Scotvolds could see that, at times, Kirk’s shoulders would slump and she seemed listless. Everything’s different in her life now and she’s scared," said Evy. “It’s my job to remind her that we’ve worked too long and too hard to get where we are today. There’s no time to waste. She’s got to get on with it.” Evy’s gentle kick in the butt seemed to do the trick. He kept prodding Kirk to skate like a woman, not a girl–with more powerful stroking, bigger jumps and greater artistry than just the captivating smile that lit up the ice when she was a child. And with time growing short, Evy drove to Boston on both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve to squeeze in extra training sessions filled with repetitions of the Saint-Saens. Though Kirk’s performance finally seems to be rounding into shape, it is rare to debut a program at a competition of the magnitude of the Olympic trials. “All I can do now is go out there and hope for the best,” she says. Evy knows but one thing for sure: “At least it won’t be stale.”
