Tara Lipinski Hasn’t Lost Her Edge
Twenty years after she shocked the world by winning gold at Nagano, the figure skating prodigy is still an Olympic star, matching and maybe even transcending her prior profile as part of a captivatingly dynamic broadcast team with Johnny WeirTara Lipinski Hasn’t Lost Her Edge
Twenty years after she shocked the world by winning gold at Nagano, the figure skating prodigy is still an Olympic star, matching and maybe even transcending her prior profile as part of a captivatingly dynamic broadcast team with Johnny Weir
Tara Lipinski won the gold damn medal in the ladies’ figure skating competition 20 years ago in Nagano, Japan, in one of the most fiercely contested Winter Olympics showdowns, and yet she still can’t go back and watch that winning program without her eyes flashing in righteous self-flagellation. On the one hand, to be fair, who among us is ever able to view footage of our 15-year-old, poofy-banged selves without a cringe? On the other, it’s hilarious to hear Lipinski’s NBC colleague Terry Gannon discuss what she fixated on last month as she rewatched tape of her feisty and ebullient 1998 Olympic free skate with Gannon and Lipinski’s other broadcast partner, best friend, and pop culture partner-in-crime Johnny Weir. Never mind her gold medal. Never mind her come-from-behind victory over Michelle Kwan, with whom she’d been trading gold and silver finishes at various skating events for the better part of two years. What stuck out to Lipinski was a jump that had been plaguing her leading up to the Olympics—the triple flip—and what stuck out to Gannon was how fiery and stubborn she became when she talked about nailing it in Nagano.
“There was one jump that she had missed in the short program at nationals,” Gannon tells me over the phone in late January in between stints calling the European Figure Skating Championships in Moscow and the Farmers Insurance Open golf tournament in La Jolla, referring to the time Lipinski landed briefly on her ass about six weeks before the Olympics. “And to this day,” says Gannon, “she was still mad about it. She said: ‘That night in Nagano, I was not going to miss that jump, no matter what.’ That just made me sit back and think, ‘Yep, that’s Tara Lipinski.’ To this day, you could hear the intensity and the emotion in her voice.”
Skating in Nagano that February 1998, in her glittering, long-sleeved, blue-skirted leotard, she did not miss that jump, landing the triple flip without incident. The proud lover of Beanie Babies and Disney World also more famously nailed her signature combination, a pair of back-to-back triple loops, and when she did, she smiled enormously in pure competitive joy and relief.
The way she kicked up her leg as she went into each jump highlighted the sheer physical willpower and force required to land all those triples with that tiny teenaged frame. (Lipinski was no more than 80 pounds and 4-foot-10 during Nagano, making her the smallest—and, at 15 years and 8 months, the youngest—American Olympian that year.) The voice in her head was practically audible, reminding her to flourish her wrists gracefully here, to upturn her chin nobly there—the sorts of artful maneuvers necessary for her to display if she wanted to beat the beloved and remarkably balletic Kwan. Over the course of that four-minute free skate, set to music from the movie The Rainbow, Lipinski wasn’t someone who’d necessarily be described as “making it look effortless,” the way top skaters sometimes are.
But the sport isn’t effortless, not at all. “It’s insane,” Lipinski tells me over the phone a few weeks before the Pyeongchang Games. “I mean, if you would break down the physics of skating, what you’re actually putting your body through?” She starts talking a mile a minute, gaining speed like she’s performing a verbal scratch spin. “You’re jumping and turning three or four times, in split seconds, and then landing three times your weight on one foot, because of gravity, on a quarter-inch blade, just the torque, and everything that’s put on the body, and the speed you’re skating at, rolling into those jumps? These are real athletes, that put their bodies to the test.”
Having passed the test that evening 20 years ago in the Olympic Games, Lipinski trotted on her toe picks and raised her hands to her head in celebration and disbelief as her coach pounded her skate guards on the rink boards like a riled-up magistrate wielding a gavel. As Lipinski sat down to receive her scores, she said, in a dazed voice: “That was so cool.” When the judges’ marks flashed before her, she jumped up and down and shrieked like that EUONYM Girl who had won the Scripps National Spelling Bee the year before. Those scores added up to first place, a gold medal, a defeat of Kwan, no. 1 in what was the most hotly anticipated Winter Olympic event, a result that elevated her to household-name status and enabled her to enter the professional skating circuit at 15, forgoing any further Olympic eligibility.
Now, 20 years later, it’s all a memory that she has somehow matched, and may even transcend, thanks to her work in what she refers to as “sort of my second career,” back at the Olympics once more. Before the Sochi Games four years ago, Lipinski teamed up with the seasoned Gannon and another celebrated skater, the enthusiastically unequivocal Weir, to form a figure skating announcing team that was an overnight sensation. Lipinski and Weir went from being broadcasting newbies working separately to being besties operating forever side-by-side. In the past few years, they’ve played fashion police at the Kentucky Derby (and the National Dog Show!); appeared together on Lip Sync Battle and in a series of Olympic commercials for Google Home; and provided substantive, sparkling insight into the sport that they’ve always lived and breathed.
“I always question now,” says Lipinski of her broadcasting work, “‘Tara, why couldn’t you have done something with a little bit less pressure?’ But I obviously live for the adrenaline rush, and I love live television.” Live television loves her back: In Sochi, Lipinski’s broadcast team provided raucous hours of daytime commentary; in Pyeongchang, they are the new no. 1 prime-time NBC crew for individual and pairs figure skating. (The ice dance events are called by Gannon and 2006 ice dance silver medalist Tanith White.) In an Olympics where many viewers are exposed to many athletes only fleetingly or introduced to them for the first time, Lipinski and Weir have both a reputation that precedes them and a broadcasting schedule that brings them into people’s homes night after night after night. As a result, they are now as much of an attraction as the skaters whose routines they lavishly celebrate and candidly critique.
As a longtime Olympics enthusiast, one of the biggest highlights of my own career was being in Sochi during the 2014 Winter Games, where I witnessed Dutch speed skaters sweeping podiums; had my heart broken by a puck hitting a post that led to a Canadian comeback over Team USA in the women’s gold-medal game; and lost a company-issued Russian cellphone after a night of vodka shots with some locals. I also sat in the Iceberg Skating Palace and watched figure skating—so, so much figure skating. The Sochi Games were the first to feature a “team” competition in addition to the individual and pairs events, which meant a seemingly nonstop parade of blinding sequins and unfathomable pressure pretty much every night for two weeks.
“Tara was this, you know, this spinning top in the air,” Terry Gannon, NBC figure skating announcer
It was heaven—until I learned that by being on-site I was missing out on perhaps the most memorable performance of the entire Sochi Olympics. “OMG,” my friends back home would text me, back when I still had the cellphone, “have you met Tara and Johnny?! I’m obsessed!” While NBC was still featuring the long-tenured announcing trio of Scott Hamilton, Sandra Bezic, and Tom Hammond during prime time, during the day the network was running a more unfiltered and lightly produced live feed of all the skating using Gannon, Lipinski, and Weir. They were an immediate hit, which the two former skaters learned after creating a TaraAndJohnny Instagram account one day.
“We created it just for fun, for us,” Lipinski says. “I think we had four followers—our moms and two friends. And then, all of a sudden, within a day, it was like—we had adjoining hotel rooms and I burst in [to Johnny’s room] and was like ‘Somehow we gained 10,000 followers?! What happened?’”
What happened was that they proved to be incredibly good. Lipinski and Weir combine the esoteric, technical know-how of “figs” experts; the casual, kinda-catty touch of a Sunday morning gossip sesh with your friends; and the general vibe of the hosts from The Hunger Games for good measure. (This is no coincidence, according to Weir.) They have a generous understanding of all the oddball aspects of figure skating, those things that might cause an athlete to do the strange things they do: Lipinski frequently and passionately empathizes with skaters who seemed overwhelmed by the pressures of the moment, while Weir, who used to paint his face and skate to Lady Gaga, has an appreciation for the thought process behind some of the weirder costume or musical choices. But, perhaps most appealingly, they can occasionally be savage—all the more so because they are usually right.
“Anyone who loves skating for what it is—a sport mixed with a pageant—could not ask for anything more,” wrote Slate TV critic Willa Paskin about the new duo during Sochi. The New York Times’ longtime resident expert on sports media, Richard Sandomir, wrote that a friend of his had favorably compared the commentators to tennis’s John McEnroe; high praise. Writing for Sports on Earth, Gwen Knapp concluded: “It’s just a question of when prime time will be ready for them.”
That time has come. On the first night of figure skating in Pyeongchang, during which the routines of several men performing in the team event came in well below expectations, Lipinski and Weir were unafraid to relay to their audience the realities of what was happening. “A disaster,” Lipinski said during American teenager Nathan Chen’s disappointing Olympic debut. When Canadian Patrick Chan struggled to a routine set to “Dust in the Wind,” Weir remarked, “Welp, that program is definitely a bit of dust in the wind.”
While many loved their candor—a common topic on Twitter was writing various versions of Tara and Johnny should commentate on [the Super Bowl/the Masters/my life]—it rubbed others, accustomed to a bit more diplomacy, the wrong way. “I’m a commentator, not a ‘complimentator,’” Weir wrote on Twitter after the men’s short program in response to this criticism. Asked by The Washington Post if she’s ever regretted something she’s said, particularly since many skaters are also her friends, Lipinski replied, “I feel like Johnny and I really just speak our minds. [...] We know the skaters. The skating world is a very small world. But [it’s] our job. We are here to entertain an audience and the viewers at home, and that’s who we’re working for.”
“We were the original reality TV show, weren’t we?” —Sandra Bezic, skater, figure skating choreographer, and television commentator
The beauty of the new NBC broadcast is that it feels like a backstage pass, like a window into the true world of figure skating in all its (sometimes harsh!) splendor. But Lipinski and Weir are not gratuitous in their criticism, and their honesty encompasses raw, giddy excitement as well.
This past weekend, when Mirai Nagasu became the third woman (and first American woman) to land a triple axel at the Olympics, Lipinski squealed “Yes! Holy cow!” just like so many of us back home. And while some viewers bristle at the volume of criticism that Weir and Lipinski provide, they’ve demonstrated that they do know when to hold back. During the men’s long program in the team event, as Adam Rippon performed a beautiful, memorable skate, I realized at one point that none of the NBC analysts had uttered a word in quite some time. Their silence spoke volumes.
Lipinski began the process of finding her voice in the figure skating world in 2009, doing commentary for the online figure skating broadcaster icenetwork.com. She teamed up with Gannon on the Universal Sports network in 2010 and “realized this is something that I could see myself doing for the rest of my life,” she says. She was drawn to live TV for the same reasons she liked to compete back in the day: the immediacy, the pressure, the ever-changing circumstances. Still, she was surprised by how difficult it was early on. “In the beginning,” she says, “you’re a fish out of water, even though it’s my own sport. I thought, I’m gonna put on my headphones, and it’s gonna be so easy—I know everything about skating.” The reality was a bit more chaotic. “People are talking in your headset, and it’s going by so fast, and you’re trying to think of what to say in the moment,” she says. “It was a lot harder than I thought.”
But Lipinski has always been a quick study. As a 3-year-old, she first started skating in roller rinks; she didn’t hit the ice for another three years. (For a while, she did both: At age 9, she won the primary girls’ freestyle title at the U.S. Roller Skating Championships.) In 1994, she won the silver medal in the “novice” category at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. That year, the senior-level gold medal went to Tonya Harding in Nancy Kerrigan’s absence.
“That sort of changed everything in skating,” Lipinski recalls of the Harding-Kerrigan situation. “Obviously, the skating world was abuzz with this, and then the entire world was completely focused on this, and it was a crazy time in skating. America became so obsessed that, I mean, our ratings would rival football ratings, which is insane.” As Bezic, a former skater herself who during those years was a sought-after choreographer and who designed Lipinski’s Nagano routines, puts it to me: “We were the original reality TV show, weren’t we?”
I always question now, ‘Tara, why couldn’t you have done something with a little bit less pressure?’ But I obviously live for the adrenaline rush, and I love live television.Tara Lipinski
Later that year, in October 1994, The New York Times featured a then-12-year-old Lipinski in an article headlined “Prodigy’s Dream Has a Price” that detailed the sacrifices and life changes that her parents chose to make in order to help their only child achieve her skating vision. They lived in separate cities; they refinanced a mortgage; they racked up high costs in long-distance bills.
If skating was indeed the original reality TV show, Lipinski was a welcome and enticing new character. Asked by the Times about all the things she was missing out on by living the peripatetic life of an Olympic hopeful skater, Lipinski responded: “Look at what all the other kids are missing out on.” The following year, she moved with her mother, Patricia, to Michigan to train, and by the time she was 13, she was landing that triple-loop-triple-loop.
Meryl Davis, who won the ice dance gold medal in Sochi and trained at the same rink as Lipinski as a kid, remembers Lipinski being a minor celebrity even at a young age. “My locker was directly beneath her locker,” Davis tells me with a laugh, “and I was well aware of her and her stature in the skating world. I looked up to her. Sometimes playing cards or quarters or little small trinkets would drop from her locker down into mine, and I would like, gather them up and show them to my mother. She’d be like, ‘Can you give them back to her?’”
In 1996, a 13-year-old Lipinski unexpectedly finished third at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships; next to her on the podium was Kwan, who was in the midst of a season in which she earned gold in every major event she entered, including the world championships. Kwan’s career was notably long-lived in a grueling sport; she battled literal growing pains, competed for more than a decade, and over one span earned gold at nationals for eight straight seasons. But the few times Kwan finished second leading up to the Nagano Olympics was when Lipinski finished first.
“Tara was this, you know, this spinning top in the air,” Gannon says of Lipinski, whose skating he covered back in the ’90s when he was part of the figure skating announcing team at ABC Sports. “She was unbelievable,” says Bezic. “Even at 13, 14—not just as a skater, but as this sort of powerhouse human child. It was extraordinary.” (Lipinski’s critics at the time weren’t as impressed: Simon Barnes, writing in The Times of London, infamously referred to her as a “robotic shrimp,” and when Salon’s Cintra Wilson traveled to Nagano to see the much-ballyhooed Kwan-Lipinski matchup, her takeaway was that the event featured “overwrought, totally digitally remastered, Spielbergian Happy Meal orchestrations accompanying good little girls like Tara Lipinski.”) Bezic’s memories of Lipinski paint a picture of a girl with aspirations and visions that belied her age: When Bezic, Lipinski, and Lipinski’s coach would sit down to hash out her programs, “Tara very much had a voice,” Bezic says. “She very much had a voice. She knew what she wanted.”
With the women’s figure skating competition not scheduled until the second week in Nagano, Kwan and Nicole Bobek opted not to attend the opening ceremonies. “A lot of competitors will go [to the Olympics] and not really be there,” says Bezic. “Not march, not stay in the village. They miss the Olympic spirit—the Olympic experience—because they’re so focused on the end result.” Not so Lipinski.
“I was always so stubborn,” Lipinski says. “My coach said, ‘You shouldn’t go to the entire thing,’ I said no, and my mom’s like, ‘If she wants to go? Let her go.’” Lipinski marched in the opening ceremonies and lived in the athlete dorms, “no parents, no coaches,” she says. “And I had the time of my life.”
Tara’s definitely an extreme. That’s why she’s been so great as a broadcaster, and as an athlete. And she makes me up my game, which really means that Tara’s a great partner.Johnny Weir, figure skater and commentator
Still, she couldn’t escape the pressure cooker of quadrennial international competition. One night in Nagano, as she fell asleep listening to a tape of herself narrating her skating program on the advice of her sports psychologist, she had a terrible dream. “I don’t know if [the tape] sparked the dream,” she says, “but I literally fell on every jump, and it was the most disastrous skate of my life, and I remember waking up and it felt so real. And I was just so happy that I had a second chance, that it wasn’t real, and I had a second chance to go out there and do it.”
And so her bad dream became like that bad triple-flip from nationals: imagined or real, she wasn’t about to make the same mistakes twice. It was Kwan whose long-program skate, while beautiful, was just a little bit tentative. Lipinski, as she had been throughout the entire Olympic Games, was all in. And after she won gold, Lipinski continued to thrive in her surroundings. One night, as she went to get some ice cream at the Athlete Village dining hall, someone congratulated her: Wayne Gretzky. She wound up having an impromptu ice cream party with him and his Canadian hockey teammates.
Based on this firsthand Olympic experience, Lipinski is particularly attuned to the event’s unique stress and awe. In her broadcast work, she frequently points out the enormity of the moment as a skater sets up to begin his or her routine—though not in that standard and-it-all-comes-down-to-this way that announcers love. Her reminders are far more personal and pathological; way more holy shit than here’s her shot. “It’s like it brings back memories in the moment, when they call your name,” she says. “And you just wanna run off the ice and hope that no one sees you, because there’s nothing more terrifying than when your music starts.”
If this sort of honesty provides the technical element, so to speak, that makes her NBC stints so compelling, it’s her chemistry with Weir that brings the artistry and makes their conversations truly shine. They are engaging to listen to and they are excellent tutors, providing random nitty-gritty figure skating obscurities along the way. They are so “in love” that when Lipinski got married last summer, she surprised Weir, a “bridesman” in the event, with a boutonniere that matched his Swarovski-crystal-encrusted Hermes shoes and arranged for “Bad Romance” to play when he walked down the aisle. They are so naturally funny that it’s easy to crave their commentary on even non-figure-skating-related happenings. Weir told GQ that he rooted for both teams in the most recent Super Bowl: the Eagles because he’s from near Philadelphia, and the Patriots because he once got a hug from Rob Gronkowski and “his arms wrapped around me twice.” Lipinski’s husband, Fox Sports producer Todd Kapostasy, is a Cleveland native who has indoctrinated her into his teams. “I said, ‘They lose so much,’” she laughs about the Browns. “‘Why do we have to choose them?’” Note to NBC: get these two in the booth with Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth!
When Weir and Lipinski first started working together with Gannon, he told them to “not overthink things,” Lipinski says, “to never try to fit in a box, and to just go.” (In turn, they’ve slowly imparted their wisdom on Gannon, too. Having spent so much time with these fashion plates, Gannon was moved to pack two suitcases, instead of his usual one, for Pyeongchang. Weir and Lipinski brought along a cumulative 21.) Now the three of them have an easy rapport that manifests whether they’re talking about skate-edge intricacies or riffing on musical selections. At this year’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships, a skater named Jimmy Ma busted out a performance to the DJ Snake tunes “Propaganda” and “Turn Down for What.” Weir described having watched Ma skate for a number of years at a rink in Hackensack, New Jersey. “He plays the rap at every practice,” he said.
“I don’t know if I’d call this rap, though,” Lipinski responded, laughing. “I do enjoy rap, but this is a bit much for me.”
“I dunno,” Gannon deadpanned. “I could see you, windows rolled down at a stoplight in L.A., this blasting.”
“This is house music,” said Lipinski. “Johnny thinks it’s rap.”
“Well, ya know—” Weir began.
“—Johnny listens to Lady Gaga,” Lipinski said.
“Where’s Celine Dion?” finished Weir. It wasn’t a conversation that the great Dick Button would have ever had, which is why it was such a delight.
It’s like it brings back memories in the moment, when they call your name. And you just wanna run off the ice and hope that no one sees you, because there’s nothing more terrifying than when your music starts.Tara Lipinski
In Sochi, Lipinski says, she and Weir “went there, and we just thought, ‘OK, let’s not get fired. Let’s fly under the radar.’” They were enormously successful on the first count, and a complete failure on the second. Far from remaining low-key and unseen, they became an Olympic breakout story whose ubiquity and fame rivals that of many athletes. “Tara has taught me about a diligent work ethic,” Weir wrote in an email, “and I think I’ve taught her how to find humor and joy in the process as well as the result.” He’s not the only one to point out that Lipinski is known to get results. “When she sets her mind on something,” Gannon tells me, “you might as well just go ahead and expect it.”
When the NBC crew went back and watched Lipinski’s 1998 skate earlier this year during nationals, Weir said something similar to his partner: “I know how hard you work just to commentate, how many triple run-throughs you do just to commentate,” he said. “I can’t imagine what kind of a nut you were back then.” When I ask him to expand on this during a recent NBC conference call with reporters, Weir says: “The examples I have are just the late nights Tara puts in with her notebooks, reading everything that there is, or on YouTube watching old performances. I can’t say that I don’t prepare, that I don’t work hard for our broadcast, but Tara’s definitely an extreme. That’s why she’s been so great as a broadcaster, and as an athlete. And she makes me up my game, which really means that Tara’s a great partner.”
If there’s one thing that drives this kind of fanatical work by Lipinski, it’s elevating figure skating, in the eyes of Americans, back to the stature it held when she was competing. “I lived and skated in a very fortunate time where the American public was completely invested in figure skating,” she says. “And I think the times have changed, and I know that skating is cyclical. And I really do think it will come back. I mean, you look at Russia or Japan, they have so many stars that skating is huge over there. Those skaters are big-time celebrities and can barely walk on the street. So I think my goal is to remind the public what’s so great about our sport.” To do so, she’s gone back to the same moves that made her a lasting success 20 years ago: kicking up that back leg, digging in that toe pick, and taking off.
