Elvis back on his blades
Article Comments BEVERLEY SMITH
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Globe and Mail Update
February 3, 2009 at 4:01 PM EST
TORONTO Three-time world figure skating champion Elvis Stojko has been on a pilgrimage. And now at age 36, he's back, renewed, happy, strong and ready to skate again.
This week, he's working as a coach for his first student, Mexican skater Humberto Contreras, at the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships in Vancouver. And he's ready to unleash a CD yes the skater can sing - and a new pro skating career.
Stojko, who won two Olympic silver medals in dramatic fashion, retired from skating during the summer of 2006, after he skated at a gala at his home rink in Barrie, Ont. And since then, he's taken an extremely low profile while living in Mexico as he searched for something important: himself. Somewhere between the quad combinations and the martial arts routines, he says he had lost himself.
There were a lot of changes in my life and I needed to find out what was making Elvis tick, he said yesterday. His parents split up. His father, Steve, remarried last summer.
Stojko said he needed to step away from the rink totally, to get to know himself, and find out what would drive him forward.
Finally, he has made his journey known on a new website, elvisstojko.net, where he tells the story of a chance meeting with a fan at an airport in Florida in March of 2006. By accident, she left behind a book with a bookmark that featured a T.S. Eliot quote: What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.''
The quote had a major impact on Stojko. He left the book at the airport's lost-and-found area, but then realized that he didn't really know the Elvis he had bid farewell to in his final skate.
He searched everywhere, for a long time, and found himself hollow. He researched sacred places. He read divine expressions of self-knowledge and travelled to destinations of soulful influence. None of them seemed real or genuine, he said.
Last year, Stojko endured a turbulent existence, standing up for human rights in Tibet during the Beijing Olympic Games, making more enemies, he said, than allies. He still felt alone.
When he returned to Mexico, he adopted the simple life: worked on his land, went hiking, mountain climbing and challenging danger and fate, dirt biking up suicidal slopes and jumping across dangerous chasms.
Finally, he decided to find that Eliot reflection that had stirred him in 2006. Strangely enough, when he went searching on the internet, the quote popped up immediately on his screen.
The next week, he said, he grabbed his skates and went skating. He hadn't skated in two years.
Stepping onto the ice sent a jolt through my body that could power a city, he said.
He discovered that in the past, skating was a way of life of competitions, autographs and applause. But he was skating now, feeling the experiences of his life, good and bad. Now my blades have real stories to tell stories I can't hide from the world, he says on his website.
During his sabbatical, Stojko said other skaters told him they couldn't believe that he had stopped skating and that he should return. He now has an agent in Boston and is looking for touring opportunities. And when he does return, he'll skate to his own singing voice.
Two of the songs on his new CD are written by his best friend, Glen Doyle, who coached him during his martial arts life. Doyle wrote a poem after his father his hero died and asked Stojko if he wanted to turn it into a song.
Stojko has singing in his genes. His father, Steve, has been a classically trained tenor for 40 years, with an outstanding singing voice. Stojko is a high baritone and sings in a slightly lower key. Their voices harmonize perfectly when they sing traditional Slovenian songs together. Don't ask Stojko to translate the words. He's still having trouble mastering Spanish in Mexico.
Stojko has had some good teachers and has been working on his singing voice for several years. His father also taught him to sing when he was younger. And he has great allies. Mark Lalama, the pianist and composer for Canadian Idol, has also stepped in to help Stojko with the new CD, providing some of the material, even co-writing a song with Stojko.
It's not just something that came out of the blue, Stojko says of his singing pursuit. You know how people are: He's a skater. He can't sing.' But a lot of emotion went into this CD.''
And the skating? Stojko, the first man to do a quad combination, had to start again after two years away from the skates. He's still kept in shape. That helped. And within two months, he went from zero to triple Axels again. And he's been trying quadruple toe loops, too, just for fun.
Contreras has been watching in amazement that his teacher could come back so emphatically and quickly. Stojko says he feels no psychological restrictions any more. Nothing is weighing him down. It feels easier.
Contreras is a 25-year-old skater who works with a host of disadvantages in Mexico, which is hardly a hotbed of skating. In the area surrounding Guadalajara, his hometown, there is only one rink, Stojko said. And although the International Skating Union biography of Contreras says he skates 36 to 40 hours a week in Mexico, Stojko said his new skater gets no more than four hours a week at the rink. There is no money nor opportunity for more. Stojko is helping him out, teaching him how to understand his body and correct his mistakes when he's not there to watch.
In the past two months, Contreras's jumps have improved, become more solid, Stojko said.
It's a very martial arts type of training that I learned from Glen [Doyle], Stojko said. That's always been my secret in being successful in skating, in knowing how to correct things on my own and how to be aware at competitions.'' Contreras, who finished 21st at a previous Four Continents championship, is the first skater that Stojko has taught his competitive secrets to. This week, Contreras will be trying them out for the first time, too. He's had to absorb a lot from Stojko in a short while.
He seems to take it really awesome, Stojko said. We enjoy every day. He works hard and he's such a joy to work with.'' With Contreras and all, Stojko is in a much happier place in his life. He's always loved to skate for an audience, but he has realized when you do only that, you lose touch of skating for the joy of it, for yourself.
Everything about his life had been so wrapped up in skating, that he needed time to get in touch with himself, he said. Skating was taking over too much of what I was, he said. It's taken some time, but it was really something I needed to do. And now that I've come back, [the skating] is a lot clearer, and more pure, and the energy is clean.
It just feels really, really good.''
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