Word: icing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...connection between teammates that boosts performance. Well, there's nothing unseen about the connections between the luge doubles. Or bobsledders: two- or four-person teams bunched together in a runaway rocket, heads buried in one another's backs as if expecting something terrible. Or the pairs figure skaters and ice dancers in their flashy outfits, bodies entwined, handling each other throughout their routines...
These athletes aren't conjoined just on the ice. Since most compete in low-revenue sports, the lugers, sledders and skaters often bunk up to save costs. Grimmette doubles as Martin's landlord, renting him a bedroom in his Lake Placid house; during the summer, a top Italian luge team, Gerhard Plankensteiner and Oswald Haselrieder, live and work together as forest rangers in Cortina. They share hotel rooms on the road and put in long hours prepping for competition. "We're like married couples," says Todd Hays, the top U.S. bobsled driver, sharing a sentiment echoed by dozens of athletes...
...rink, with so many partners ending up inand out ofromances, the athletes call the skating soap opera As the Blade Turns. "Being a skating partner is like being in a marriage, without the sex," says top U.S. ice dancer Ben Agosto, whose partnership with newly minted U.S. citizen Tanith Belbin, a Canada native, could yield the U.S.'s first ice-dancing medal since 1976. "Well, for some people." Agosto and Belbin are not romantically involved...
Since skating routines are inherently sensual, off-ice contact is inevitable. Love has certainly worked for Melissa Gregory and Denis Petukhov, the other top U.S. dancing pair. Gregory met Petukhov, a Russian, five years ago on an Internet message board for skaters. Petukhov flew to Colorado to test the pairing. "If it wasn't going to work, I was going to put him right back on the plane and say, 'Adios, I'm going to college,'" says Gregory. The pair clicked on the ice, started dating after about two weeks and were married in five months. Skeptics chirped that Gregory...
Some coaches encourage romance to create the chemistry that enchants skating judges. John Baldwin and Rena Inoue, an off-ice couple, won the 2006 U.S. title and are headed for Torino. Platonic pairs like the world's top ice-dancing team, Russians Tatiana Navka and Roman Kostomarov, must summon a skill so rare in great athletes--acting (ever see Shaquille O'Neal in Kazaam?). "Go to Hollywood, take some lessons," implores Russian coach Evgeny Platov, who despite a combustive partnership with Oksana (Pasha) Grishuk--"I went cuckoo"--faked love on ice to win gold medals with Grishuk...