Word: zmievskaya
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When she first arrived in the U.S., Baiul stuck close to her coach and surrogate mother Galina Zmievskaya and to Ukrainian Olympic champion Viktor Petrenko, who has always acted as a kind of older brother to Baiul. But they have been drifting apart. "She had kind of stepped away from the real hard work on the ice," Petrenko told TIME. "She's just enjoying her life." That included adding a new layer of friends, like Ari Zakarian, 30, the Russian-trained skater who was a passenger in her car the night of the accident. In the days after the crash...
...refused to utter Baiul's name at a postcontest press conference -- she was instead "the first-place girl." Claire Ferguson, president of the U.S. Figure Skating Association (U.S.F.S.A.), snapped, "Nancy doesn't have that sassy look that Oksana has." It didn't help matters that Baiul's coach, Galina Zmievskaya, marched around wearing the gold medal and boasted, "It's mine...
...Dnepropetrovsk when she was two; her mother died at 36 of cancer when Oksana was 13, leaving the child without blood relations to turn to. Her coach was the next to vanish -- emigrating to Canada to seek a better future than struggling Ukraine could offer. It was then that Zmievskaya took over...
...Odessa Baiul skates at a rink where the ice is often like spring mush. She shares a little room with her coach's younger daughter, her best friend. Her idol is Rudolf Nureyev, whose pictures adorn the walls. Zmievskaya says her prize pupil "doesn't know what a million dollars is. All she knows is that she needs 10 fantiki ((candy wrappers)) to buy an ice cream...
That phase of an already crowded life is definitively over. Crowds love Baiul, and she loves them. Anyone with something to sell will be just as smitten. In the past, Zmievskaya has turned aside suggestions that her extended family move to the comforts of the West because they lacked the money for training and living expenses. Now they will probably spend at least part of the year outside Ukraine...