His name is Johnny Weir. The D is silent.
Weir has heard the joke, and laughed at it. If anyone is true to himself and his eccentric personality, it is Johnny Weir.
He is more than just a figure skater, for he has outgrown that small and sparkly subculture to become a worldwide celebrity.
He is a beacon, a bright light of honesty and individuality.
He will be on stage again Tuesday, competing in his second Olympics, and the show he performs in his short program will be one of the best of the 2010 Winter Games. He skates to I Love You, I Hate You, and it’s pure Weir, attitude and artistry wrapped in sequins and chiffon and
tied with a pink corset.
No fur, though. Weir has decided to change costumes for his long program Thursday, throwing out the one that featured a piece of white fox fur on the shoulder after he was threatened by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
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Weir is a long shot for a medal because he does not have the repertoire of jumps so heavily rewarded in the sport’s point system that has turned skaters into “robots,” as Weir says, frantically counting and adding numbers in their heads as they cram one element after another into their programs. The system favours a skater like Russia’s Evgeni Plushenko over Weir, who will need luck to get on the podium.
But you never know with Weir. He aims to surprise, even if he has clung stubbornly to his interpretation of what figure skating should be.
“I want people to be taken away to another planet when they watch me skate,” he said. “Like a performance in the theatre. I want them to be transported into a dream world.”
A dream world. That’s where Weir imagined himself to be as a child in rural Quarrysville, Pa., a one-stoplight town in Lancaster County, where he grew up with Amish neighbours. His parents worked at the Peach Bottom nuclear plant.
Weir used to roller skate in his basement, humming his own music, and pretending he was an Olympic figure skater. His first love was riding horses, and his Shetland-Arabian pony, My Blue Shadow, won lots of ribbons in shows.
When Weir was 12, an ice storm hit Quarrysville. His mother, Patti, bought him a second-hand pair of ice skates and he went behind the house, into a frozen field and skated among the corn stalks. It was the first time he tried skating.
“We tried soccer, baseball and hockey but Johnny never liked team sports,” Patti Weir said. “Then, he just took to the ice. He was so shy and quiet. But on the ice, he came alive. It was okay to be himself.”
By 14, he was a junior champion.
From the roots of his small, conservative, conformist town, grew a flamboyant, outspoken, one-of-a-kind athlete/artist.
“If I’d grown up in New York City, maybe I’d be completely different,” he said. “I’m still a country boy to the core. People who perceive me as a diva don’t know me. I love being barefoot in the grass, drinking chocolate milk, eating a giant tomato.” Today, at 25, he is one of the top skaters in the world, but he almost quit last year after finishing fourth at the national championships and failing to make the world team. He was depressed. He felt the sport had passed him by. He’d “fallen off my cloud.”
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