Carroll Looks to Achieve Final Goal: Gold Medal

NAGANO, Japan —  Frank Carroll chose Tuesday to reflect.

“When I’m on the Eiffel Tower, in the Jules Verne restaurant, I think, ‘What am I doing here?’ In my mind, I’m still just a kid from Worcester, Mass., skating on a frozen pond. It’s funny where life takes you, the different directions.”

In 38 years as a figure skating coach, Carroll has achieved everything imaginable from such a calling except for this: He has never had a skater who won an Olympic gold medal.

That could change here, starting Wednesday when Michelle Kwan, the elegant young woman he coaches at Lake Arrowhead, steps onto the White Ring ice for the short program as the favorite.

After a practice Tuesday, Carroll, 59, stopped to answer a couple of questions from reporters and stayed for an hour.

He didn’t leave even when Kwan’s father, Danny, called on the walkie-talkie to tell him their car had arrived.

“I know,” Carroll said. “Over.”

He talked about that frozen pond in Worcester, figure skating practices at Holy Cross performed in front of a vociferous ice hockey team, a coaching career that started when his mentor, Maribel Vinson, was killed in a plane crash that claimed the entire U.S. team, a Hollywood interlude to appear as an extra in Frankie and Annette beach movies and a small, cold rink in Van Nuys where he coached Linda Fratianne.

Almost nothing happens here that doesn’t remind Carroll of his Olympic experience with Fratianne. She was his first skater, and the last before Kwan who had a chance to win a gold medal.

Oh, there was Christopher Bowman. He was the most gifted skater Carroll ever coached, perhaps the most gifted anyone ever coached. But the skater known as “Hans Brinker from Hell” seemed committed only to self-destruction and, by the time he was in position to contend for a gold medal in 1992, Carroll had long since given up on him. He has never looked back.

“Are we friends? Would I go to dinner with him?” Carroll asked. “No.

“It’s not Christopher’s problem. It’s my problem. I’m angry. I did whatever I could over a long period of time. Maybe if he could prove to me he’s clean and sober . . .”

But if Carroll still feels hurt by Bowman, he still hurts for Fratianne.

Fratianne went to the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., as the favorite, a reigning world champion who would be performing before supportive crowds in her home country.

Carroll, however, had a premonition that the judges would be biased toward East Germany’s Annet Poetzsch.

If he had to identify one regret in his coaching career, it’s that he didn’t approach the International Skating Union’s technical director, Italy’s Sonia Bianchetti, with his concern. He rode with her in an elevator, started to speak and then had second thoughts.

He knew he had made a mistake as soon as he saw the scores for the first phase of the competition, the compulsory figures. Poetzsch was first, Fratianne third.

But, in those days, scores were more important than placement. Fratianne was so far behind that she had no chance to recover, even if she outskated Poetzsch in the short and long programs, which she did. Fratianne finished second.

“Linda Fratianne definitely should have won the Olympic Games,” Carroll said. “I’m very bitter about that. She skated brilliantly.”

Carroll, holding his tongue no longer, complained vehemently about the judging and was an outcast in the sport for a while.

“But the next year the scoring system was changed,” he said.

The value of compulsory figures, which since have been eliminated altogether, was decreased. A judge’s placement of a skater took precedence over the scores.

Under that system, Fratianne would have won the gold medal.

“It killed Linda Fratianne not to win,” Carroll said. “She felt she’d let the country down and that she was a failure.

“She didn’t take out her Olympic silver medal for 15 years. When she finally did, she also found a commemorative pin. She sent the pin to me with a note that said, ‘After 15 years, I took out the Olympic medal and told myself, “Linda, you didn’t do so bad.” ’

“It’s a sad story, but she eventually was able to come out of that and acknowledge she was a great skater and a great Olympian.”

Asked what had motivated Fratianne to look at the medal, Carroll said, “I believe it was because her mother died. She was a relatively young woman who died suddenly of an aneurysm, and that conjured up a lot of thoughts for Linda about how much her mother meant to her as a skater.”

Fratianne and Kwan have talked on several occasions. But Fratianne hasn’t broached the subject of her Olympic disappointment, Carroll said, because she doesn’t want to cast a shadow over Kwan’s experience. Carroll believes he has done as good a job with Kwan as he did with Fratianne in preparing her to win. His hope is that he has done a better job than he did with Fratianne of preparing her to lose.

“Is her life going to be over because she missed the triple lutz?” he said. “This kid’s life cannot be based on her success here. She’ll live to skate another day and skate very well.”