Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 8, 1991 TAG: 9102080024
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B4 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: MICHAEL JANOFSKY THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Just a little vacation," she said, sitting down to a Caesar salad lunch recently. "I just had to get away for a few days."
For all her years before the public eye, the grueling push toward Olympic figure skating championships in 1984 and 1988, she has never experienced anything like the wonderful craziness of the last year or so.
Once the darling of the celebrated East German sports system but a prisoner of its protocols, she was freed of it last fall when the two Germanys became one. For the first time in her life she could keep her own passport, earn her own money, go where she pleased, do what she wanted.
"Freedom," she said. "A totally new world opened to me. I had a lot of possibilities after the Olympics, but I wasn't able to do them. It was like being in a box, knocking on the walls, screaming, `Please let me out.'
"Now, I have so many possibilities. It's all so new, so wonderful. People come to me and ask me what I want to do."
Witt is 25 years old, hardly the naive youth who first dazzled the world by winning the women's title at the Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, seven years ago, but new enough to the thrills of capitalism not to be cynical.
She can scarcely believe what's before her, and it's evident. A 90-minute conversation is littered with references to her life being "totally different," "wonderful," "great," and "more fun."
"At the moment," she said, "I wouldn't want to be anyone else."
Her primary vehicle continues to be the ice shows that she and Brian Boitano, another 1988 Olympic champion, conceived, designed and grace as its stars.
The two became good friends after the Olympics and began plotting a professional future together with a variety of projects, including films, television specials and the ice shows, the first of which they performed last year.
Now in hiatus until Feb. 19, the second show is simply called "Katarina Witt & Brian Boitano - Skating II," although the cast includes 13 other performers, many with Olympic credentials.
As such, it is less a conventional ice show than what she perceives as a natural extension of their competitive careers, an artistic blend of athleticism and expressionism.
"A show for thinking adults, very artistic, very theatrical but very athletic," she said. "The image of professional skaters is that after they turn pro, they cut down on the sport and only have to look beautiful.
"Usually, ice shows are all floofy and fluffy. I don't have anything against it; it's important to have those. But that's not something I worked so hard for, for 20 years, you know, clowns, poodles and snow falling from the ceiling.
"That's not real skating . . . Our show is provocative."
The show is scheduled to conclude its North American run in early March, but that hardly means another Caribbean vacation right away.
As the principal asset of her own company in Frankfurt and the principal client of a marketing firm in Charlotte, N.C., she is finding her commercial options expanding.
This week, she was in New York to discuss a forthcoming line of skating attire from Danskin that she is helping design: What fun, and what a departure from the old days in East Germany, when the authorities gave her a say in the costumes she would wear in competition but little more.
"This is totally different," she said. "This is leotards, tights, leggings, everything. I know what I like to have, the kind of cut, the prints. It's a dream to be able to do what I want and wonderful to be in it from the beginning."
Other opportunities are under consideration, including a series of competitions for professional skaters that she and Boitano plan to organize. But she declined to discuss them with any specificity until plans were complete or contracts signed.
Meanwhile, she has become intrigued by the growing fascination the rest of the world is developing for her. This is the kind of stuff that sort of embarrasses her in conversation, but she let it slip there was this one time not long ago, in Dallas, where she was performing at a rink in a fancy shopping mall. Scads of men, about four deep, stood mesmerized by her. And she loved it.
But that's as far as it goes, with privacy becoming a more critical issue. For example, she wouldn't say on what island it was she had spent the last few days. Nor would she say with whom.
With everything else going on, she feels more compelled to protect herself from close-quartered scrutiny, and it's growing difficult. In Germany, she has become a celebrity of such huge proportion that she has found reporters camped in front of her Berlin apartment to note her comings and goings.
by CNB