The first thing a promising child figure skater has to learn is the compulsory Car Routine, with a greasy double axle. Somewhere between the pre-dawn wake-up calls and the morning sessions on the ice and the piano lessons and the private school and the dance lessons and the afternoon sessions on the ice and the weight-lifting regimen, a little girl still has to find time for other things, such as eating and school work and catching up with news from home and visiting with Mom and Dad.
Katie Mulvaney and Stephanie Rosenthal, Utah's ice-skating prodigies, have mastered the Car Routine. They snack in the car. They change clothes in the car. They do their hair in the car. They do homework in the car."You should see our handwriting," Katie says, and she acts it out for you, bouncing in her chair while she pretends to write -- "Slow down, Mom, we'll get there on time!" she giggles.
This is how Katie and Stephanie fill the small gaps of time in their single-minded pursuit of figure-skating perfection. They live in the fast lane. "I like being home," says Stephanie, "but I'm never home. My home is the car and the rink."
Stephanie and Katie, 11 and 12, respectively, are very driven. Strap on your seat belt and hold on to something if you want to keep up.
Stephanie wakes up at 4:30 a.m. three days a week. She practices piano and reads before you're even out of bed, and she's just getting warmed up. Her father, Harry, vice president of a construction company and a weekend hockey player, gets the morning car duty. He drives his daughter from their home on Salt Lake's East Bench to the ice rink in Bountiful to practice with her coach from 6:30 to 7:15. Afterward, Harry drives her back to Salt Lake and drops her off at Rowland Hall. On the other two weekday mornings, she gets to sleep in till 6 and stops off for a piano lesson en route to school.
Lisa, Stephanie's mother, draws the afternoon duty. She picks up her daughter at school each day and drives her to Bountiful for a two-hour session on the ice, and afterward they drive to dance lessons -- three days a week to ballet, one day to tap, one day to jazz. But Saturday is a lazy day -- only one 8 a.m. session on the ice. To get everything done, Stephanie, an excellent student, plugs a gooseneck lamp into the car to help her do her homework assignments on the road while also eating a snack and changing into her dance outfit.
"She's old for her years," says Lisa. "She has to be to do what she does." Lisa notes she was a college tennis player and adds, "I was never as driven as Stephanie is."
Same song, different house
A few miles south of the Rosenthal home, another girl is performing the same difficult double axle Car Routine. ("We suffer together," says Stephanie.) Katie, her friend and new rival, gets up at 5 a.m. to practice piano. Her father, Michael, a former freestyle skier of some renown who owns a sign business, drives her from their East side Salt Lake home to Bountiful, where she skates from 6 to 7:30 while her father jogs on a treadmill (Katie and Stephanie practice at the same time on the same ice but with different coaches). Afterward, Katie is driven back home to pick up her sister McKenzie and is taken to the Reid School.
Carolyn, Katie's mother, pulls the afternoon driving duty. She picks up her daughter at school each day, sometimes 90 minutes before school is dismissed, and drives her back to Bountiful for another longer skating session. Carolyn sits in the stands, watching and gabbing with the other moms. This is where the mothers live a good part of their lives. After she finishes skating, Katie lifts weights for an hour a couple of days a week, and then it's back to the car and home again.
With limited time to be with her daughter, Carolyn has come to appreciate the Car Routine. "We have that half hour in the car," she says. "It's a nice time, and we're very close."
By 7:30, Katie is in bed, out like a light. Carolyn notes that she was a high school swimmer and ski racer -- "but I was never as focused as Katie."
Saturdays are easy. Katie skates late in the morning and takes a piano lesson in the afternoon.
Unbelievable? Yes!
Even after all these years, Carolyn and Lisa marvel at the world they have been drawn into by their daughters -- a world of arenas and ice and automobiles. "When you talk about it like this," says Lisa, "you wonder how you do it all."
It all began innocently enough. Carolyn Mulvaney was pregnant with her second child and wanted to beat the summer heat, so she took 5-year-old Katie to the ice rink to skate. "She could just do it right away," says Carolyn. "A friend of mine who is a skating judge happened to be there. She told us Katie should take lessons and gave us the name of a coach."
A year later, a friend suggested to Lisa Rosenthal that they take their 5-year-old daughters to a Learn-to-Skate Program for preschoolers in Bountiful. After a few lessons, the teacher told Lisa, "I can't accommodate Stephanie anymore in a group lesson."
So Katie and Stephanie began weekly private lessons. Two years later, they were up to two lessons -- per day. Soon they were competing and winning and traveling to major competitions out of state, and gradually, it mushroomed into a lifestyle.
"They've both been successful all the way up the ladder," says Stewart Sturgeon, Katie's coach. "They are definitely very solid skaters at a young age."
Katie has pretty much owned the competition at her level (the competitive categories are determined by the skaters' ability to pass a skills test, not by age). She won the Utah Winter Games, the Oktoberfest and the Copper Cup, all Utah competitions. She also won the Silver Skate in Las Vegas and the Fiesta Skate in Phoenix.
Katie pulled a hamstring last fall and wasn't at her best when she skated at the Central Pacific Regional Championships in San Jose, Calif., but managed to place sixth against the best skaters from the Bay Area, Nevada, Utah and Hawaii. The winner was another Utahn, little Stephanie Rosenthal, who had moved up two levels to skate in the intermediate competition. That qualified her to skate in the Pacific Coast sectional competition in Phoenix, where she placed sixth against the top girls in the West (the top four advanced to nationals). The winner was 13; Stephanie had barely turned 11. Only a year earlier, she placed third in the Pacific Coast regionals in the subjuvenile division.
"I had to push her (to a more difficult level) so she had some real life experience," says Sturgeon.
Power -- and a smile
The Utah girls are two entirely different skaters. Katie, who is nearly 5 feet, is a powerful, athletic skater with bulging thigh muscles. She already has landed a double axel in competition. "If you don't get the double axel, you can't keep skating," says her coach, Kris Sherard. Katie is so fast moving across the ice and whirling through her spins that Sherard calls her Zoom Zoom. Her dad calls her Katie the Jumpin' Lady. Sherard compares Katie to Holly Cook, whom she coached to a third-place finish in the World Championships.
"She's as strong as Holly as far as leg strength, and she's a better spinner," says Sherard. "She's right on the same path."
Stephanie is petite, perky and charismatic on the ice. "If I smile first, I usually land a jump," she says, and that comes close to capturing her style. Sturgeon, who coaches or has coached several Olympic-caliber skaters, says, "Stephanie's got all the jumps and all the personality. She's a complete little package . . . She's a feisty little thing. She's definitely got all the markings of an elite figure skater if she keeps training hard."
Sturgeon puts the skills of the two young skaters in perspective when he says, "They would have won or placed in the '68 Olympics with the moves they're doing now . . . What they're doing at 11 and 12, Peggy Fleming was doing at 17 and 18."
Prospects for 2002?
Will it lead to the Olympics in 2002, or 2006? "They are more like a 2006 project, but definitely they're very solid at their age," says Sturgeon. "They're on track."
Whether they remain on track remains to be seen. There are several critical stages in a skater's career -- executing the double axel, enduring the onset of the teenage years (when interest can wane), puberty (when bodily changes redistribute weight) and growth (with the emphasis on gymnastic-type routines, shorter is better, the upper limit being about 5-foot-4).
Besides their talent, both girls have one essential ingredient necessary for making a champion: the support of their parents. "It's a huge project as a whole team," says Sturgeon. "The role of the parents is critical. The amount of energy they put in is unbelievable, and they have to do it in a way that the kid doesn't view this as a sacrifice. It's expensive and time consuming, and the parent has to put on a face that says that he's not being put out by this. When a kid has to skate with that, that's the kiss of death."
It isn't easy for the parents. The daily schedule is so demanding that both the Mulvaneys and Rosenthals have recruited extra drivers. Lisa has hired two women to help drive her other daughter, Mallory, to her appointments and to run errands. Carolyn gets help from grandmothers.
Worth the cost?
The Mulvaneys sacrifice family vacations to support Katie's career, or they turn out-of-state competitions into vacations. When the Rosenthals vacationed in Cape Cod and Palm Springs, the first thing they did was locate a rink. They prefer trips to Sun Valley, because of its ice facilities.
Aside from the time commitment, the cost can be prohibitive -- easily more than $1,000 a month. "Out accountant thinks we're absolutely crazy," says Carolyn. "The cost is outrageous. I don't even know how much we spend, and I don't want to know."
A coach costs $26 per half-hour. Travel to an out-of-state competition is about $1,000, and there are usually four per year. Ice time costs more than $100 per month. Skates cost $900 per pair, and the girls go through two or three pairs per year because the firmness of the boot breaks down. Competition dresses are $150 or more, and two or three are required each year. A choreographer is maybe $160 per month. And then there's the cost of the constant daily travel by car. The Mulvaney's Volvo has 170,000 miles on it. There are other expenses as well (paying for the music, the dance lessons, the skills tests).
The girls have no social life, say their mothers. They miss several hours of school each week for practice. They go to bed early and get up in the dark.
"Sometimes, I wish I could go with my friends," says Stephanie. "I feel better once I'm on the ice. But it's hard when you're invited to a sleepover or a birthday party, and you can't go."
"When my friends want to play," says Katie, "I have to say no. I'd always rather skate."
The girls seem to thrive on the exhausting schedule. Sherard once ordered a fatigued Stephanie to sleep in the following morning, but at 5:30 a.m., she walked into her parents' room and told them she wanted to go anyway. Similarly, one morning when Stephanie refused to wake up, her parents went back to bed. Two minutes later, Stephanie was in their faces -- "C'mon, get up!" Occasionally, the schedule will catch up with them. Stephanie will tell her mother, "I need a play day," and so they'll skip the Saturday skating session and have a sleepover.
"I worry," says Lisa. "I ask her, 'Are you sure you don't want to cut back?' And she says, 'No, then I won't be as good.' They get to a certain level, and if they can't progress and strive for that next level, they'd rather quit."
Their fresh faces and giggly demeanors conceal the steely resolve and relentless drive in both girls. Their rooms are filled with stuffed animals and puppy posters, and they still play with Madame Alexander dolls and Barbie, but these girls are as tough as linebackers. They spend 20 hours a week on the ice, and it can be grueling. There are many falls before there are leaps and bounds.
"They get spanked around," says Sturgeon. "It's a contact sport. It looks like all satin and lace and music and beauty, because all people see are the end product. They don't see the blistering and the suffering and the pain."
All this notwithstanding, the rink is not a place of drudgery for the girls; if anything, it is a refuge, a place that reduces life to the simplicity of skating on ice.
"You're worried about school and other things, but when you go to the rink you feel free," says Katie. "Nobody can bother you."
"It's a no-stress world," says Stephanie.
The girls are taking a break from practice at the rink, sitting side by side, chattering away with wide-eyed enthusiasm and more giggles. They are precocious, animated and charming enough to stick in your pocket to take home to your kids.
"I have a journal, and my first goal is to have a great year and have fun," says Katie. "That's what sports is about. That's why I wake up early and want to go to the rink . . . I've only wanted to do more. I always feel refreshed to get up early. I'm always excited to go to the rink."
Then Stephanie is talking. "I hope to go to the Olympics. Right now, I just hope to land my double axel in competition. I landed it on Thursday."