You don't have to know much about figure skating to know that something special is happening when Midori Ito executes a triple Axel. Skimming -- sprinting -- across the rink at 20 miles an hour, she pushes off with her left foot, leaps clear of the ice, spins three and a half times in midair and lands on her right foot, skating backward. The crowds roar. Rival coaches shake their heads. The triple Axel, named after Axel Paulsen, a Norwegian skater from the early 1900's, is one of the most difficult jumps rated by the International Skating Union. In 1988 Ito became the first woman to perform it successfully in international competition.
In fact, until recently, Ito -- the 1989 world champion and Japan's best hope for a gold medal at the 1992 Winter Olympics -- was the only woman to have landed the jump in competition. She last executed the triple Axel in January at the All-Japan Figure Skating Championships in Yokohama, which she won, to nobody's surprise. Then, last month, at the United States Figure Skating Championships in Minneapolis, Tonya Harding duplicated the feat, won the women's title and instantly became Ito's most formidable rival. Barring an unforeseen mishap, both women will compete at the World Figure Skating Championships this week in Munich, Germany. (For a moment in mid-February, there were doubts that Ito, who underwent surgery a few weeks earlier on her jaw, would make the trip.)
To watch Ito in action is to realize that she is in a category all her own, notwithstanding the challenge from Harding. For one thing, she doesn't even look like other figure skaters. She is just 4 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 98 pounds. Her legs are short and sturdy and, well, a little bowed. At presentation ceremonies, the runners-up standing one step down on the medal-winners' stand can look the champion square in the eye. Nor does she perform like other skaters. Waiting their turn on the ice, her rivals are keyed up like race horses, shrugging their shoulders, shaking the kinks out of their legs. Ito is impassive, almost grim-faced. The gate opens for her, and she goes through it like a gladiator into battle: This space is mine .
Figure skating is partly showmanship. Skaters work "Saturday Night Fever" poses into their routines; they make dramatic finishes on one knee; they smile automatically as they glide past the television cameras. Ito's routines are not that different from those of other skaters, but she carries the field not so much as a better performer than as an immeasurably better athlete. She moves faster, jumps higher, covers more of the ice. Most skaters can manage a triple jump (a half-turn short of a triple Axel) followed by a double; Ito can do consecutive triples. Most skaters also need the whole rink to build up enough momentum for a triple jump; Ito jumps with room to spare.
"Actually," she confesses, "I didn't do as well as I wanted to in Yokohama. I've missed a lot of practice this year." On top of her recent hospitalization, the 21-year-old skater has been suffering from a number of leg injuries.
Ito has consented to be interviewed not at home but in the office of the Osumo skating rink in Nagoya, where she has been training since 1974. The office is a small cramped space at the back of the building. Small boys on rented skates crowd around the snack bar outside, its concrete floor littered with food wrappers and discarded chopsticks. Ito hardly seems to notice her surroundings.
Soft-spoken, her hair pulled back from her face, Ito in person shows little of the sheer presence that she displays on the ice. Questions don't open into conversations. She answers them one by one -- briefly, soberly -- speaking only in Japanese, and stops, earnest and composed in her chair, to wait for the next question. What stands out most about her responses is that she refers to herself in the third person, as Midori. It's a habit that children develop early in Japan and usually drop by the age of 5 or 6, when they first go to school. Some women hang on to the habit into their teens and 20's, but only with close friends and family. Most Japanese, hearing Ito speak of herself this way to outsiders, would assume that she was simply immature.
The assumption would be hasty. Until 1985, Ito was just a promising local skater, having yet to win even a national competition. Four years later, she was a world champion, bathing in the peculiar adulation the Japanese reserve for those who achieve something -- anything -- outstanding in the outside world.
Although little in Ito's background prepared her to deal with people on the scale that her sudden celebrity demands, she gives the impression of having mastered the problem the way she would master a new jump, with the same deliberate homage to form and technique. She is self-confident without being self-absorbed, aware of the limelight but determined to keep it at a distance. Crowds -- delighted audiences -- make her happy; individuals make her cautious.
Midori Ito was born in Nagoya, the fourth-largest city in Japan, on Aug. 13, 1969. She started skating at the age of 4, when her parents began taking her once a week on family outings to the Osumo rink. One day, seeing Machiko Yamada coaching a group of preschoolers in the middle of the ice, she asked if she could also take lessons.
"I've been coaching for 25 years now," Yamada says. "Most of the kids I work with start at about age 5 or 6. Still, the first time I saw Midori, I felt there was something unusual -- something different -- about her. There was a kind of concentration about her already, for somebody so young. You could tell that she'd been thinking a lot about what she wanted and how to get it."
Ito's formal training began when she was 5. The bond between student and teacher was immediate and strong, so much so that when Ito's parents separated the following year she began to spend more and more time with the Yamadas at home. When she was 10, she moved in, and she has been there ever since. Over the past 10 years, she has had little contact with her own family (she has an older brother and a younger sister), who still live in Nagoya, and in that time they have not seen her skate in competition. Neither Ito nor Yamada will discuss what happened; it is a part of their lives that they have successfully hidden from the notoriously inquisitive Japanese press. "I don't really remember much," Ito says. "It all just seemed to work out that way before I knew it."
The Yamadas live in a brick-front, two-story house in a largely residential area about 10 minutes by car from the Osumo rink. The living room is overfurnished; like many middle-class Japanese, the Yamadas have abandoned the traditionally spare interior decor for the often cluttered Western look. A sideboard along one wall is piled high with Ito's trophies. Along the entire opposite wall there is an array of hi-fi equipment: decks and amps and mixers that might well belong in a professional studio. The equipment is a hobby for Yamada's husband, Hiroki, who is general manager of a local motorcycle and automotive tire company. Machiko Yamada uses it to edit the music for Ito's skating programs.
"When Midori was younger," she says, "we used to put selections together from marches -- upbeat pieces with nice clear tempos. Now she's become fond of classical music." Ito's interest in Western music does not really go beyond what appeals to her sense of rhythm as a skater, but she will spend hours in record shops, browsing for new pieces. This year she got interested in piano concertos.
"Yamada- sensei is very strict as a coach," Ito says, "but at home I have a very ordinary life. Her daughter, Mikiko, is my age. They treat me like her sister."
Yamada has a slightly different view of the relationship. "After all, we're two women," she says. "When we get grumpy with each other at the rink, a lot of times we can't just leave it there; we wind up taking it home. Luckily, there's the rest of the family. My husband or my daughter -- she has no interest in skating -- can usually get us talking about something else."
A trim, handsome woman of 47, her long hair dyed a fashionable auburn, Yamada could easily be taken for 35. She is comfortable with people, has a sense of humor and a low and throaty laugh. She talks easily about Ito, and seems to be able to step back from their relationship. One imagines that achieving that psychic distance, balancing her roles of coach and foster parent, took some effort. This is obvious when Ito competes. Other coaches are there -- touching, encouraging, calling their skaters to the fence during warm-up sessions to dispense last-minute instructions, raising the emotional ante. Yamada, who sometimes appears at the rink in an ankle-length fur coat, seems almost to ignore her protegee. The connection is invisible, but it never wavers.
"The toughest time was when Midori was 13 or 14," Yamada continues. "That's a rebellious time of life for kids anyhow, and whatever you said, she would take the opposite tack. At one point, she wanted to give up skating altogether. Now that she's older, she's not what you would call feminine, but she has developed a basically cheerful disposition. I think we get along pretty well." AT AGE 11 ITO QUALIFIED TO COMPETE in the World Junior Figure Skating Championships in London, Ontario. She finished eighth. "I thought then she just might make an interesting competition skater," Yamada says, "but I never figured that she would turn out as strong as she did. Here in Nagoya we sort of expect the top skaters to come out of Tokyo." This kind of deprecating comment is often heard in Nagoya. An industrial giant of 2.2 million people, the city nurses a half-envious, half-resentful vision of the capital, two hours north by train.
In 1983, at the world junior championships in Sapporo, Ito finished third -- qualifying, although she was only 14, to compete as a senior the following season. "It never crossed my mind then that I could be a world champion," she says. "I just wanted to do my best in every competition. I'd watch skaters like Katarina Witt or Scott Hamilton, and think, 'Wouldn't it be great if I could skate like that someday?' "
Ito made her international debut as a senior at the 1984 world championships in Ottawa. Over three days of competition she rose from 16th to 7th place; digging herself out of the hole was becoming her trademark. "Even so," she says, "starting way behind and moving up was a lot better than starting high and falling back."
For the next few years, playing catch-up was mostly what she did. Why? Simply put, the girl who would become the world's best woman figure skater could barely muster a competitive figure eight.
Until last year, competitions sanctioned by the International Skating Union had been made up of three events: an individually composed short, or original, program of 2 minutes, 40 seconds; a choreographed free-skating program of 4 minutes, and the compulsories, which gave the skater no latitude at all. The rules called for the execution of selections from 41 different figures, performed to instructions that specified even whether the skater should trace the line on the ice with the inside or outside edge of the skate. Each figure had to be repeated twice, "without skids or scrapes, double tracings or unpermitted changes of edge." It was akin to an archer putting an arrow through a previous bull's-eye, then splitting the second arrow with a third. Mistakes, flawed circles, deviations from the axis were easy to determine; the judges went out on the ice when the skater was finished and examined the traces. The compulsories were often called school figures. Traditionalists believe that the combination of grace and precision they demand are the very heart of the sport.
According to Kashio Takizawa, director and secretary general of the Japan Skating Federation, "Japanese skaters have never done very well in the compulsories because they don't get enough practice on clean ice, where they can see the tracings." In all of Japan, there are only 28 skating rinks open year round; just 13 of these are 30 by 60 meters (about 100 by 200 feet), the competition size. All of them are jammed throughout the day with recreational skaters, chewing the surface.
The Osumo rink in Nagoya, where Ito trains, is a notable handicap. Built in 1953, it is a little smaller than standard. Legions of wobbly recreational skaters have left it with scars that never have time to heal. As a child, Ito would practice there in a group from 6 to 7:30 A.M., go to school, and come back again from 5 to 8 P.M.
"I've never had any confidence about my figures," Ito confesses. "I could never really trace well." Still, this is not simply a matter of practice; it's a matter of temperament. The compulsories demand a submission to the geometry; Ito wants to dominate the rink. "For the compulsories," Yamada says, "you have to skate slowly, deliberately -- you have to be composed. That's just not Midori's personality at all. Her style is quick and energetic. She's an attacker."
In June 1988, the attacker got her big break. The International Skating Union met in Davos, Switzerland, to consider eliminating the compulsory figures from competition. Opinion was divided. Member countries traditionally strong in the figures -- among them the United States and Canada -- were reluctant to give them up. They also happened to have lots of year-round skating facilities where training could be done. Member nations not so happily endowed, including Japan, were ranged on the other side.
"Spectators," Takizawa notes, "can't see the tracing on the ice. Most of them have no idea why one skater gets a higher score than another." The compulsories were more than a mystery, the argument went. They were time-consuming and downright dull. Without them, figure skating would draw more attention.
"Of course, we depend a lot on television for financial support," says Katsuichiro Hisanaga, chairman of the Japan Skating Federation's figure-skating committee. "The compulsories were taking up enormous amounts of time, and the television networks just didn't want to cover them."
In the end, the majority of voters favored the figure-skating audience. As of July 1, 1990, declared the I.S.U., the compulsories would no longer be a required event. The short program would count for one-third of the overall score and free skating for two-thirds. BUT UNTIL THE RULES were changed, Ito managed the best she could. At the 1985 world championships in Tokyo, she wanted to become the first woman ever to land a triple Axel in competition.
All the jumps in the figure-skating repertoire end with the skater gliding backward. Except for the Axel, all the jumps also begin with the skater gliding backward, and the spin involves one or more complete 360-degree rotations of the body. With the Axel, the skater enters the jump facing forward, into the direction of the glide, so in order to land facing backward, a skater has to execute an extra half-rotation: two and a half spins for a double Axel; three and a half for a triple Axel. Jumping high enough to make three and a half spins requires tremendous strength in the legs and arms -- and superb balance. Few performers -- men or women -- have the strength to get high enough for the extra 180-degree spin.
The day before the championships, however, Ito broke her right leg in a practice session. "It was just an accumulation of strains," she says, with no hint of the enormous disappointment that must have meant. She couldn't start training again for six months.
Ito finally landed the triple Axel on Nov. 2, 1988. Hardly anyone noticed. The occasion was a small free-skating competition in Aichi prefecture, where Nagoya is located, and Ito's feat received only local coverage. The following week, however, when Ito landed the jump at the All-Japan Figure Skating Championships in Osaka, it was a different story.
"I don't think too many people watching really knew what happened," recalls Hirotaro Yagami, a reporter for the daily Sports Nippon newspaper who has followed Ito's career closely. "But the next day the major national papers were all over it." By the end of the day, the whole country knew that Midori Ito had done something extraordinary, something no woman had ever done before.
Nine months before, at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Ito gave a dazzling free-skating performance and for the first time gained worldwide attention, but she finished just out of the running for a medal. It wasn't until the World Figure Skating Championships in Paris in 1989 that Ito finally managed to be strong enough in the original and free-skating programs to overcome her weak compulsory figures, becoming the first Asian skater ever to win the gold medal. At the end of the first day, she was well back in sixth place. Winning the second round of competition with a nearly impeccable performance -- two of the judges gave her the only perfect scores of the day -- she moved up to third place. On the final day, Ito's routine included six different jumps, including the triple Axel, and she won the title.
The 1989 world championships were a kind of watershed for the entire sport. Figure skating would no longer be dominated by the flowing, elegant style of European and North American skaters like Brian Orser and Katarina Witt. From then on it would belong to more dynamic and acrobatic performers like Ito -- and it promised, for a while, to belong to Ito alone. "She's the only woman I've seen," commented Canada's Kurt Browning, the men's gold medalist, "who could compete with the top men. Her jumping ability is incredible."
Ito's victory brought to the fore an old debate: Is figure skating essentially balletic or gymnastic? In the long run, the decision to drop compulsory figures promises to dissolve, rather than resolve, the debate.
Coaches still make their students learn the compulsories, especially in the early stages of their training. Although some feel that Ito is in the vanguard of a new breed of athletes poised to turn the sport into acrobatics on ice, figure skating continues to demand a special dimension of grace and style.
Performances in the short and free-skating programs are still scored in two categories: technical merit and artistic impression. In the free-skating program, moreover, if two competitors get the same number of points from any judge, the skater with the higher score for artistic impression is ranked higher. Artistry is clearly no small factor. If the athlete has the edge now, the graceful athlete has an even greater edge.
Still, Ito may be a special case; her scores for technical merit have been so high that she could afford to give away the edge. The future of the sport is likely to belong to skaters with a combination of athletic strength and traditional grace -- like Kristi Yamaguchi, 19, and Tonya Harding, 20, both of the United States, and Surya Bonaly, 17, of France.
At the recent United States Figure Skating Championships in Minneapolis, Yamaguchi was the odds-on favorite to win the women's title until Harding overtook her with her flawless completion of seven triple jumps, including the Axel. Bonaly, who was last year's world junior champion and the surprise winner of the European Figure Skating Championships in Sofia, Bulgaria, in January, began her career as a gymnast. She also has the distinction of having landed a quadruple jump in exhibition, something Ito had hoped to do in Munich, but which is now unlikely. WITH HER VICTORY IN the 1989 world championships, Midori Ito became a national hero. The Japan Amateur Sports Association awarded her a group "A" category stipend of about $1,500 a month. In December 1989, she was awarded the 39th annual Japan Amateur Sports Grand Prix, given for the top performance of the year by an athlete or team; she was the first figure skater to win it, and the first woman in 13 years.
Ito's Japanese fans were now taking it for granted that Ito would run away with another world title. The 1990 championships, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was the last international competition to include the compulsory figures. But Ito turned in a catastrophic performance during the first round and ended up in 10th place. Leading the field at that point was Jill Trenary, the three-time United States national champion. Ito won the original program, advancing to fourth place. On the final day, her winning routine again included seven triple jumps, one of them the triple Axel. The nine judges awarded her three 6.0's (perfect scores) and six 5.9's for technical merit. But Trenary -- who outscored Ito only in the compulsories -- took the gold.
"Everybody said it was too bad," Ito notes, "but I didn't go into it with the feeling that I was defending my title. Sure, I wanted to win -- but you know, it's hard enough to be world champion even once. I did the kind of original program and free program I wanted to. I don't have any regrets."
Now, without the compulsories to worry about, Ito's one remaining vulnerability is a want of grace. Her scores for artistic impression are still a little low, but they have been getting better in the past two years. The ballet lessons she started when she was 11 are paying off.
"Midori's improvement has more to do with her age," Yamada says. "She's had some experience of life now. She's centered more, and it shows up in her sense of self-expression."
Last April, Ito graduated from Tokai Gakuen Junior College in Nagoya (her major: home economics) and was hired by the Prince Hotels. She is nominally to work in the general-affairs department of the company headquarters in Tokyo, although she continues to live and train in Nagoya. Like American universities, leading Japanese corporations recruit aggressively for outstanding athletes. A lot of prestige is on the line.
In Ito's case, she does not skate "for" the Prince Hotels, but her official affiliation is now the company's own skating club. Twice a week, on the average, she takes the train up from Nagoya to Tokyo, puts on the company uniform and shuffles some of the routine paper work normally assigned to new employees. Otherwise, she is free to do what she does best. Her salary is the same as any other first-year clerk's: about $1,100 a month.
It was natural that Ito would join the Prince Hotels. The Prince chain is the flagship company of the Seibu Railway Group. Its chairman, Yoshiaki Tsutsumi (according to the Sept. 10, 1990, Fortune magazine, the seventh-richest man in the world), is the eminence grise of Japanese winter sports. The Seibu Group sponsors the strongest hockey team in Japan's company league; operates 34 ski resorts, and owns 11 of the country's 200 or so hockey rinks, including the sites of the last three All-Japan Figure Skating Championships.
So far, the current season -- which ends this week in Munich -- has not been good for Midori Ito. At the Skate America competition last October in Buffalo, she placed second to Kristi Yamaguchi. Her performances in January at the national championships in Yokohama were good enough to win, but most observers agreed they were cautious and uninspired.
"Midori's legs haven't been in really good shape for a while," Yamada explains. "She had that break in 1985, then trouble with her knees -- one thing after another. She could ignore all that when she was 18; now she doesn't have the same stamina. Katarina Witt used to have two or three different triple jumps at most in her programs; that's why she could compete until she was 22 or 23. Midori has five different triples and the triple Axel, and her jumps are higher than anybody else's."
Ito cut back considerably on competition appearances for the 1990-91 season, saving herself for Munich. She has also adopted a less demanding training schedule. (For every week of practice, she spends three to five days in a Prince-owned hotel at the Yunohana hot springs in Hakone, a resort area near Mount Fuji.) Then, in late January, she was briefly hospitalized for removal of a stone in a salivary gland.
Ito tends to turn aside questions about her retirement from amateur figure skating or about her future plans. "I like to take one season at a time," she says. "I have this vague feeling that the Olympics are coming up, and it would be great if I could go, but right now I just want to do well in Munich."
"The Olympics," her coach says, "will probably be the last time Midori competes as an amateur."
One career Ito absolutely rules out is coaching. "She's been watching me do what I do for 15 years now," Yamada says, "and she admits she hasn't got the temperament for it."
Skaters of Ito's stature occasionally turn professional -- become entertainers in ice shows and exhibitions -- and this she finds attractive, although the chances are slim that she would find the backing in Japan to develop and produce her own show. Would she join an existing show? Hire an agent? Skate abroad?
"What should I do, what should I do?" she says, and the stern little face wrinkles in dismay. "I really don't know." It's hard to take that dismay seriously. Midori Ito, after all, has been thinking about what she wants and how to get it since she was 4 years old.
Photos: This space is hers. Midori Ito at last year's world championships. (Gerard Vandystadt/Allsport USA)(pg. 41); Ito with her coach of 15 years, Machiko Yamada, at the 1988 Winter Olympics. At age 10, Ito moved in with Yamada's family and has lived with them since. (Split Second); The compulsory figures had been Ito's stumbling block until they were eliminated from competition after 1990. (Gerard Vandystadt/Allsport USA); Tonya Harding landed her own triple Axel at the United States championships last month, won a surprise victory and emerged as Ito's strongest rival for the world title. (Focus on Sports)(pg. 42)