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.