With Dizziness Gone, Davis Has High Hopes

SAN JOSE —  Considered the strongest spinner in men’s figure skating, two-time national champion Scott Davis knew he was in trouble last summer when his head continued to spin even after the rest of his body had stopped.

“There were some times it was so bad, it was, ‘What if I can never skate again?’ ” he said Wednesday.

Eventually, an ear, nose and throat doctor near Davis’ home at Colorado Springs, Colo., diagnosed the condition as vertigo, an increasingly prominent ailment for Olympic athletes. Diver Mary Ellen Clark, a silver medalist in 1992, sat out all of last season because of it.

But with treatments, including chiropractic massage to realign the particles in his inner ear, Davis was able to recover in time for the U.S. championships in the San Jose Arena.

The men’s competition starts with the short program today and ends with Saturday’s free skate.

On Wednesday, defending champions in pairs and dance were in jeopardy. After a fall in their short program, Jenni Meno and Todd Sand of Costa Mesa trail Kyoko Ina and Jason Dungjen of Monsey, N.Y., entering tonight’s free skate period.

In dance, Renee Roca and Gorsha Sur of Colorado Springs are second to Elizabeth Punsalan and Jerod Swallow of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., after the second of three phases in their dance competition.

Davis, 23, the son of a Great Falls, Mont., high school football coach, once was considered the successor to 1988 Olympic champion Brian Boitano as the United States’ premier men’s skater. Davis even upset Boitano in the 1994 national championships.

But his career since has spun out of control with seventh-place finishes in the last two World Championships and an eighth in the 1994 Olympics.

He failed to defend his national title last year, finishing second to Todd Eldredge of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

Then came the dizziness.

“It’s pretty normal for skaters to come out of a spin and feel uneasy,” Davis said.

“But it was taking me a couple of extra seconds to refocus. I wouldn’t know when I was still in a spin. I had a couple of bad episodes when I was walking around afterward and was still dizzy. The doctor told me that years of spinning and jumping caused it.”

Davis said he did not feel normal until the last week of December, adding that he enters these championships 100% “undizzy.”

Making his head spin now are all the questions he has to answer about his head spinning.

“I don’t think Scott should even think about being dizzy,” said his coach, Kathy Casey, who arranged for him to appear at a news conference Wednesday so that he could address the issue for all the media at the same time.

“We’d like to focus on skating and put the vertigo in the back of our minds.”