Where Have You Gone Olympic Champions?

HELSINKI, Finland —  Barely a year ago, they were on top of the skating world--gold medalists at the Olympics in Nagano.

Now Tara Lipinski, Ilya Kulik and the others have gone their different ways.

Some, like Lipinski, don’t look back and are living comfortably. Others, like Pasha Grishuk, have had mixed fortunes and are contemplating career changes.

Unlike past Olympic champions who had two choices--stay amateur or go pro--last year’s winners had a third choice. They could stay eligible for the Olympics, while still making money by competing in open events, loosely under International Skating Union rules.

As long as they avoided the made-for-TV competitions with non-ISU rules, the 1998 winners could compete in the 2002 Olympics.

Lipinski didn’t go that route. She participated in an “unsanctioned” event last fall, thus giving up her Olympic eligibility. If the ISU doesn’t change its rules, as it did briefly for the 1994 season, Lipinski will be a one-time Olympic champion.

Yet she’s content with that.

“I need new challenges,” she said. “I could be 24 or whatever, but I still would have accomplished all I set out to do at 16. So I don’t see it.”

Lipinski has been busy in the year since the Olympics. She joined the Stars on Ice tour. She’s appeared on several TV shows and even had her own specials.

She’s earned close to $10 million in everything from endorsements to books--all before turning 17.

Kulik, meanwhile, chose a wait-and-see attitude. He participated--and mostly lost--in ISU-sanctioned events but not the regular competitions for official ISU titles. He left the coach who guided him to Olympic gold and he moved to Los Angeles.

Yet all is not smooth for Kulik. He has been moody and uninterested at times. On a morning TV show, he snapped at the host for making him wait in the cold rink.

Pasha Grishuk has turned a cold shoulder on a number of people.

She and Yevgeny Platov split soon after winning her second Olympic gold. She dropped her agent and joined Alexander Zhulin for a “Pasha and Sasha” duo on the ice.

The pairs winners, Artur Dmitriev and Oksana Kazakova, have performed in relative obscurity compared with other winners.

They, too, are keeping their options open and have not forfeited their chance for another gold medal for Dmitriev, which would allow him to become the first male pairs skater to win three gold medals. In 1992 he won with Natasha Mishkutienok.

Kazakova and Dmitriev, like all the other Russian champions, are now in the United States. They still work with their longtime coach Tamara Moskvina in New Jersey.