The ice has it

Shortly after competing in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City -- finishing in sixth place in his third Winter Games -- Todd Eldredge announced his retirement from the competition and joined the professional Stars on Ice tour. It wasn't an easy decision, he said in a telephone interview in advance of his appearance Saturday at Arco Arena, but one based on the reality of a skater's life.

"I was 30 at the time -- I'm 31 now -- and 30-31 for a figure skater is getting up there a bit," Eldredge said. "I figured I'd had my run, been to three Olympics (finishing 10th and fourth in his first two appearances), and there wasn't too much left except to try to win an Olympic medal -- and that gets harder and harder every year."

The most immediate benefit of retirement was time off, the skater said. "I took a month off this summer, which was the first time I'd done that. It was great. Just to stay home was like a vacation."

Eldredge has a five-year contract with the ice show and also intends to engage in professional competitions.

"Beyond that, I'd like to do some commentary work, get behind the camera instead of in front of it, and later, maybe some teaching and clinics," he said. "But for the next five years, I'll be doing this tour."

Eldredge was born on Cape Cod, Mass., into a commercial fishing family that struggled to pay the escalating costs of his nascent skating career. He began skating at 5, when he asked for and got a pair of skates for Christmas. First his parents bought him hockey skates, but he asked to exchange them for figure skates so he could do jumps and spins. By 7, he was attending summer camps to get more coaching, and at 10, he went to live with a coach in Philadelphia.

His parents weren't sure about the move, he said. "I went with my mom to attend a summer camp with my current coach (Richard Callaghan) in Rochester, New York, when I was 9, and in just those three months over the summer, I was really improving, and I thought it was so cool. He was moving to Philadelphia at that time, and I asked if I could go there during holidays and train and see how I like it. I went during the summer, and I was getting better and better, and I said, 'Can I stay?' They said yes, but I'm sure my parents thought I'd be home in a week."

He stayed and continued to improve. In 1983, when it appeared he'd have to quit his training because the cost was too much for his family, his hometown of Chatham established the Todd Eldredge Youth Hockey Fund to help subsidize him. A few years later, Eldredge had become the youngest man ever to win the National Novice title (1985), the U.S. Junior Championship (1987) and the World Junior Championship (1988).

He has since given money to the Chatham Recreation Fund to aid other young athletes and participated in the Chevy "It's Great To Skate" program (with the U.S. Figure Skating Association) to teach beginning skating skills through clinics in several cities.

Eldredge hopes to find other ways to help young skaters, too. "Skating is such an expensive sport, and it's not fair that talent alone isn't enough to excel. You see kids, and you know the ones that have tons of money and the ones that struggle to pay, and you just pray that they'll find the money to continue to keep doing what they're doing."

One way to make that happen is to encourage schools to establish teams and scholarships for figure skaters, he said. "Some schools in Michigan now are starting to offer skating teams, and that's great because at least the athletes can be recognized. Next is to get colleges to accept figure skaters as athletes on a par with hockey players."

In the Stars on Ice show, Eldredge skates solo twice (to a Buddy Rich drum solo, then to an Andrea Bocelli song), appears in the opening and closing segments and participates in several small-group numbers.

"It's a lot of fun for the crowd to see different Olympic and world champions out on the ice together," he said. Eldredge has been U.S. national champion six times and was world champion in 1996.

Among the many international champions in the show are Jamie Sali and David Pelletier, and Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, the Canadian and Russian pairs teams who both won gold medals at the 2002 Olympics after an international scoring scandal. The four skate together in the show.

"A lot of people, I think, had reservations about whether they'd get along," Eldredge said, "but quite honestly, they get along great. It's been fun seeing them work together.

"That whole scoring thing was awful, and it was the skaters that ended up with the worst backlash from the whole thing. It made the skaters look bad when all they did was go out and do what they were supposed to do. It wasn't the fault of any of them that they competed and weren't judged fairly. But the thing was never really between the skaters, and they're fine with each other."

Eldredge declined to say if he'd ever been judged unfairly, saying only, "I've been in the sport so long, if I went back and thought about every performance in every competition, I could probably come up with one or two instances ... but you really have to let that go. It comes down to: 'Do I feel good about what I did on the ice and did the fans enjoy it?' "

Participating in Stars on Ice is fun, Eldredge said, but it's sometimes more difficult than the competition circuit. When he spoke, he had completed three shows on the East Coast before New Year's and was about to perform in Seattle before coming to Sacramento. The U.S. tour will include 50 shows after Arco; then there's a Canadian leg that will go until May 5, before an international tour begins.

"You don't compete every night, but we're doing the show every night, or every other night -- and there's the travel in between.

"You skate, then pile on a bus exhausted, travel, get to the next place, rehearse, do the show, then crash on the bus again."

The fatigue is alleviated by the audience, though, once the show starts. "The energy from the crowd lifts you up. It's all about the fans, anyway. They don't hold up 6.0 or 5.8 cards in the audience, but we go on applause."

And how long will the skater continue to go on applause?