Hamilton decides to stop touring

At age 42, Scott Hamilton has had enough of this.

His ankle hurts. His back hurts. His professional skating career puts him on call for seven months a year. He's never home.

Hamilton is a four-time world figure skating champion and 1984 Olympic gold medalist. He has been living on the road for 17 years of a pro career, and six less intense years of his storied amateur career. His body just won't take the touring anymore.

He skated at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto last night, but says that on May 1, when the curtain falls on the Chrysler Stars on Ice tour in Vancouver, his touring career will be over.

How will it change his life?

"I have no idea," he said. "I'm stepping off a cliff. I want to skate. I don't want to retire. I just know that touring like this, travelling every single day, my body just doesn't enjoy it any more."

Every day, Hamilton faces a new physical wrinkle. He is already a cancer survivor, taking off only five months to recover, refusing to give in. These days he talks about his gimpy ankle that blew up the night of the tour stop in Halifax a week ago. "I got through the show just fine," he said.

On Wednesday morning, he woke up in Ottawa and could barely breathe, because of back pain. "My back is killing me," he said. "It will loosen up. It's just one of those old man things, you know. A lot of it is just from sleeping on a different bed every night, travelling, and sitting in crowded airplanes. It's just hard."

Now, he said, it's time for him to shift gears and find something to keep him busy but in one place, maybe two -- he owns a home in Denver, and a hideaway, believe it or not, that clings to a cliff in Los Angeles.

Living on the edge hasn't been great for his personal life, either. When you're never home, it's tough to keep the home fires burning. Hamilton wants to change that. "Honestly, I don't want to wait so long that the mother of my children is changing my diapers at the same time," he said.

His life involves Stars on Ice rehearsals in September. "If you don't show up for rehearsals in some semblance of shape, you're going to be trying to catch up all year," he said.

October and November is exhibition and television special season, although Hamilton has cut back on most activities extraneous to Stars on Ice, a tour he helped start 15 years ago. In mid-November, there is more work on the show. The pro competitive season tends to happen in December, although Hamilton hasn't competed in a year. After Christmas, the Stars on Ice tour wends through 65 stops in the United States and another 11 in Canada.

Hamilton won't disappear, however. He wants to do a theatre skating show on Broadway. "You might even see more of Scott Hamilton in different ways," said Kurt Browning, the Canadian star of the Stars on Ice troupe. "But the hole will be felt in Stars on Ice.