Sarah: Oh my God. Yeah, seriously, look at cheerleaders. It's terrifying what they're capable of.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. Today we are learning about Debi Thomas, a name you may not know, but you'll be very happy after you hear Leslie Gray Streeter tell you about it. Debi Thomas is an American figure skater and world champion who competed in the 1980s, and specifically and most famously in the 1988 Calgary Olympics, where she went head-to-head with East German juggernaut, Katrina Witt in the legendary “Battle of the Carmen’s.” She was also the only Black figure skater competing at that level at that time, and very few people have followed in her footsteps. And today we are going to talk about why that might be.
Leslie Gray Streeter is a columnist for the Baltimore Banner. We were talking about topics that she might do on this show, and Debi Thomas came up and it became clear that was the only thing we could talk about. I have been thinking about Debi for a while. Leslie has been thinking about Debi Thomas for her entire life, for the most part, she grew up watching her. And the conversation that we have about her today is a combination of sports history, autobiography, and structural oppression in America.
Even if you don't care about sports or even if you don't care about figure skating or have no foreknowledge of the topic, I think this is an episode for you. Because our sports stories are really, in my opinion, about the people who we want to be, the success stories that we allow ourselves to imagine, and the dreams of transformation that we have. And this is a story about all those things and about the dreams that we allow little girls to dream and the limitations that we place on athletes for reasons that have nothing to do with their abilities. It's about the world that we lived in the eighties, and hopefully the changes that we are trying to make. Although it appears that we are doing it very slowly.
Right now You’re Wrong About is on tour. I am Sarah on the road, and in fact I am talking to you from the Sheraton Hotel in Canada, site of the National Grammar Rodeo. Specifically, I am in Toronto. We had an amazing show last night. I'm on tour, of course, with producer Carolyn Kendrick, who is serenading us all with the most beautiful love songs ever written. And then I come out and tell a terrible story where love doesn't work out for anyone. It's a really nice balance. And with us is the irreplaceable Jamie Loftus. I hope you can come see us. We are in New York and Philadelphia this week. There are still some tickets for our Philly show. It's on April 30th. If you feel like seeing some music, mystery, and mayhem, come see it with us. We would love to see you. And if you're in New York City and see a tall girl, it could be me. And we have a few more dates. The start of May we are going to Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, Boston, Burlington, Vermont, and finishing up in Montreal. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Here's our episode.
*recording*
ABC Sports and the Olympics, a longstanding partnership again at the Winter Games of Calgary. The Olympic tradition continues. Hello, I'm Jim McKay. A battle began here today. The participants were not soldiers, but two attractive, young women. And this battle began not with a shout, but with a whisper. Now the participants are Debi Thomas of the United States, former World Champion, Magazine cover girl, and pre-med student at Stanford University. And Katerina Witt of East Germany, the defending Olympic champion, a beauty who hopes for a career as an actress.
Sarah: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast that sometimes is brunch. And with me today is Leslie Streeter to talk about Debi Thomas and how she was robbed! I'm not biased. Hello, Leslie.
Leslie: Hello. And yes, robbed. Robbed, almost like she was stuck up. Like there was someone behind her with an old timey mask or something, terrible.
Sarah: Leslie Gray Streeter, what else are you up to out there in the world?
Leslie: I am up to everything. I am a columnist for the Baltimore Banner. Find me at baltimorebanner.com. I am a podcaster myself with my sister. Our goofy show is called, Fine Beats and Cheeses, about pop culture you have no guilt about loving cheesy, though it may be. It hits all of your podcasting situations on Tuesdays. I am a writer. I have a book called, Black Widow that came out a couple years ago of my widowhood. If you find anything about widows and sad things and laughing through grief and drinking bourbon, you'll find me. I'm there and I'm just out here raising a human child and hoping not to be stuck at soccer practice for five days a week.
Sarah: The dream. I am so excited to talk about this topic because we have had in the last few years, I, Tonya and a big increase in Tonya Harding literacy in this country, which I find very exciting. And yet nobody is talking about Debi Thomas. We are going to do that today.
Leslie: I think that narrative is so ripe for more of an explanation and an exploration of who she is, and it hasn't happened. So as you said before we did this, if we could be part of the Debi Thomas renaissance, I'm all for it.
Sarah: Who is Debi Thomas and what is figure skating?
Leslie: Yes. Debi Thomas is a former American figure skater. She came in third with a bronze medal in the 1988 Calgary Olympics. The real competition was a woman named Katerina Witt, who was East German. They actually skated to the same music from Carmen. She was also a former world champion skater. She was a former United States champion. She was the first African American person to win an Olympic medal.
Sarah: A winter Olympic medal, right?
Leslie: A winter Olympic medal. Winter Olympic medal.
Sarah: I remember reading that in Time when I was reading an old issue, to read about Debi Thomas obviously, and you're like, “What? That happened in 1988?”
Leslie: So much of statistics about sports has to do to access. It’s why when you watch the Winter Olympics and you watch, hey, it's the Jamaican bot flip team, it's because they don't have snow in Jamaica. So there is not ready access to those things, that's geographical. It's why before the Williams sisters and Arthur Ashe, you did not have a lot of Black people playing tennis. It's not that they couldn't do it obviously. It's that there was not physical and financial access in many ways.
Figure skating is an Olympic and competitive sport which involves literally skating figures on the ice. It is different from ice dancing, but it's close. It's a sport where individuals, pairs of groups perform on figure skates on ice. It's in the Olympics, which is once again where many people only pay attention to it.
But figure skating basically is a sport that used to be very dance-y, like in your Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming. Very voletic, graceful. Then in the nineties and two thousands it became very athletic with your telling your Tonya Hardings, and Midori Ito, and people like that who were hitting all the triple axles and stuff, and your Surya Bonaly. If none of these names mean anything to you, it's because these are people that have not been written about as well as they should have. And the sport can be very insular because figure skating is judged. Just like with some other things, people have decided that it's not really a sport because people understand sports and you had more points, and you had less points. So the person with a more points one and that they go, if it's something that's subjective, it's not really a sport.
Also, I believe that people thought that way, even though there were obviously many male figure skaters, that people thought of it as feminized. So they decided that was a way to dismiss it from not being a sport, just like cheerleading.
Sarah: Oh my God. Yeah. Seriously, look at cheerleaders. It's terrifying what they're capable of. Cheerleaders could rule the world if they ever truly wanted to, which apparently they don't. And I find figure skating so compelling as well because probably all sports are about gender in their own ways, right? But figure skating is so overtly about gender, and it gets that it's about gender because it's here's the correct way to do gender. But there's so many other aspects of it that it seems willfully ignorant. So the two things that it feels like women's figure skating, which I believe had its title changed to women's figure skating from ladies’ figure skating, Jamie Loftus talked about this in our bonus episode about skating that we just put out. It feels like the two things that it's really policing and also judging on whether it admits it or not, and it tends not to, are correct performances of gender. And then also specifically, within femininity, white femininity and that any deviation from that, the sport has not known what to do with not,
Leslie: Not at all. For instance, there's a skater that you guys might not be aware of, named Surya Bonaly, who was a Black French skater who was just the most badass of all bad asses. She had been a gymnast, so she did a lot of flips and spins. And I think you'll agree with me, Sarah, that so much of the resistance at that time to a lot of these athletic moves was a very gendered thing. That this is masculine, and this is feminine, and the jumps and the athleticism and the bodies that are required to do these jumps are masculine and in this way, Africanized. And so she got a lot of pushback. Because not only was she very beautifully dark-skinned, she had a very athletic body.
But there was a moment where she was in a competition where she knew she'd gotten screwed by those scores. And she refused to get onto the podium. It was easier to punish her because physically and visibly she was an outsider. She was different. Once again, Tanya Harding had the same thing. It goes to race and class and gender. Tanya Harding had big thighs. She had big hair. She smoked. She wore blue eyeshadow. She was from a trailer park. She was not rich. She was surrounded by sketchy, shady people. And she was not the quote unquote ice princess that was expected. So even though she was a white woman, she was treated, I think in many ways, the way that non-white skaters were treated in that she was an other and an outsider.
Like you said, you're willing to play the game or not. I think that Debi Thomas, who had been interviewed in the beginning when people made a big deal out of, she's the first Black person, and she didn't want to be held to that standard. She just wanted to skate. But then she talks later about how she did not really want to talk about it until she understood that she became a role model. If you skate on, I'm the first Black, I'm the first woman, I'm the first whatever, then you are marginalizing yourself in a way. But if you don't acknowledge it, then you're not necessarily being realistic or you're maybe not honoring other people who find that thing in you. And you obviously can't pin your own personal worth to what other people see in you.
But you don't want to be the only, you don't want it constantly pointed out to you that you are the first, because why would you be the first? It's because the landscape was not welcoming to you. And so you get through, it's not like you got there and now everybody loves you. I was reading today that there were people who did not, and I could see it. You can see it, the subjectivity of the judging, that she was not judged highly.
Sarah: Yeah. In the past, in Debi Thomas's era, and this plays into her story, you would get an artistic score and a technical score, and they would be nine numbers from nine judges, and they would be on a scale of six. So it would be like 5, 7, 5, 8, 5, 6, 5, 9, and you could see what judge was doing what, and it was overly complicated, but a person understands how much of six a number is roughly. And now you get these aggregate scores that theoretically have no upward limit because you can get all these like extra points for various things. And so a skater will leave the ice and they'll be like 183 and he'll be like, oh, that sounds good. And then someone else will skate and they'll be like 217 and you'll be like, huh. I don't know.
Leslie: It's very confusing and I thought that the way that they were going to affect the judging would be to make it more understandable for people outside.
Sarah: You would think they might do that, wouldn't you? We're going to go back in our time machine to Debi Thomas and her beginning to skate in, I believe, around the Dorothy Hamill era based on her age.
Leslie: Yes. She was born in 1967, so she's 55 years old. She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, but she was raised in San Jose. She said her mother took her everywhere she went, and her mother had gone to see skating and she goes Debi should do this too. So she took her with her to a thing, and she's what is this? She's like, this is what you're doing now.
So she starts skating around five. She started competing around nine and was very good. And her mother, like a lot of hockey parents and skating parents and gymnastics parents, found herself driving a hundred miles a day between school home and the ice rink. And then her parents divorced when she was very young. So she got into it and she met her coach, Alex McGowan, who was Scottish, who would be her coach for the rest of her career when she was 10.
So she started skating in Los Angeles, and launched a career at the Los Angeles Speaker Skating Club. She stayed with Alex McGowan until she retired at 21, right after the Olympics from amateur competition. So in 1985 she placed fifth in the world championships, and she won gold in 1986. And I remember that cause I remember going, who is this? Who is this? I'm a little Black girl in Baltimore, which is where I live now. And I remember seeing her picture and going, wait, is she Black? Because what? Previously there had been Tai Babylonia, a seventies pierce skater, and she was of mixed race. So she was part Black, part Filipino. She was a couple of things. So she registered as not white, but not definitively Black.
The Williams sisters changed so many things because people like Debi Thomas had to come in, they were visibly and physically Black and not white. But they could not really talk about it. The Williams sisters came in with their corn rows and their beads and their hair playing in Compton and said, we're Black. What of it? They didn't straighten their hair and try to be ballet dancers. They didn't take lots of elocution classes to try to speak in a certain way to negate the very obvious and fierce Blackness. They just were who they were. Now are they different people than Debi Thomas? Sure. They were raised in a different way, but I wonder if you have to answer less questions about your identity now than you used to look at. Like someone like Brian Boitano who was in the same Olympics who was gay and did not come out until after the Olympics.
Sarah: Until way after the Olympics.
Leslie: We are in such a different place that it breaks my heart to think that these other people who paved the way for the people now, what they could have done or accomplished had they had the same support and just the same social understanding that these things happen, and you don't have to come in with eight layers of excuses about who you are. You could just skate.
Sarah: And I feel like skating, as far as I can tell, isn't there, but is certainly closer. And as we talked about, I went to see some of the skating at Nationals this year in San Jose, whereby the way, I spent a long time at the arena where the Sharks normally play and where they have all these hideous plaques of San Jose sports legends and who isn't there? Debi Thomas, but anyway.
But I saw the Women's Short program and there was a queer skater skating in the women's category, which is exceedingly rare and possibly a first-time thing, Amber Glenn, who was amazing and skated, in my opinion, a very gay number. And two Black skaters, Alexa Gasparotto and Starr Andrews. And that feels closer, but it's still, it's like, who's missing?
And going back to Debi Thomas, something I'm curious about, and I remember encountering in one place in skating research I was doing years ago was somebody claiming that Debi Thomas had a nose job to try and give the judges the aesthetic they wanted, basically. Have you encountered that anywhere?
Leslie: I read this, she got three nose jobs.
Sarah: What? Wait, where is that? Where's she saying that?
Leslie: This is in the Washington Post story. It was that terrible story about her breakdown.
Sarah: I don't know the story. Tell me about this.
Leslie: Basically it was the, Hey, what's up with Debi Thomas story in 2015. And it was not good stuff. It was not good stuff. I imagine that there were people who thought that they were doing her a favor by saying, yes, you're Black, but you can also be different. Or, yes, you're Black, but you can also have a different look. And so the fact that she did her hair was blown out, but it was not super straight, but she wasn't wearing it natural either. Surya Bonaly wore her hair in braids. It was a very different thing.
And then also Debi Thomas is fairly light to medium brown skinned, so it's a different thing. There were people who treated her blackness as an aesthetic rather than a reality and identity. And I cannot imagine what that would be like. Like I said, I read the quote where she said, I just was skating. I wasn't really thinking about that. And you wonder if that's true and if it's true that's in one way, commendable in one way it's, I don't get it because I don't understand being able to divorce yourself from your culture that way.
But once again, it's not my story. And maybe she was in a place where she didn't feel that she could. But there's always this idea that, for instance, there were Americans who openly preferred Katarina Witt, and wrote about how sexy she was and how great she was, and then what was not said, they were like, … not you black girl. And the pressure of any Olympian to win, particularly in a Cold War era, late eighties, the communist are bad, we are good. We're going to beat these people. And that sport became, get the East Germans. Get the Russians, right?
Sarah: Yeah. It's a Reagan Cold War Olympics for God's sake.
Leslie: Absolutely. And not only as an American did she feel this pressure, this little, tiny person to represent this culture war, but she was also Black. And I think there were a lot of people who were disappointed that she was the representative of us. And when she failed, they thought, oh, see, we told you.
Sarah: And that's the sense that I have of the forces that shaped her career. And so just a couple things. To come back to Surya Bonaly hair, again, it's worth pointing out that the scoring system used on her at the time, the artistic score, was meant to reflect hairstyle partly. That was part of the score. So if you didn't like that her hair was in braids, you could be like, I'm not being racist. It's just the artistic score.
Leslie: Yep. People talked about how her costume sat on her butt. They talked about the fact that she wore too many sequins. Was it suggestive? And because of sequins, because of the unfortunate and inherent push of sexuality onto non-white bodies, her very body was sexualized, as you said. So an outfit on her that looked quote unquote revealing on a thinner, whiter woman with no boobs and no butt. It was just Susie Sunshine, and there was nothing inherently sexual about anything Surya Bonaly did. She was a teenager.
Sarah: Yeah. Yes. Ugh. Yeah. It's very creepy, the amount of sort of sexual power that is being projected onto these young skaters, sometimes very young skaters who are being treated as if they have all this power. And are these dangerous forces that need to be damned in like the Colorado River. I think that the sport recognizes with male figure skaters anyway, that a lot of the muscles you need to do these jumps are stored in the ass. How are you not going to have one? It's a real question, but I would love to ask you, getting back to this memory of seeing Debi Thomas, do you remember like watching skating before her? And were there skaters that you and what was the sport to you? And then what did Debi mean when she came along?
Leslie: I loved Dorothy Hamill as a little girl. I was five during the ‘76 Olympics. Because she was pretty, and I loved her hair and I loved the commercials, the shampoo commercials. And my hair didn't do that, right? In high school, there was a rink that would be open on rash field and at the Under Harbor in Baltimore, we went a couple times. I'm Debi Thomas, look at me. And that year, that was my senior year, and we all were like, look at us, we're Debi Thomas. If you're a figure skating fan you'll get this reference. My favorite moment from any Peanuts thing was when Peppermint Patty was ice skating.
Sarah: I know. I love it. That Peppermint Patty ice skates.
Leslie: She ice skates. And Snoopy is her Russian coach who's yelling. So there's a moment where Peppermint Patty, who as you know was pretty masculine and super awkward and just very blunt and not very feminine. She's doing this figure skating thing and she's pretty good at it. And her music won't work. And she's out there sweating, and Woodstock comes to the microphone and whistles her music for her.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Leslie: She’s there by herself. And that's the thing that always got me about Debi Thomas is that even with the backing of this country and this supposed group of people that has your back, she was really on her own.
Sarah: And I feel like you could feel that watching her and speaking about what the models for a lady's champion are to this point, the most recent ones, and the ones that have been, the most successful are Peggy Fleming in 68, and Dorothy Hamill in 76. I had a Dorothy Hamill haircut for most of my childhood, and they were women who were rewarded for winning gold for their country by being thrown lots of endorsement deals, lots of money. It became a necessary function of how the sport worked in the eighties as Debi Thomas was coming up, that you make your money in endorsements. And I know that Debi Thomas did a Campbell's soup ad, and I cannot think of a single other thing. And I've looked.
Leslie: Nope. And this is the thing about racism and classism in America. No matter what you do, you can't complain. And if you complain, they're waiting for you to tell you that you're wrong and they’ll trying to gaslight you. And so you go along, and you don't complain, and you don't tell the truth and then they go, see, it was fine. She never said anything. She was great. She loved it. It was great. And so it's so hard to win even when you're winning. You look at that and go, where were her endorsements? Where was her second act? Where is her biopic? Where is the respect she doesn't have. And it's not fair.
Sarah: And Diet Coke was doing ads with Katarina Witt, and not to be all Reagan about it, but the East German! Do an ad with an American! So Debi Thomas is at this point in the story, is coming up through the rankings. She's on your way to being an Olympian. You also really can't expect another American woman to medal in 88, because the rest of the team is Caryn Kadavy and Jill Trenary. And Jill Trenary is not a strong jumper. And Caryn Kadavy has the flu. And also, the Olympic alternate that year is little Tonya Harding.
Leslie: Wahoo. And so Debi Thomas comes in, she's in this field where I remember their breath being held. It'd be really great if we could just crown her now, but we can't. But do we want to? We'll see what the white girls do. That's terrible. But it's true. So it doesn't work out for the other two skaters. And in 86 rather, she'd won the St. Ivel title and the World Championship title, which was stunning to people. Cause it's not just the way that we were trying to grade her here. Germans even, no one could deny her. Everything was great. So in 1988 Debi Thomas came into the Olympics as one of the favorites. As we mentioned, the other favorite was Katarina Witt, who was a beautiful East German lady who was white, who was thin.
Sarah: I feel like sometimes they were like, Katarina is a little too sexy. She was too sexy in a very predictable white woman way that she was like giving bombshell, you know?
Leslie: It was what friends of mine referred to as ‘Spicy White’. Katarina Witt had this very, and she's gorgeous, just gorgeous, very talented. And because the media, which I'm a part of, can't help but make things a spectacle, found out that both of them were doing pieces from Bizet’s, Carmen. And I don't know. To this day, I'm like, would it be different if the music was different? If they had done different pieces, if this could have been hyped in this way where it was all or nothing because it was just so ugly. But it was the battle of the Carmen's.
And so the difference is that at the end of Katarina Witt’s performance, the Carmen was supposed to die. And Debi Thomas, she lives victoriously. It did not go that way. Debi Thomas missed several jumps and my whole family stayed home on a Saturday night to watch this. So we're watching this, and she starts and we're cheering for her, we're so proud. She slips the first time.
Sarah: And it was like a small error the first time too. It's the kind of thing that it would've been potentially possible for her to just move on. But you can see her not moving on.
Leslie: Yes. So by the time the third one happens, and it's clear that she can't do this isn't working. And I remember going into the back of the basement with the door where our laundry room wasn't just closing the door. And I remember whispering, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. It's over. We come back out, we see the scores. To this day, I was surprised she medaled. I just remember this moment where it felt like the whole country was waiting for Debi to win, not just for herself, not just as a Black person, but as an American. And that it felt like she had failed everybody and herself.
And I read something recently that said once it didn't go well, she just gave up. You're a Peppermint Patty out there with no music. You're Marian Anderson, knowing half the country hates her. Knowing that something bad could happen to you, but you still have to perform, you still have to skate, you still got to sing. And how unfair that is. I always think about the little black kids that integrated schools. And I remember being in a class where they go, what would you have done if your child was asked? I'd say, I wouldn't do it. I would be like, are you kidding me? Let someone else risk their life.
And it's terrible. But when it's personal, when it's your body, your child, your physical wellbeing at stake, it's not so easy because now we look at those people and we go, oh, isn't that great? Look at them, how brave they were, so great. But now we also see the pictures of the angry white mobs behind them yelling at them.
Sarah: And it feels like our concept of social change is based on this idea that there just have to be these chosen casualties who go first and probably are extremely traumatized by it. And going back into the battle of the Carmen’s, this is I think one of the best skating Olympics to watch because there's so much drama for both the men's and the, what it was called at the time, ladies’ event. And I'm fascinated by Katarina Witt’s performance in this Olympics and her story.
I feel like one of the things about her in the eighties was that she was this competitive juggernaut. That she was this very consistent competitor that seemed to have this sort of intense mental fortitude. And then you see interviews that she's done more recently and learn about why that was. And she literally had to win, according to her, a second Olympic gold medal, she had already won in 84, in order to get out of East Germany. I would also just love to take a moment to appreciate, the Olympics are like at their core about diplomacy, I think.
But there's something so odd about figure skating, because it's relevant primarily to Americans in connection to the Olympics, that it's a diplomatic post, especially to be a female skater. And that this effectively was like, our second Reaganite, Cold War Olympics, and that those were part of the stakes.
Leslie: If you remember in 1984 where the Russians boycotted, right? And so there was an asterisk in some way put on, say, the American men's gymnastics team who had never won gold before. They go, well the communists weren't there, so of course they won. Of course, the Russians are going to be your primary people, just like where the Russians still represent this indomitable force in sports and in politics in a real dangerous way. And that your body as a boxer, a skater, a gymnast, is the cannon fodder for this war that someone else picked a long time ago.
Sarah: Oh my God. And then you look at that and you're like, imagine explaining this to a martian, right? They're like, you're showing a martian the battle of the Carmens. Sounds like a good Saturday night. And they're like, oh, what beautiful skating. What is the significance of this? And you're like, so this skater represents the first of any Black person in this country that historically discriminated against Black people to be allowed to skate. And now she has to win against East Germany. She has to win against Communism, which is the opposite of capitalism, which is the ideology of her country, which hates her. And she has to skate the best to prove that capitalism is correct.
Leslie: Yes. And the martian would be like, this is insane. We're just going to obliterate you all. We're going to start all over because this is messed up. And this gets into the whole, what does 4th of July mean to the Negro? Frederick Douglass’s wonderful speech about, what does this patriotism and the mantle of the responsibility of representing a country that hates you, that to this day, denies the existence of either your existence or your history. What does this nationalism mean to you? And Debi Thomas, she represented a lot of things to a lot of people. And I think that her failing for a lot of people was justification for their own racism.
Sarah: Oh my God. Completely.
Leslie: We told you she couldn't do it. Cause we have to be at the same time, feminine enough to be innocent, sexy enough to be interesting, white enough to be competitive, exotic enough to be interesting to give them something to write about. And we have to be all these things at the same time also while landing your entire body on a tiny blade. If you can't focus on that moment, if you're Debi Thomas and you admit later that you just gave up in that moment when you're Marian Anderson, you're Peppermint Patty, and everybody is watching you, and you have now blown your shot to be the thing. And I don't think it was, and now I give up, it's just like your body just says, I can't do this anymore. And this juggernaut of pressure and xenophobia and nationalism and all of these other things, and at this moment, it's all on me in these three and a half minutes and I just can't do it. Can you imagine?
Sarah: No. And the thing of skating in gymnastics, probably again, any sport, but these are the ones I think about, they seem to be so much about trust, right? You have to trust your sense of where you are in space. You have to trust your body's ability to do what it needs to do. There's a fundamental sense of trust involved. And then what happens when you can't trust any of the governing bodies of your sport, which of course is such a huge thing in gymnastics now too.
And of course we have to reckon with the fact that the infrastructure of American gymnastics is an utter horror show and always has been, but we've been mostly able to ignore it until recently. But the battle of the Carmen’s had both of them skated at their best, I think I would've had to go to Debi Thomas because she was so much stronger athletically and the jumps that she was attempting were so much harder. But as it was, it went to Katarina Witt who had I think four triple jumps in the whole program, just by today's standards, very easy. Even for the time it was the last of its era in terms of lack of kind of demands, in terms of triple jumps that the skater had to do.
Leslie: Absolutely. So there was the exhibition after. It's over, she's on third.
Sarah: The exhibition skate is where they put you in a spotlight like they do in movies whenever they show skating competitions, and never in real life where people have to compete under the harsh, horrible lights of a stadium.
Leslie: Yes. And so Debi Thomas's big triumphant moment after was George Michael's One Try. And it was literally one more try. It could not have been more perfect. The song is about how you having these expectations of me and I can only do what I can do, and the one thing I have is my pride. And she nailed every jump in that song. Because the pressure was gone and she did it. After this performance, retires from amateur skating and becomes professional once again, because skating is this thing that says, once you start making money, you can't skate in the Olympics anymore.
Sarah: Makes perfect sense. Jesus Christ.
Leslie: Because there's something unclean and materialistic about wanting to make money and they say you can go and become a professional skater and do ice capades and do skating on ice and all this stuff, but you can't be in the Olympics anymore. So you have to decide if I'm going to waste the next four years of my peak health and my peak athletic ability to wait to be an Olympian again, or am I going to make money? And there's no going back. So she went professional, and she had some successes as a professional while she was going to Stanford, got her bachelor's at Stanford.
She retired the next year. Went to Northwestern University in Chicago for medical school, and she became an orthopedic surgeon. Living in LA, things did not go well after. She was married twice. The second marriage did not seem to go well. She has a child who is now actually a college football player named Luke, but she lost custody of him. She went into bankruptcy. She wound up in 2015, this was the public re-awareness of Debi Thomas when she was on Iyanla Fix My Life, which is Iyanla Vanzant of the Oprah Network doing a show where she was mostly going to some normal people, but many celebrities. And so she would go and tough love them and yell at them, whatever. So Debi at the time, was living in a trailer in Virginia. She'd lost all her money. She even lost her medal because she went to bankruptcy. and they came and took her medal.
Sarah: Oh, Debi. No. To lose your medal. The medal that you got for skating for your country, the thing that you sacrificed everything for. And I know that it's no surprise to anyone that athletes get chewed up by their sport, but I think that figure skating, it just doesn't have a reputation for being quite as ruthless as it is. I think it always surprises people.
Leslie: Because it looks so pretty.
Sarah: It's so pretty.
Leslie: She stopped being a doctor. Her practice was in shambles. She was diagnosed as bipolar. And she was living with her boyfriend and his two sons and a bedbug infested trailer in Virginia. And she was defensive. At this point since she hadn't been to the doctor in years. There was also a story in the Washington Post at the same time about it, and I hated that story. If you get a chance to read that story, do it holding your nose, because it seems to be so salacious.
And so the beginning of the story is that she can't find her skates. Yeah. It's not the life that she thought she was supposed to have. And certainly there was mental illness and stuff, and obviously things happen in 30 years. You're not the same person. There's no guarantee you're going to be the same person at one point, that you are at another. All of that to say so many people, I think were willing to be like, oh, see. It wasn't our fault. We don't have to feel bad for, we don't have to feel bad for her anymore because look at her, she's a loser living in a trailer with a dude she's not married to and his kids, and she lost her kids and oh, so sad. And it made me want to punch everyone involved, made me want to shake her a little bit because she's like, oh, I don't get a doctor. She doesn't believe in medicine anymore. And she's completely turned off.
But once again, yeah, I don't know what that experience is like for her. So I can't tell her she's wrong to think that. I can't tell her that she's wrong. So the good part, here's the good part. Recently, as in the last week, she has made a bit of a comeback to skating. Not competitively, but a gentleman who's involved in the figure skating world invited her to come to Lake Placid, home of the Olympics, to skate. And she had not skated at that point, I think, in about 15 years. Because, can you imagine what all that entailed? And having to face who you used to be and who you were supposed to be and other people's ideas and disappointments in you, and maybe your disappointment yourself.
But I saw pictures, I saw a video of it, and she looks like she's doing okay. Like I said, I think she's still with that dude, not my business, still living in that trailer, I think, not my business, but she had three turns, loops with a head rush, backwards crossover. So once again, she's 55 years old, she's never going to be the skater that she was. And that's okay. But the fact that the video is pretty great of her doing it and enjoying it. This is her moment, I think. And if you're out there, Debi Thomas, talk to me. I want to write your story. Truly once again, part of what we want to do, the reason that we like comeback stories is so we can feel better about our faith in these people. Sports is about tribalism in many ways. Sports is about how you root for a team because you're from there, or because your dad rooted for them or because that's where you went to school or that's where you wanted to go to school.
And I think that individual sports, even though they're not tied necessarily to a geographical place, they're tied to a country, they're tied to an idealism. And so you have to decide if you are an American, but you don't really love Black people, do you vote for Serena Williams? And do you root for her in a way that is about embracing her as an American? And not just as the Black girl who happened to be the person that's representing you. And I think we're better now. I truly think we're better. I think that one of the things that I know little kids, white, Black, whatever, who will root for anybody who's the American because they recognize that.
Sarah: And this is like the kind of classic idea that you certainly is like a part of the American history I was raised with, which is feminism or, progress of any kind is like people are going to think less of you. So a woman has to work twice as hard as any man and get paid half as much or a Black woman has to work eight times as hard as any man and get paid nothing or whatever. And this idea that that can be sold.
And I think in Debi Thomas's competitive years was still being sold as like, yeah, isn't that- we still do this, we obviously still do this. But the thing of, isn't it great you can work so much harder and do so much more? And that it was such a thing that Debi Thomas was like, she is a national champion and a Stanford student, and she's going to be a doctor. And just that the way her personality was packaged for the public was that she was just like achieving so much all the time. Every second of her day she was getting something done. And it's just like, what if you didn't have to do that? What if the question was not, how hard do you have to work to get seen the same way as the baseline of a white man or a white skater or whatever.
Leslie: Yes. And what if they then didn't guess like you into believing that it was noble that you had to work that hard? No, we love you because you had to work so hard. No, this is our love and appreciation because you're plucky and strong and persevering. But I'm also sweating and I'm tired and my back is breaking.
Sarah: Yeah. Also, I wanted to look at some videos and just talk about Debi skating. So I don't know if this makes the most sense to start with this, but I would love to watch her Olympic short program and then the score's coming in.
Leslie: Let's do it. Hold on. And this can be very emotional for me. I haven't watched this in a while. I've watched it since then.
Sarah: Yeah. Okay. 3, 2, 1, go.
*recording*
“Remember, she's a risk taker and she has the potential to seize.”
Sarah: Full disclosure, I am crying.
Leslie: So triumphant. Look at.
*recording*
“Very strong, very hard driving.”
Leslie: Just look how energized she is and look at how happy, little poofy hair. And she knew she nailed it.
*recording*
“She liked it. Now, if you've never watched the short program before, you understand the tension on it”.
“Oh, look at the height on that. Look at the height on that. And the difficulty of that was much greater than the two-jump combination that Katarina Witt did. Good height on that. Second.”
“Here they come, oh, and technical merit. Yeah. 5.7 from Great Britain. Another from Canada, 5.8 from Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Japan, East Germany, 5.9 from the US and Switzerland. That'll be very close, I think. See what the marks in presentation are. Ah, but these marks are not, these marks are considerably lower. Wow. Considerably lower. 5.6 to 5.8. But Debi has taken the lead. She's still in the lead. Let's go down to you, Peggy”.
Peggy: “Debi, it's been this short program in the past that it's given both you and Katarina trouble tonight. You're an even match. What can we look forward to in the long program on Saturday?”
Debi: “I think it's going to be a real battle. I hope we both skate well. I think my program…”
Peggy: “How do you feel about the marks?”
Debi: “Well, you know, I skate a good program and of course I hope to have higher but…”
Sarah: She’s got two 5.7s, the rest are 5.8 and 5.9 for technical score. And you can hear the crowd reacting to her artistic scores.
Leslie: Once again, they will get you on the artistic.
Sarah: Let's talk about the artistic score. Because we talked about leaving room.
Leslie: Yes. And I believe that they looked at Debi’s jumpsuit and that it did not artistically speak to them. The music did not speak to them. The modernness of it did not speak to them. And so they penalized her for it because the artistic score is where the favorites will gain points.
Sarah: Because you can wiggle around a little bit. And weirdly, the compulsory figures being so important, one thing you can say about them is that they made the whole thing more objective. Because you either traced this figure eight the number of times you needed to with the position you needed, or you didn't. And that's so much less arguable than how much do you deduct based on your taste? And then I guess the artistic score, and we have a version of this in the scoring system we have now. If part of it comes down to personal taste, then how can it also not come down to personal racism?
Leslie: I would love to find an African American female skater who has an afro. I would love it. Or locks or something. I also want women who want to be ballerinas to be able to do that. I want them to go and be judged on their technicals the same way anyone else would.
Sarah: Okay. I want to run my personal Debi theory by you, because who knows why things happen the way they do. I sure don't. But here's what I wonder. We have the Olympics. She skates in the short program. She does this amazing routine in the unitard to the song by Dead or Alive. And she still is first after the short program, partly because she also did so well in figures before that.
But you see her demeanor change as the scores come in and the crowd boos the scores because they're so clearly not in keeping with the performance they just saw and the crowd doesn't boo scores that much in skating, for the record. They could do it more, if I'm being honest. And I feel like you can see all the air go out of her and she has to talk to Peggy Fleming.
Leslie: Who literally shows up like a freaking cipher.
Sarah: She just pops up outta nowhere. I don't know, like a clown and an urban legend. But you can see her just I don't know. I imagine that one of the things she could be feeling is oh, right, it doesn't matter. I can skate like truly the best I possibly could. I can show up and do everything I came here to do and just put it all out there and I'll still get a 5.7. And then what's the point?
Leslie: Yeah. The realization that, okay, I'm screwed. And you also watch her trying to be upbeat because she knows this should be a triumphant moment and she's trying not to let it get to her. And she goes, well they said, I knew this. I’m ahead. I had to get one or two so in her head. She's still gaming for the next round, but she's still positive. There's still not a reason to believe that she's going to completely blow it. Although I would imagine, I would love to talk to her if I ever got to talk to her and say, if you want to talk about this, when you fell, did you know that you had been graded down enough in the short program that there was no way that you could get back up?
Sarah: Yeah. What would you ask her?
Leslie: I would ask her if this space and time between now and then has given her any perspective. I'm going to ask her what she might have done differently. If I got to know her really well, I would ask her what she might have done had she had her bipolar diagnosis earlier and had been treated. I want to ask her, does she feel any connection between herself and the younger people, particularly those of color who are coming up and now that she said she didn’t want to be the first Black anything just went to skate, does she still believe that now that we are in a place where we discuss race differently and we can discuss race differently?
People are still mad about it, but we can do it. And because there's a precedent for these conversations, I would ask her, has she reconsidered these things? If she were coming up now, how would she approach it differently? Does she regret it? You are a part of this history. And it's important to us that you be here to talk about this because we consider you a pioneer. We consider you an important figure in the sport. We consider you one of us.
Sarah: Yeah. And something that this made me think of is that it's like this very classic thing, whereas a skater, when you're coming up, you will often cite when you realize that skating was for you. And I feel like for most of the stories that I've heard, it's watching somebody else compete in the Olympics. You're like a little girl watching Kristi Yamaguchi or you're a little girl watching Tara Lipinski or you're, now a little girl watching, well you can't because it's on Peacock. But hopefully you can see Star Andrews or Amber Glenn.
But what about all the little girls, all the little kids who watched Debi Thomas skate and said, I want to skate like Debi Thomas and then the sport wasn't interested in having them. It didn't want Black skaters and I imagine that there was also a really pervasive sense of we tried. One Black skater had her shot and now it's over, basically.
Leslie: It's beautiful to know that just by being out there with brown skin or in a woman's body or with natural hair or with big hips or whatever it was, that somebody said, you can do that so I can do that. And I think that the Debi Thomas’ of the world, whether or not they asked for it or are in the position to inspire people. And we just need more of them. Not because of quotas, but because we're missing people. We're leaving talent on the table if we don't open up these spaces.
Sarah: What I kind of wonder about now is that it feels like the technical bar is so high to be competitive internationally that it seems like countries like Russia are doing so well, a) because of all the judging scandals that they seem to be implicated in. But b) because they do have infrastructure for training skaters, some might say too rigorously and from too young an age and with too much pressure.
And I almost feel like, I don't know, skating, it is impossible, it seems pretty impossible. It is at least very hard to have a balanced life or a happy life while skating competitively and I don't know. But that skating is such a special thing and it's so fun to watch and to experience that- I realize this is a ridiculous thing to be like, this is what we should prioritize as society! In a time when skating rinks are not good for the environment and there's a lot of other stuff to do, but more skating for the people! I still care about it.
Leslie: Me too. I still care about it and I care about access. One of the conversations that you and I had before we did this when we were talking about what we were going to talk about was the prohibitive nature of these sports on purpose. And so it just becomes a sense of how badly do you want to do this? How badly do the people, the athletes, and their families want to be involved and how badly does the sport actually want to integrate in every way possible, including economically.
Sarah: The more we talk about it, the more it feels obvious that any institution dedicated to maintaining what it recognizes as the broader culture's definition of the paragon of white femininity, that's a very dangerous goal. That shouldn't be anyone's goal.
Leslie: No.
Sarah: Yeah. Because what? Because what is that? That's a goal whose only motive could be white supremacy.
Leslie: Yeah. Let's think of the way that white supremacy is spoken of in terms that they want you not to know what they're saying. About tradition and it's about heritage, and all these words that can be icky if you say them with certain intent.
Sarah: Yeah. Heritage. You're right. That's such a big one.
Leslie: And so I guess where we are, is that we have to keep encouraging and hoping there is space for people in these spaces to continue to do themselves and be themselves. And it's easy, like I said, when you have a rebel like a Tonya Harding class-wise or background-wise, or racially like Debi Thomas. It's easier to say, oh, let's find some other reasons that we can explain our low scores for them. But if you have more diversity in every way, racially, financially, identity wise, whatever, if you can find ways to be more diverse, it's going to be harder to just pick from the thing and say that's the one different person so we can play in their faces, and I truly believe that we can get there.
Sarah: Yeah, and the sport needs all the help it can get, clearly. Try and watch figure skating sometime, I dare you. You can't watch it anymore. The sport is dying.
Leslie: It was everywhere. NBC, CBS, ABCs, any of them, you turn on the tv, there was some sort of skating.
Sarah: It's a sport that asks us to trust ultimately human subjective judging a lot and I think it just like it has a greater responsibility than it's fulfilling.
Leslie: There should be more Debi Thomas's now. And it's a failure of the sport that there are not. It is a failure of the sport that when I look at that moment and say, not just racially, but from every opportunity, who are we missing? Who are we not looking for? What are we doing? I seriously doubt you'd have to go outside the sport to find and recruit talented Black, Latina, Asian, non-binary, lesbian skaters. Don't believe you'd have to look that far, but you do have to look.
Sarah: And the trans skaters. Where are the trans skaters?
Leslie: Oh, but see, but where would they put them though? That's the other thing. Putting people together against each other just because they share sensibly, a gender is so backwards.
Sarah: But we have to talk about who's aging appropriately. The answer is no one.
*recording*
“American Debi Thomas, getting set to skate here in Tokyo. Before the competition we asked her how she got started.”
Debi: My mom took me to see ice shows, and I thought, wow, that's neat. You can go without, without having to walk. And it took me a while before I really got into competitive skating.
“Debi Thomas began skating competitively at the age of nine. Eight years later she's not only the second best skater in the US, but the first Black American woman to skate at the worlds”.
Debi: It's a rare thing to be at this level and there aren't many Black skaters. And the probability of having a Black skater at this level is slim. And so I just happened to be the first one. So its, I guess it's an honor.
Sarah: And that's our episode. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you're passionate now, or even more passionate than you were before. Thank you for joining the Debi Hive. Thank you so much to our incredible guest, Leslie Gray Streeter, my favorite person to talk passionately about eighties figure skating with. Thank you to Miranda Zickler and Carolyn Kendrick for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, as always for producing and sitting right next to me on my hotel bed and telling me what to say.
If you want to learn more about figure skating and specifically what me, Carolyn, and Jamie Loftus think about it, I have incredible news for you. We did a bonus episode on it a couple months ago. You can find it on Patreon or Apple Plus subscriptions. We went to U.S. nationals together and watched the juniors compete and had the time of our lives and are here to tell you about it. So if that's interesting to you, we've got you covered. Thanks for joining us. If you will come to one of our shows or have come to one of our shows, thank you so much for being there and if you can't make it, don't worry. We'll come back. We'll see you in two weeks.