Baiul Was On The Road To Trouble Even Before Wrecking Mercedes Figure Skating Star Travels In Fast Company, Hitting Hartford’s Favorite Watering Holes

Oksana Baiul’s soap-operatic orbit was speeding toward doom long before a random Connecticut night.

As her world turned from Ukraine orphan to Olympic darling to teenage drunken driver, she played out her lost childhood in life’s fast lane.

Three nights before she wrecked her green Mercedes, the 19-year-old Olympic gold medalist dropped by ZuZu’s, a coffee-cocktail haunt aglow on the downtown Hartford scene.

She sipped her favorite, a “Doppio,” a double espresso.

“She was definitely out a lot, frequenting the downtown Hartford watering holes,” said Rammy Harwood, 25, ZuZu’s general manager, who met the giggling teen when she first dropped by a year ago.

The Hartford havens with sassy tags would become the talk of the town in the aftershock of the 2:25 a.m. EST accident on Jan. 12.

The next day, police arrested the figure skating champion for drunken and reckless driving after finding her injured by her $100,000 car 3 miles from her $450,000 home in the Hartford suburb of Simsbury.

Cops said she was doing close to 100 mph on the 45-mph, winding two-lane road when she collided with a clump of small trees; that she had visited Hartford’s bar scene after attending an ice show, and that her blood-alcohol level was 0.168 percent - well over Connecticut’s 0.10 limit.

“There are culverts and large trees all along the roadway,” said Richard Mulhall, chief of police in neighboring Bloomfield. “If she had hit one of them, she probably would be dead.”

Baiul suffered a concussion and doctors had to put 12 stitches in her head to close a cut.

Tongues wagged about the underage star being sighted in several of downtown Hartford’s nightspots.

A Cool Moose Cafe ad hawked: “Oksana’s Driving School” - “Drive like an Olympic Champion.”

In Harwood’s place, where she could legally enter, “She’d come in two to five times a week, later in the evening,” Harwood says. “Sometimes she’d be here until we closed, 1, 2 a.m.”

She smoked. “That’s the first thing that shocked me,” he says. ‘Come on,’ I’d say, ‘You’re the best athlete on ice.’ She’d laugh and say, ‘You’re right.”’ He said last Nov. 16, her 19th birthday, “She was with maybe 15 people and she told me, ‘Let’s celebrate with some champagne, and I said, ‘No, no, no; let’s celebrate with some Perrier.’ She just giggled.

“She was hanging with a definitely older crowd, 24-to-29-ish,” Harwood said. “Did they like to be with a nice little friend, or Oksana Baiul?”

On March 4, three years ago, in Lillehammer, Norway, the nice little balletic Olympian was a breath of fresh air in the bogs of “Tonya-Nancy.”

Nancy Kerrigan, the U.S.’s virtual shoo-in for figure-skating gold, had months earlier been whacked in the knee in a scheme hatched by archrival Tonya Harding’s ex-boyfriend.

In a rinkside version of a tractor pull, the world awaited the Olympics duel between the street-tough Harding and the beautiful favorite, Kerrigan.

Baiul, the 5-foot-2, 95-pound “Swan Lake” swan, glided by them both.

The 16-year-old had finally beaten life to win the gold.

Her father, Sergei, had deserted the family in Denpropetrovsk, Ukraine. Baiul, age 2, and her mother, Maria, whose favorite music was “Swan Lake,” lived in a three-room flat.

“I saw her skate when she was 5,” said Stanislav Korytek, one of Ukraine’s great coaches, the first to coach the chubby tyke Baiul. “You could see in that kid lots of power, like she didn’t know where to put it. We worked 5, 6 hours every day our whole nine years together.”

In 1991, the worst came. Maria, at 36, had ovarian cancer.

“Each day after practice, we went to the hospital,” said Korytek, 37, who is now living in Canada. “I was shocked when (Maria) … asked me to take care of Oksana. Then the doctor told me privately, ‘We don’t want to tell her kid right now, but she’s going to die like any minute.”’ That August, two days later, Maria died, leaving 13-year-old Baiul orphaned.

“I tried to calm Oksana,” said Korytek. “She couldn’t stop crying.

“When they put (her mom) … in the ground, Oksana got hysterical; I had to carry her. She said, ‘I want to go on the ice.”’ He found her there that night. “Like a hero, she skated. That ice was her home.”

The waif was under Korytek’s care until he suddenly left to coach in Canada. He had no money to take her or his family, he says. Baiul was deserted again.

Korytek had called Galina Zmievskaya of Odessa, famed coach of 1992 Olympic gold medalist Viktor Petrenko. Zmievskaya took Baiul home and on to Lillehammer.

Then, in the wake of her Olympic victory, a famed U.S. Olympic coach from Connecticut had an idea. Bob Young had met Zmievskaya at an Odessa competition in the late 1980s, and had since built a $6 million International Skating Center on a tobacco field in Simsbury. He invited Zmievskaya, and her daughter Nina and Nina’s husband Petrenko. Baiul joined her.

Russian pairs skating champions Ekaterina Gorddeva and husband-partner, Sergei Grinkov, later moved there with their baby.

“Team Simsbury” lived virtually side by side in a condo pod, Riverwalk. Baiul loved Madonna and Hollywood, chocolate and teddy bears.

Barbara LeVine, a Riverwalk neighbor, remembers “the little slip of a thing” who came into her driveway, sobbing when Grinkov died of a heart attack in 1995.

Baiul by then had turned pro - and into an instant millionaire. Her pixie ponytail became stylishly shorter and blonder.

She grew 5 inches taller. She put on weight. “This little girl’s body grew up in the last 18 months,” said LeVine.

But knee and back injuries benched her. Rumors began. “I heard that partying was leading to her poor training,” said Debbie Adams, a Simsbury skating coach.

She wanted a house. She wanted a car. “Galina was as aware of Oksana as any parent could have been,” said Young. “She never said, ‘Hey, she’s not my daughter.’ She’d ask the normal things, ‘Yes, you can afford it but do you need the fanciest car? Do you need a house that expensive?”’

Baiul thought she did. She left Riverwalk and bought a 5,000-square-foot house on an exclusive Simsbury hill.

On Jan. 12, Zmievskaya got a call from the hospital.

“Galina was devastated,” said Young. “Oksana was scared, emotional. ‘I screwed up,’ she said.”

Young fiercely defends his skater: She didn’t go wild. She skated hard: “Everybody wanted a piece of her.”

But he doesn’t excuse her. “She needs to make a decision,” he said. “She’ll either say, ‘I want to keep going the way it was,’ or go to friends who aren’t always her friends. I’m still here for her… . Viktor’s still here for her. Galina’s still here for her more than ever.”

Last Tuesday Baiul pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of traveling unreasonably fast. She paid a $90 fine and was ordered to perform 25 hours of community service. A drunken driving charge will be dropped if she finishes an alcohol education program.

She has said she is sorry. “Where she went drinking is still under investigation,” said Police Chief Mulhall.

The made-in-America star has taken the time-honored American route to image rebooting. She went on Oprah last Friday and admitted having four or five Long Island Iced Teas at an unidentified bar.

“I knew not to go there because I was 19 years old, but I did,” she said.

A better choice would be bookstores, where she could autograph “Oksana, My Own Story,” her newly released life story.

“Years from now, if people still talk about Oksana Baiul, I hope they will remember me as just a normal girl who loved to skate to ‘Swan Lake,”’ she ends her book.