Homespun Talent On Ice U.S. Skater Has Made Right Moves, Including Staying At Home To Train

In the basement of his father’s gym, Michael Weiss attempts the quad.

Not the one with four jumps, the unique quadruple lutz Weiss hopes will carry him to a medal in Nagano. The one with four weights, sitting on each side of the barbell.

“I can bench press more than 300 pounds,” Weiss said after gritting his teeth through a series of shoulder lifts, “which is pretty good for someone who weighs 155 pounds.”

A weightlifting figure skater? Even in the age of cross-training gone mad, it’s a rare combination.

But Weiss has carved his own path to the Winter Olympics. In an era when young skaters are shopped around the country in search of the best coaches, he never left his hometown to train. And, even though he’ll be competing against the greatest jumpers in the world next month, he’s the only one who will try the quad lutz, bypassing the slightly easier quad toe-loop.

“I wanted to do something that would differentiate me,” said Weiss, who nearly became the first person ever to land the jump cleanly - barely two-footing the landing - when he finished second at this month’s U.S. championships in Philadelphia. “There were four of five guys attempting quad toes, and nobody has ever tried a quad lutz.”

That’s where the weightlifting helps. The 21-year-old skater has been a regular at the gym since his early teens. It became easier after his father, who competed in the Tokyo Summer Olympics as a gymnast in 1964, bought two local Gold’s Gym franchises a couple of years ago.

“The way I look at it, in all the other professional sports, basketball, football, they are utilizing cross-training and lifting weights, because they know being a better overall athlete will make you better in a specific sport,” Weiss said. “I think figure skating is just starting to pick up on it a little more.”

Weiss lifts for about an hour every day, maintaining the upper-body strength that helps him muster the centrifugal force needed to spin himself around four times in the air. Yet he also has to keep in mind that figure skaters are supposed to be graceful and stylish, not stiff and muscular.

“It’s a balance,” Weiss said. “You want a strong body, but not so strong that you don’t have the ability to have grace and style and presentation. I do a lot of stretching.

“I think we’re maxing out in terms of what the physical body can do,” Weiss said. “I don’t know that there will ever be five rotations.”

Weiss’ successful quads are cheered faithfully by the fans - lately it’s been as many as 150 - who gather every Friday night to watch him practice at the Fairfax Ice Arena. He started skating here at age 8 and, once he got good, resisted the temptation to leave home for a skating mecca such as Detroit or Lake Arrowhead, Calif.

“It teaches kids a good lesson,” Weiss said. “You don’t need the multimillion-dollar facility, the multimillion-dollar coaches. You need somebody who’s technically a good coach - I have that in Audrey Weisiger - and you need determination and hard work. Those are the things that get you on an Olympic team, not the fancy outfits.”

Weiss’ No. 1 cheerleader at the Friday skate is always his father, Greg, whose face brims with pride when he speaks about his son. He has lovingly nourished his son with ideals that he admits may sound corny in the 1990s, but he’s not ashamed of them.

“I’ve heard (other parents) say, ‘You’re dead meat when we get home,”’ the elder Weiss said. “It’s a little kid that screwed up a program. She needs your help then more than any other time, for goodness sakes.”

That’s one of the reasons why the father said he would never coach the son.

“I think he needed a father more than he needed a coach,” Greg Weiss said. “I want my son to turn around and say, ‘Boy that was a great childhood, dad. That was a great 15 years. Let’s do it again.’ … You don’t beat it out of them, you love it out of them.”

For years, the elder Weiss had kept in the bottom of a drawer two souvenirs from the Tokyo Games: an Olympic flag and his U.S. team sweatsuit.

Michael had never seen them. Then, in Philadelphia, as he was taking his bows at the end of his long program that earned him the spot on the Olympic team, he looked into the crowd and spotted his parents.

“I saw them waving the flag,” he said. “And I knew exactly what it was. It said Tokyo and it had the Olympic rings on it. That was a special moment for me.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: FOUR-SIGHT Michael Weiss lands the quad lutz cleanly only about 10 percent of the time in practice. He’s counting on the adrenaline of the competition to help him nail the jump in Nagano and raise the bar for the entire sport.