Skater "Brian Boitano" performs on the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza. -- Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC
Brian Boitano has won more pro figure skating titles than any other skater in the history of athletics. He’s also been laboring at it for 22 years without any noticeable wear.
So how does he maintain the level of command and grace with one of the most demanding sports ? “It’s hard,” Boitano tells Entertainment Heartbeat, weighing the love of his work with the effort that its become. “This is the best my body has been; It’s funny because I did The Today Show this morning and I was warming up really early in the morning and I’m like, you know what, I’ve really got to appreciate this moment because…this is the best my body’s felt in three years. Three years ago I was really struggling and I had some injuries I was dealing with. So it’s cyclical and it depends on the year and depends on how you take care of your body. And my whole thing is really just taking care of my body and staying in shape all year around.”
Facing an age that often ushers the best athletes to the easy chair, Boitano has no signs of time on his face or the bounce in his famous legs. But he does say that some events have taken their strain. “I had a knee injury and I’ve had back stuff. Yeah, the knee injury sidelined me for quite a while…It was interesting because I was trying a new trick, something that I wanted to accomplish but I’d never done before, it was sort of very simple but it taught me that I’m going to stick with what I do, I’m not going to try anything new, but maintaining what I have.”
Boitano will be hosting and performing a skating extravaganza this Sunday at Notre Dame University that includes brass-rock legend Chicago and the 500-piece Norte Dame Marching Band accompanying as he and his guests skate.
Loyal fans come to expect the kind of high bar that Boitano set for the entire sport during his competition days, but he also must create new features that keep his shows new. We asked the greatest skater of his generation how he rides the tightrope between the surpassing technique and his revised showmanship “The one thing that you don’t want to do is alienate your core audience, and a lot of times people try to stretch and get other audiences involved that will completely eliminate whatever was attractive in a certain situation to that core audience,” he says. “So you just have to juggle things, you have to do something for your core audience and then you do something to bridge out, like in this show since we filmed at Notre Dame, we did this whole football number, and Notre Dame actually gave us the uniforms of the Fighting Irish…and the bands played a collage of the fight songs of Notre Dame. So, we’re trying to think outside of the box and appeal to a different audience and it was really a blast doing it.”
In 1995, Boitano heard about a gone-viral five minute video from friends at the studio, but he didn’t watch it, than four years later there was the South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut movie with a song about him titled What Would Brian Boitano Do? “I was scared to death…and I’m like, Oh my god, what did they do? And I listened to the CD and I thought that’s pretty nice, I like that, that’s OK. So, If they’d been mean I wouldn’t have embraced it so much but also people probably wouldn’t have talked about it as much either.”
And today a superhero spoof of Boitano appears as a now and then character on South Park.
Boitano is also host of his own Food Network show, What Would Brian Boitano Make? (which also borrows that South Park movie song as its opening theme) where he prepares his own low calorie gourmet preparations. “After I finished my Olympic training and I was such a restricted diet I decided I wanted to eat like a normal human being, and I wanted to discover ways to prepare food like it was great restaurant food but without all the extra added calories, so I started testing recipes and keeping a notebook of recipes and it’s just been growing from there so about 25 years I’ve been doing this almost.”
“That show is so much fun, it takes five days to do one episode but it’s really fun and I just have a blast doing it, and I’m actually coming out with a cookbook this year called (as with his cooking show) What Would Brian Boitano Make?
Musselman’s Apple Sauce Presents Brian Boitano Skating Spectacular airs this Sunday, December 18, at 4 p.m. ET on NBC.
Guest stars include MICHAEL WEISS, RYAN BRADLEY, STEVEN COUSINS, CARYN KADAVY, ELENA LEONOVA & ANDREI KHVALKO, KIM NAVARRO & BRENT BOMMENTRE, and GEV MANOUKIAN.