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It took nineteen seconds of inattention to destroy Victor Nikiforov’s chance to make his mark as a senior skater.
Sure, he’d skated just fine a handful of weeks ago at the regional championships in Moscow. And he’d performed admirably at a little competition in Germany in September. But a gold won against a handful of mid-level athletes was hardly meaningful. Focus on your expression, Yakov had told him. Leave the quads for the Grand Prix series.
That meant the real test of Victor Nikiforov, senior skater, was coming. In a short while, Makkachin’s dog-sitter would arrive. Victor would have twenty-four hours and three separate plane rides to make his way to Skate America somewhere in one of the boring square states in the middle of the United States.
The Grand Prix series was starting. Victor intended to make the Final. He needed to make the Final. He was going to get there by being incredibly responsible—he was fifteen, but he was a senior now—which meant doing all the things that Yakov told him to do before a competition. Up until now, as a junior... Well, he’d sometimes done what Yakov said.
But today, he was stretched out on the couch in his dingy studio apartment with Makkachin sprawled at his feet, responsibly checking the structural stability of every last sequin and crystal on the outfit Madame Petrova had delivered. No unnecessary costume deductions for him, not this competition.
And—he checked the time—as a senior with a handful of new sponsorships fresh of his gold Junior World Championship win, he also had a responsibility to see to his image.
He turned on the television, switching the channel. He’d talked to the reporter yesterday, had made sure they got some perfect footage of his best jumps—particularly the quad toe that Yakov had finally let him introduce in competition now that he was a senior.
“Up next,” the reporter he’d spoken to was saying. “This weekend heralds the start of the Grand Prix series, kicking off with Skate America in Colorado Springs. What can we expect, Ivanov?”
Victor tuned out as they talked about pairs, the single women. He found one gold crystal in his armpit that might have been a little loose, and carefully glued it down.
Then he folded his costume and set it in the waiting roller bag, before taking out his skates. He started with the left boot, examining it for nicks and scratches that would need polishing away, then lightly tested his edges against the back of his thumbnail, generating little white shavings up and down the blade as testament to its continued sharpness.
Finally, the reporting turned to talk of single men. “The question on everyone’s mind,” said Ivanov, “is going to be Victor Nikiforov. He’s the junior world champion, but will he be able to transition to seniors?”
Victor smiled into his boot. “That won’t be a question for long,”
He set the finished boot into the rollerbag, then checked to make sure he had extra laces. Usually, he had a spare pair that had been broken in properly. New laces needed to be coaxed into stretching properly. They needed to be strong around the ankle to provide support, while flexing enough to allow the ankle bend necessary for deep edges and powerful strokes.
Unfortunately, Victor had ruined his spare laces two weeks ago. In an ideal world, he would have broken in a new pair, but doing so would have interrupted his training at this crucial moment...
Well. The laces on his boots would do just fine. He’d scarcely used them, aside from the break-in period over the summer. And he still had two pairs of extras... It would be fine.
He double-checked that those pairs of extras were zipped into their little pocket, and then picked up his right boot. There was a little scarcely visible scuff on the toe that needed to be polished out.
“What should our viewers be watching for Victor to accomplish at Skate America?” Ivanov asked.
“Victor’s two events are, of course, this and the Cup of Russia,” the first reporter replied. “And he’ll be up against Baranov at home, which means he’s unlikely to get better than second. If he wants to go to the Grand Prix Final, he needs to come in at least fourth at Skate America—or better yet, third or second.”
“What about first?” Victor’s nose crinkled. “You have a recording of my full run-through, step sequences and everything. You think I can’t get first at Skate America?”
It was almost as if Ivanov had heard Victor speak. “This week, I watched him do a full run-through,” he said. “This will be the first time Victor Nikiforov performs quads in competition. Let’s see how he did in practice.”
Victor leaned forward, setting his boot on the ground.
He’d seen footage of himself before, but this was the most recent video available. His edges looked good—deeper than when he was a junior, his blade biting into the ice. His short program had one quad—the toe-loop—and he watched himself land it with a flourish. Last year at Junior Worlds, it had taken him four crossovers to build up speed for his triple lutz-triple toe combo. This year, he’d gotten it down to three with a transitional Charlotte spiral.
“God.” He leaned forward, smiling.“I look so good.”
It was the last moment of confidence Victor felt—those nineteen seconds in which his gaze was riveted on footage of himself.
Then he looked down.
He had set his boot on the ground without thinking, because why would he not set his boot on the ground?
The answer was all too plain: Makkachin had settled in, nose working deep into the boot.
“Makkachin! No!” He screamed those words.
She jumped, darting away with a guilty expression on her face.
“No, no, no.” He grabbed the boot, running his hands over it. “Bad—” He cut off those words. Bad dog. He’d almost been about to call her a bad dog.
He had gotten Makkachin after he’d won Junior Worlds. Yakov had warned him—“Dogs are a mess, dogs are a lot of work!”—but Victor had promised: Makkachin would never get in the way of his skating. She’d be good for him! She would make him go running as cross-training! She would force him to have a regular schedule instead of staying up to all hours!
Victor had almost called Makkachin a bad dog.
She was seven months old and she tried to be good. But she was a puppy. His trainer had emphasized that constant vigilance was the key. Constant vigilance.
His vigilance hadn’t been constant. Luckily, there was not a single tooth mark on the black leather. He let out a sigh of relief. He’d gotten away with...
With...
That was the moment when Victor saw the damage. Not the boot itself—that was fine—but the lace. It had been chewed apart in four—no, five separate spots. Sliced and sliced and sliced again. There was no saving it.
“Oh my God.” He stared at his skate. “It’s the right boot. Why the right boot? Why, Makkachin?”
She didn’t answer, but she knew something was wrong. She crouched down, giving him a sad, defeated look.
Your dog doesn’t speak Russian, he remembered the trainer admonishing him. She won’t understand what you’re saying if you yell at her. If you don’t want her to chew things, you need to keep them out of reach. Yell at yourself, not your dog.
He scrunched his eyes shut. “Oh.”
He’d set his boot down right next to her. How could he blame her? It was so clearly his fault.
His right boot. His landing boot. And he didn’t have a broken-in lace to swap it for.
Victor reached out for his dog. “Hey, Makka.” He pulled her close, petting her with shaking hands. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m sorry I yelled at you. It’s my fault for putting the boot next to you. It’s my fault.”
He thought of the long plane ride ahead. Of the schedule that had him landing three hours before the first practice, of the scant time in the hotel when he’d be fighting jet lag and the after-effects of a lengthy plane ride.
He absolutely, one hundred percent could not tell Yakov what had happened. He had promised Yakov that Makkachin wouldn’t interfere with his skating.
“I’ll fix it,” he told Makkachin. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry.”
#
Victor did not fix it.
He moved his good lace from his left to his right boot, but even that felt wrong and out of place, his feet were now asymmetric, one bending too much, the other too little. He tried wearing the boots and doing squats in his hotel room out of Yakov’s sight.
But there was no substitute for on-ice training, and he just hadn’t had the time to break in a new lace. His practices suffered. He didn’t land his quad toe loop once in that first forty-five minutes on the ice.
Halfway through, Yakov had shaken his head in disgust. “You’re better than this. You’re too tentative, not getting enough momentum into your jumps. Where is the constant speed in your step sequences? I want you to do a second run through. No jumps. Concentrate on your footwork. Make sure you get that speed.”
Victor hadn’t been able to accomplish even that. He’d must have looked absolutely miserable at the end of the practice, because even Yakov hadn’t had the heart to yell at him. “So much flying... sometimes it messes with your inner ear, which can impact your balance. And we are at altitude here.” This was Yakov’s version of reassurance. “Maybe we need to tone your program down if you haven’t recovered. A triple flip, instead of the quad toe—”
“Yakov,” Victor said urgently. “I need that quad toe.”
“You need to skate cleanly.”
“I need that quad toe. Nobody will take me seriously as a senior skater if I can’t land a quad.”
Yakov sighed and let it go.
#
But the next day, nothing felt better. His feet ached in his boots, and everything felt subtly off, as if his center of gravity had been shredded along with his laces. As if he’d somehow forgotten basic skating skills. The final practice before the short program came and went. The confidence he’d had in those moments before he’d lost his lace? It had vanished. All the parts of him as a skater—his training, his conditioning, his choreography—these felt like shreds that had been split into pieces.
He fell on his under-rotated quad toe, but still managed to hold on to a respectable third place—close enough, as long as he held onto his jumps in the free.
When the free came around, nothing seemed to work. He felt out of sync with his music. He fell on one jump, tripled his quad toe loop, put a hand down on the first jump of what should have been a combo. When he tried to rearrange his choreography to eke out that combination in the back half of the program, he added a triple toe loop and realized a half-second too late that under the new rules, that was his third triple toe.
Panic led him to stumble through his final step sequence.
Victor was too much of a performer to do more than smile and wave and bow four times at the end of his free. He was too much of a performer to let his smile slip in the kiss and cry, or even in the mixed zone afterward, where a few lackluster interview questions demonstrated that everyone had already written him off as a threat.
He ended in fifth place. Not in fourth, where he might have had a chance of sneaking his way into the Final with a strong second place showing in Russia. In fifth, where nothing would save him.
Yakov didn’t accost him until they were on the bus on the way back to the hotel.
“What was that?” he demanded. “Do we need to practice falling more? I think we need to practice falling more.”
Victor stared out the window. This part of the United States was hot—didn’t American’s believe in autumn?—and dry. The middle of a desert, and it was still overdeveloped with wide asphalt streets and big parking lots and cars, cars, cars everywhere. His lungs felt like twin paper bags, desiccated crackling things, in his chest.
“I just...” He shook his head. “I lost my confidence.” He couldn’t say that Makkachin had eaten his shoelaces. He couldn’t. Yakov would...
He would be mad. He’d say that Makkachin needed to go.
“Confidence,” Yakov scoffed. “Just because you’re at Skate America doesn’t mean you’re allowed to sound like an American. You don’t need confidence to skate. Just skate. Either you can skate or you can’t.”
He did not say—but Victor knew—what the truth was. In that either/or statement, there was one obvious answer. Victor couldn’t. He couldn’t skate.
#
Thousands of miles and several days later, his dog sitter returned Makkachin to a dark apartment. Victor hadn’t unpacked his things. He hadn’t turned the lights on.
He just paid her and took his dog and sat on the floor of his dingy one-room apartment, surrounded by his junior golds and dreams of his senior success.
He put his arms around his dog and cried.
Oh, he wished he could blame her. But the truth? He had only himself to blame. He shouldn’t have put his skates next to her. He should have watched them.
More than that; he knew it wasn’t even the laces. He’d changed laces before with less of a meltdown. The laces were an excuse, and apparently an excuse was all he had needed to flail out, to lose the mental composure that had seemed second nature to him.
He’d kept himself from falling apart up until this point, but in the dark with nobody but his dog as witness, with the wet snuffle of Makkachin’s nose against his cheek and his hands burrowed in her soft fur, he sobbed.
No Grand Prix Final. No brilliant senior debut where he blew the judges away and they could speak of nothing else. Nothing but whispered pity for a has-been who couldn’t hack it in the big leagues. His life stretched in front of him—a few ignominious years, the inevitable departure of his sponsors, and finally, inexorably, a retirement in which nobody remembered him except to say, “wasn’t there a junior once? I thought he’d make something of himself.”
“I’m nothing,” he told Makkachin. “Nobody. I don’t have confidence. I don’t have my skating...”
She snuffled against his ear, as if in answer.
“Of course, Makkachin,” he told her. “If I had brought you with me to the rink, I wouldn’t have needed confidence.”
She licked his chin.
It took Victor nineteen seconds to imagine how that would play out. He thought of Makkachin sitting on a tall stool ringside, her fuzzy head poking over the boards.
She would bark a lot less than Yakov, that was for sure. Through his tears, a smile cracked.
He could see himself skating out to center ice. He pictured himself skating the way he had in the broadcasted run-through—knees bent deep, blades biting in to the ice, every stroke gathering power, every step foot-perfect in time with the music.
He could see the short program he could have skated: the perfect quad toe loop. The triple axel to start off the back half of his program. The triple lutz—no, he thought wildly to himself, triple lutz? Why a triple lutz combo?
The answer was obvious. The lutz was the highest-value triple jump allowed in a combination in a short program. The only other alternative would be a quad in combination, and nobody had ever landed two quads in a short program. That would be...ridiculous.
Surprising.
If he could land two quads in a short...
Victor’s breath caught.
If he could land two quads in a short, he could beat Baranov. He could take first at the Cup of Russia. His tepid fifth place finish at Skate America coupled with a second place would never make the Grand Prix final. But a fifth place with a first?
Victor pulled back to look into Makkachin’s eyes. He could barely see them in the dark.
“I don’t need confidence,” he told her. “I need you.”
He stood and flipped on the light in the kitchen. He flipped open his plastic cell phone, searched through his pixelated contacts... There. He had gone through the trouble of tapping in the number in his phone, annoying as it was to do such things through a phone’s keypad. He placed the calls as he paced, waiting—god, it was eight at night, maybe—
But Madame Petrova answered.
“Hello,” he said brightly. “It’s Victor Nikiforov.”
“Victor.” She sounded sad. “I saw what happened. Don’t you worry. You’ll bounce back.” She didn’t sound as if she meant it.
He thought of Makkachin’s breath, Makkachin’s support. Makkachin meant it, even if nobody else did.
“Oh,” he said, a little more airily then he felt. “I’m over that. I have a bit of an unusual request, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to have it finished in a few weeks for Rostelecom.”
“A costume?” She tsked. “I don’t think—”
“It’s not a costume. It’s something different.”
“Hmm. Very well, Victor. Tell me what your something different is, and we’ll see if we can make it happen.”
“Great!” He smiled. “So let me tell you my specifications...”
#
“The good news,” Yakov said many weeks later as they stood at the boards at the Cup of Russia, just before his name was announced for the short program, “is that nothing you do will really matter here.”
Victor smiled. This was what counted as a pep talk from Yakov.
“Just skate better than everyone else,” Yakov said. “Don’t make a single mistake and your sponsors won’t desert you.”
Victor reached out and touched the tissue box that Madame Petrova had made for him. It was a tiny replica of Makkachin complete with a little pink felt tongue. He thought of the way his dog pushed against him. The way she understood when he was upset. The way she didn’t care, not one bit, whether he landed his jumps.
“My best sponsor will never desert me.” He grinned at Yakov.
Yakov rolled his eyes. “Don’t believe that. They all would.”
Victor didn’t respond. If Makkachin was here, he didn’t need confidence. And here she was.
He rubbed her fabric ears and let the sense of being with Makkachin infuse him.
Victor pushed off from the boards as they announced his name.
It took him nineteen seconds to make his way to center ice. He did a little waltz jump, a three-turn, a tight circle around his final position, before coming to a halt with a T-stop.
His mind was clear as the music started. There was nothing but his blades and the curves they left on the ice. The turns. The brackets... the clean feel of his toe pick, striking strong and launching him into the air, legs wrapping in perfect form, hands pressed together, then the bend of his knee as his outside edge found the landing circle, ankle knee hip in perfect alignment.
His hands reached up to the rink lights on his camel up, fingers in ballet position, torso rotating up and up. Every stroke, every step. Five crossovers—no Charlotte spiral; there would be time enough for that later—and a Mohawk into a quad salchow. He raised his hands above his head for the final triple toe loop.
The shocked applause from the audience set the beat for his final change foot spin.
The music stopped. The flowers rained down. And Victor bowed to the judges. He bowed to the stands, then the short side. Finally, he turned to the boards where Yakov waited, and he bowed to Makkachin.