Cat's Lair

After the Salt Lake City Olympics I thought I had heard all I wanted to hear about the Pairs Competition. When I heard a new book about the SLC scandal was coming out I thought "who cares" what more can be said about that. But to my surprise The Second Mark turned out to be engrossing, a true couldn't put it down book.

The book is fascinating, not for re-hashing the much hashed story about the Franco/Russo conspiracy that fixed the 2002 Olympic Pairs competition, but for the mesmerizing story of how the teams made it to the Olympics in the first place. The book focuses on all three teams that won medals in Salt Lake City; Russians Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier and Chinese Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo. The book tells the story of how each team first entered skating, became pairs skaters and made their way up the torturous ladder to the Olympic games.

By far the most compelling, and inspiring story, is the story of the Chinese team Xue Shen and Honbo Zhao. The stories of the other two teams were very well publicized long before Salt Lake City. Yelena Berezhnaya's harrowing head injury at the hands of a former partner is very well known. But Shen and Zhao's story has not been told before and is the most fascinating of the three teams. I was a fan of Shen and Zhao's skating before I read this book, reading it made me admire them off the ice as well.

With Shen and Zhao now on the brink of leaving competitive skating for a while, perhaps forever, it is moving to look back at how it all began for them. I highly recommend this book.