Independent Ukraine’s first Olympic champion, famous figure skater Oksana Bayul, visited her home city Dnipropetrovsk for the first time since she settled in the United States eight years ago. Addressing a press conference at the Pivdenmash Factory’s Meteor Palace of Sports where she began her sporting career, the now grownup and experienced young Ukrainian lady said with a trace of an American accent that she had “felt her roots” now and found her father whom she had not seen since early childhood.
As Ms. Bayul recalls, her parents divorced when she was but a little girl. Then she was brought up by her grandmother and mother who dreamed of seeing her a figure skater. The girl began training at the Meteor Palace children’s sports school at the age of four, and won the first competition only three years later. Oksana was 13 when her mother died, and her coaches in fact replaced her parents. One of them, Halyna Zmiyevska, took Oksana to Odesa. In the early 1990s, the talented figure skater won a long series of sporting titles. After becoming champion of Ukraine, she won major victories at the European and world championships. In 1994 the 16-year-old Oksana Bayul became the first Ukrainian athlete to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics held in Lillehammer, Norway. Her brief appearance under the music of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake won the hearts of foreign and Ukrainian sports fans. As Bayul made her triumphal comeback to Ukraine, she was elected honorary citizen of Dnipropetrovsk, presented a mink coat, keys to an Opel, and a new apartment. Yet, Oksana soon moved to the United States to make a professional sports career. A few years later she was in the center of sensational liquor-abuse-related scandals. Ms. Bayul explained to journalists that this was caused by her sudden wealth, glory, and complete loneliness. She is sorry about the mistakes of her youth and has been drinking “nothing but water” since 1998. Now she says everything is different. Oksana married Yevhen, a young Kharkiv-born Ukrainian emigrant entrepreneur, dreams of having children, and decided for this reason to trace their future grandfather and her father.
The famous figure skater had searched for him for almost two years via the Red Cross, the Ukrainian Embassy to the US, and even the Inter TV channel. Finally, it is the “native” Meteor Sports Palace administration that helped find Serhiy Bayul. The Olympic champion’s father refused - for lack of words or for some other reason - to speak at the press conference, but he later told the most persistent journalists in the corridor that he used to be a mechanical engineer and now he is simply unemployed.
Oksana herself said she was happy to reunite with her father whom she hated to see before, while he, “a self-respecting person,” was also reluctant to meet his world-acclaimed daughter. Now everything came to a happy, truly Hollywood-style, ending.
Then Oksana Bayul confidentially told the press that she was going to renew her performances in the United States as early as October this year. “I am working on a jubilee program dedicated to the tenth anniversary of my Lillehammer Olympic victory,” she said. She also plans to take part in the All Stars tour of sixty US cities in January 2004. Moreover, after marrying the businessman, she has been modeling women’s and sports wear and even established her own Oksana Bayul Collection. She also wrote the books Oksana, My Story and The Secrets of Skating.
As the Olympic champion confessed, she is not at this time going to leave America and return to her homeland, although she is very much distressed over the state of Ukrainian sports, especially figure skating. “There are some strong ice dancing pairs in Ukraine,” she said, “although many skaters and their coaches have moved to America.” Ms. Bayul is going to set up a “little show” of her own in Ukraine, involving graduates from the Dnipropetrovsk figure skating school. “It’s a shame,” she noted, “that schools and skating rinks should be closing in Odesa, Donetsk, and even, as far as I know, in Kyiv. With this in view, I would not like to see the school I went to in Dnipropetrovsk face the same fate.” Oksana’s compatriots immediately took her at her word: Meteor’s figure skating school manager Dmytro Kachurovsky produced Bayul’s employment record book and a ten-year-old contract whereby she is still considered a full-time sports instructor. The Olympic champion chose not to rush with a decision but firmly promised to occasionally visit Dnipropetrovsk and help young figure skaters and the school as much as she can.
