You're Wrong About - Debi Thomas with Leslie Gray Streeter

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

 In 1988, twenty-year-old American figure skater Debi Thomas headed to the Calgary Olympics to face off against East German juggernaut Katarina Witt. In the process, she became the first Black American in history to medal at a Winter Olympics. Then she disappeared from the sport. Where did she go, and who wasn’t there to catch her when she fell? This week, Leslie Gray Streeter tells Sarah about growing up watching Debi skate, where she is now, how her sport and her country failed her, and just how many people are missing from the stories we tell and the dreams we dream. You can find Leslie online here. Debi returns to the iceDebi cover of TIMESupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalYou're Wrong About Spring TourBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://lesliegraystreeter.comhttps://youtu.be/CHUI3QpYnl4https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19880215,00.htmlhttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Oh my God, yeah, I mean, seriously, look at cheerleaders, it's terrifying what they're capable of. Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. Today we are learning about Debbie Thomas, a name you may not know, but will be very happy you know after you hear Leslie Gray's Reader tell you about it. Debbie Thomas is an American figure skater and world champion who competed in the 1980s and specifically, and most famously, in the 1988 Calgary Olympics where she went head to head with East German juggernaut, Katerina Witt, in the legendary Battle of the Carmins.

She was also the only black figure skater competing at that level at that time, and very few people have followed in her footsteps. And today we are going to talk about why that might be. Leslie Gray's Reader is a columnist for the Baltimore Banner. We were talking about topics that she might do on the show and Debbie Thomas came up and it became clear that that was the only thing we could talk about. I have been thinking about Debbie for a while, Leslie has been thinking about Debbie Thomas for her entire life for the most part, she grew up watching her, and the conversation

that we have about her today is a combination of sports history, autobiography, and structural oppression in America. Even if you don't care about sports or even if you don't care about figure skating or have no foreknowledge of the topic, I think this is an episode for you because our sports stories are really, in my opinion, about the people who we want to be, the success stories that we allow ourselves to imagine, and the dreams of transformation that we have. And this is a story about all those things and about the dreams that we allow little girls to dream and the limitations that we place on athletes for reasons that have nothing

to do with their abilities. It's about the world that we lived in in the 80s and hopefully the changes that we are trying to make, although it appears that we are doing it very slowly. Right now, your wrong about is on tour, I am Sarah on the road, and in fact, I am talking to you from the Sheraton Hotel in Canada, site of the National Grammar Rodeo. Specifically, I am in Toronto, we had an amazing show last night, I am on tour, of course, with producer Carolyn Kendrick, who is serenading us all with the most beautiful love songs ever written, and then I come out and tell a terrible story where love doesn't work

out for anyone, it's a really nice balance, and with us is the irreplaceable Jamie Loftus. I hope you can come see us. We are in New York and Philadelphia this week. There are still some tickets for our Philly show, it's on April 30th. If you feel like seeing some music, mystery, and mayhem, come see it with us, we would love to see you, and if you are in New York City and you see a tall girl, it could be me. And we have a few more dates.

The start of May, we are going to Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., Boston, Burlington, Vermont, and finishing up in Montreal. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Here's our episode. ABC Sports and the Olympics, a long-standing partnership. Again, at the Winter Games of Calgary, the Olympic tradition continues. Hello, I'm Jim McKay.

A battle began here today. The participants were not soldiers, but two attractive young women, and this battle began not with a shout, but with a whisper. Now the participants are Debbie Thomas of the United States, former world champion, magazine cover girl, and pre-med student at Stanford University, and Katerina Bid of East Germany, the defending Olympic champion of beauty who hopes for a career as an actress. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast that sometimes is brunch. And with me today is Leslie Streeter to talk about Debbie Thomas and how she was robbed.

I'm not biased. Hello, Leslie. Hello, and yes, Rob, like Rob almost like she was stuck up, like there was someone behind her with like an old-timey mask or something. Terrible. Leslie, Grace Streeter, what else are you up to out there in the world? I am up to everything. I am a columnist for the Baltimore Banner.

You can find me at baltomorbanner.com. I am a podcaster and myself with my sister, our goofy show. It's called Find Beats and Cheeses About Pop Culture You Have No Guilt About Loving. Cheesy Though It May Be. It hits all of your podcasting situations on Tuesdays. I am a writer. I have a book called Black Widow that came out a couple years ago by my widowhood. If you find anything about widows and sad things and laughing through grief and drinking

bourbon, you'll find me. I'm there. And I'm just, you know, out here raising a human child and hoping not to be stuck at soccer practice for five days a week. The dream. I am so excited to talk about this topic because, you know, so we have had in the last few years Ayatanya and like a big increase in Tanya Harding literacy in this country, which I find very exciting.

And yet nobody is talking about Debbie Thomas. We are going to do that today. I think that narrative is so ripe for more of an explanation and an exploration of who she is. And it hasn't happened. So as you said before we did this, if we could be part of the Debbie Thomas Renaissance, I'm all for it. Who is Debbie Thomas?

And what is figure skating? Yes, Debbie Thomas is a former American figure skater. She came in third with bronze medal in the 1998, 1988, rather Calgary Olympics. Her real competition was a woman named Katerina Vitt who was East German. They actually skated to the same music from Jose's Carmen. She was also a former world champion skater. She was a former United States champion. She was the first African-American person to win an Olympic medal.

A winter Olympic medal, right? A winter Olympic medal. Winter Olympic medal. Which is like, I remember reading that in time when I was reading an old issue to read about Debbie Thomas, obviously. And you're like, what? Right? That happened in 1988.

So much of statistics about sports has to do to access. It's why when you watch the Winter Olympics and you watch, hey, it's the Jamaican Bob Flitt team. It's because they don't have snow in Jamaica. So there is not ready access to those things. That's geographical. It's why before the Williams sisters, you did not have a lot in Arthur Ashe, a lot of black people playing tennis.

It's not that they couldn't do it, obviously. It's that there was not physical and financial access in many ways. Figure skating is a Olympic and competitive sport, which involves literally skating figures on the ice. It is different than ice dancing, but it's close. It's a sport where individuals, pairs or groups perform on figure skates on ice. It's in the Olympics, which is once again where many people only pay attention to it. But figure skating basically is a sport that used to be very, like, dance-y, like in your

Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming, very balletic, graceful, then in the 90s and 2000s, it became very athletic with your tying your hardings, you were Dory E. Toes, and people like that who were like hitting all the triple axles and stuff, and your story of Bonnelly's. If none of these names mean anything to you, it's because these are people that have not been written about as well as they should have, and the sport can be very insular. Unless figure skating is judged, just like with some other things, people have decided that it's not really a sport, because people understand sports and you had more points and you had less points, so the person with the more points won, and that they go, well,

if it's something that's subjective, it's not really a sport. Also I believe that people think, thought of it that way, even though there were obviously many male figure skaters, that people thought of it as feminized, so they decided that that was a way to dismiss it from not being a sport, just like cheerleading. Oh my God, yeah, I mean, seriously, look at cheerleaders, it's terrifying what they're capable of. Cheerleaders could rule the world if they ever truly wanted to, which apparently they don't.

Yeah, and I mean, and I find figure skating so compelling as well, because it's like, probably all sports are about gender in their own ways, right? But figure skating is so overtly about gender, and it kind of gets that it's about gender, because it's like, here's the correct way to do a gender, but there's so many other aspects of that that it seems willfully ignorant of even. Yes. I mean, so kind of the two things that it feels like women's figure skating, which I believe had its title changed to women's figure skating from ladies figure skating,

like Jamie Loft has talked about this in our bonus episode about skating that we just put out. It feels like the two things that it's really policing and also judging on whether it admits it or not, and it tends not to our correct performance of gender, and then also specifically within femininity, white femininity, and then any deviation from that the sport has not known what to do with. No, not at all. Well, like for instance, there's a skater that you guys might not be aware of named

Suria Bonnelly, who was a black French skater who was just the most badass of all badasses, who she had been a gymnast. So she did a lot of flips and spins, and I mean, I think you'll agree with me, Sarah, that so much of the resistance at that time to a lot of these athletic moves was a very gendered thing that this is masculine and this is feminine and the jumps and the athleticism and the bodies that are required to do these jumps are masculine and in this way Africanized. And so she got a lot of pushback because not only was she very beautifully dark skinned, but she had a very athletic body.

But there was a moment where she was in a competition where she knows she'd gotten screwed by those scores and she refused to get onto the podium. She was easier to punish her because visibly, invisibly, she was an outsider. She was different. So once again, Tonya Harding had the same thing as it goes to race and class and gender. The Tonya Harding had big thighs. She had big hair. She smoked.

She wore blue eyeshadow. She was from a trailer park. She was not rich. She was surrounded by sketchy shady people and she was not the, quote unquote, ice princess that was expected. So even though she was a white woman, she was treated, I think in many ways, the way that non-white skaters are treated and that she was an other and outsider. Like you said, you're willing to play the game or not.

I think that Debbie Thomas, who had been interviewed in the beginning when people made a big deal out of she's the first black person and she didn't want to be held to that standard. She just wanted to skate, but then she talks later about how she, she did not really want to talk about it until she understood that she was, she became a role model. If you skate on, I'm the first black, I'm the first woman, I'm the first, whatever, then you are marginalizing yourself in a way. But if you don't acknowledge it, then you're not necessarily being realistic or you're maybe not honoring other people who find that thing in you and you obviously can't pin

your own personal worth to what other people see in you, but you don't want to be the only, you don't want it constantly pointed out to you that you're the first, because why would you be the first? It's because the landscape was not welcoming to you. And so you get through, it's not like you got there and now everybody loves you. I was reading today that there were people who did not, and I could see it. You can see it, the subjectivity of the judging that she was not judged highly. Yeah, in the past, in Debbie Thomas' era, and this plays into her story, you would

get an artistic score and a technical score and there would be nine numbers from nine judges and they would be on a scale of six. So it would be like five, seven, five, eight, five, six, five, nine. And you could see what judge was doing, what, and you could kind of get, and it was like overly complicated, but you could like a person understands how much of six a number is roughly, you know? Yes. And now you get these aggregate scores that theoretically have no upward limit because

you can get all these like extra points for various things. And so a skater will leave the ice and they'll be like 183 and you'll be like, oh, that sounds good. And then someone else will skate and they'll be like 217 and you'll be like, huh, I don't know. It's very confusing and it's very, I thought that the way that they were going to affect the judging would be to make it more understandable for people outside. You would think they might do that, wouldn't you?

I want to actually, I would love to, we're going to go back in our time machine to Debbie Thomas and her beginning to skate in, I believe like around the Dorothy Hamill era based on her age. Yes. She was born in 1967, so she's 55 years old. She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, but she was raised in San Jose. She said her mother took her everywhere she went and her mother had gone to see skating and she goes, well, Debbie should do this too.

So she took her with her to a thing and she's like, what is this? She's like, this is what you're doing now. So she starts skating around five, she started competing around nine and was very good. And her mother, like a lot of hockey parents and skating parents and gymnastics parents found herself driving 100 miles a day between school home and the ice rink. And then her parents divorced when she was very young. So she got into it and she met her coach, Alex McGowan, who was Scottish, who would be her coach for the rest of her career when she was 10.

So she started skating in Los Angeles, was launched a career at the Los Angeles Figure Skating Club. Did she stay with Alex McGowan until she retired at 21 right after the Olympics from amateur competition. So in 1985, she placed fifth in the world championships and she won gold in 1986. And I remember that because I remember going, who is this? Who is this? I'm a little black girl in Baltimore, which is where I live now.

And I remember seeing her picture and going, wait, is she black because what previously there had been Ty Babylonia was a seventies pair skater and she was of mixed race. So she was part black, part Filipino. She was a couple of things. So she registered as not white, but not definitively black. The Williams sisters changed so many things because people like Debbie Thomas had to come in. They were visibly and physically black and not white, but they could not really talk

about it. The Williams sisters came in with their cornrows and their beads in their hair, plain and confident and said, we're black, what of it? They didn't straighten their hair and try to be ballet dancers. They didn't take lots of Elocution classes to try to speak in a certain way to negate the very obvious and fierce blackness. They just were who they were. Now are they different people than Debbie Thomas?

Sure, they were raised in a different thing, but I wonder if you have to answer less questions about your identity now that you used to look at like someone like Brian Boytano, who was in the same Olympics, who was gay and did not come out until after the Olympics. Until way after the Olympics. We are in such a different place that it breaks my heart to think that these other people who paved the way for the people now, what they could have done or accomplished had they had the same support and just the same social understanding that these things happen and you don't have to come in with eight layers of excuses about who you are, you could just

skate. Yeah. And I feel like it's like skating, as far as I can tell, isn't there, but is certainly closer. And like as we talked about, I went to see some of the skating at Nationals this year in San Jose, where by the way, I spent a long time at the arena where the sharks normally play and where they have all these like hideous plaques of San Jose sports legends. And you know who isn't there, Debbie Thomas, but anyway.

But I saw the women's short program and there was a queer skater skating in the women's category, which is exceedingly rare and possibly a first time thing, Amber Glenn, who was amazing and skated, in my opinion, a very gay number and two black skaters, Alexa Gasperado and star Andrews. And that feels closer, but it's still, it's like who's missing, right? And just going back to Debbie Thomas, I mean, something I'm curious about and I remember encountering in like one place in skating research I was doing years ago with somebody claiming that Debbie Thomas had had a nose job to try and give the judges the aesthetic

they wanted, basically. Have you encountered that anywhere? I read this, she got three nose jobs. Wait, where is that? Where's she saying that? It was in the Washington Post story that was, it was that terrible story about her breakdown. I don't know the story. Tell me about this.

Yeah. Basically, it was the, hey, what's up with Debbie Thomas story in 2015 and it was not good stuff. It was not good stuff. I imagine there were people who thought that they were doing her a favor by saying, yes, you're black, but you can also be different or yes, you're black, but you can also have a different look. And so the fact that she did, her hair was blown out, but it was not super, super straight,

but it wasn't, she wasn't wearing a natural either. Suriya Bonnelly wore her hair in braids. It was a very different thing and also Debbie Thomas is fairly light to medium brown skinned. So it's a different thing. There were people who treated her blackness as an aesthetic rather than a reality and identity. Yeah. I cannot imagine what that would be like.

Like I said, I read the quote where she said, I just was skating, I wasn't really thinking about that. And you wonder if that's true. And if it's true, that's in one way commendable in one way, it's, I don't get it because I don't understand being able to divorce yourself from your culture that way. But once again, it's not my story. And maybe she was in a place where she didn't feel that she could. But there's always this idea that, for instance, there were Americans who openly preferred

category to it and wrote about how sexy she was and how great she was. And then what they was like, not dot, dot, dot, not you, black girl. And that the pressure of any Olympian to win, particularly in a Cold War era, late 80s, the communists were bad, we're good, we're going to beat these people. And that sport became get the East Germans, get the Russians, right? Yeah. It's a Reagan Cold War Olympics for God's sake. And so not only as an American did she feel this pressure, this little tiny person to

represent this culture war, but she was also black. And I think there were a lot of people who were disappointed that she was the representative of us. And when she failed, they thought, oh, see, we told you. Right. And that's kind of the sense that I have of the forces that shaped her career. And I mean, well, so just a couple of things, I mean, to come back to Surya Bonali's hair. I mean, again, it's worth pointing out that the scoring system used on her at the time,

the artistic score like was meant to reflect hairstyle partly like that was part of the score. So if you didn't like that her hair was in braids, you could be like, well, I'm not being racist. It's just the artistic score. Yep. And she also talked about how her costume sat on her butt. Yes.

They talked about the fact that she she wore too many sequins. Was it suggestive? And because sequins, because of the unfortunate and inherent push of sexuality onto non-white bodies, her very body was sexualized, as you said. So an outfit on her that looked quote unquote revealing on a thinner, whiter woman with no boobs and no butt, it was just Susie Sunshine. And there was nothing inherently sexual about anything Surya Bonali did. She was a teenager.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's very creepy because the amount of sort of sexual power that is being projected onto these young skaters, sometimes very young skaters who are being treated as if they have all this power and are these like dangerous forces that need to be like damned in like the Colorado River. Yes.

I think that the sport recognizes with male figure skaters anyway, that a lot of the muscles you need to do these jumps are stored in the ass, you know? How are you not going to have one? It's a real question. But I would love to ask you like just, I mean, getting back to this memory of seeing Debbie Thomas, like, do you remember like watching skating before her and like, were there skaters that you liked and like, what was the sport to you and then what did Debbie mean when she came along?

Well, I loved Dorothy Hamill as a little girl, I was five during the 76 Olympics, because she was pretty and I loved her hair and I love the commercial, the shampoo commercials and I loved, my hair didn't do that, right? In high school, there was a rink that would be open on Rashfield and at the Under Harbor in Baltimore. We went a couple of times. I am Debbie Thomas. Look at me.

But in that year, that was my senior year and we all were like, look at us, we're Debbie Thomas. Oh, yeah. If you're a figure skating fan, you'll get this reference. My favorite moment from any peanuts thing was when Peppermint Patty was ice skating. I know. I love it that Peppermint Patty ice skates. She ice skates and Snoopy is her like Russian coach who's like yelling, so there's a moment

at Peppermint Patty who, as you know, was pretty masculine and super awkward and just very blunt and not very feminine. She's doing this figure skating thing and she's pretty good at it and her music won't work. And she's out there sweating and Woodstock comes to the microphone and whistles her music for her. Oh my God. I had a fright.

God. She's there by herself and that's the thing that always got me about Debbie Thomas is that even with the backing of this country and this supposed group of people that has your back, she was really on her own. Yeah. Well, and I feel like that you could feel that watching her and just in speaking about like what the models for a, you know, a ladies champion are to this point, the most recent ones and the ones that have been, you know, the most successful are Peggy Fleming and

68 and Dorothy Hamill and 76. I had a Dorothy Hamill haircut for like most of my childhood and they were women who were rewarded for winning gold for their country by being thrown like lots of endorsement deals, lots of money, you know, it became kind of a necessary function of how the sport worked in the 80s is Debbie Thomas was coming up that you make your money in endorsements. And I know that Debbie Thomas did a Campbell soup ad and I cannot think of a single other thing. And I've looked.

Nope. So like, you know, and this is the thing about racism and classism in America. No matter what you do, you can't complain. And if you complain, they're waiting for you to tell you that you're wrong and they're trying to gaslight you. And so you go along and you don't complain and you don't tell the truth. And then they go, see, it was fine. She never said anything.

She was great. She loved it. It was great. And so it's so hard to win even when you're winning. You look at that and go, where were her endorsements? Where was her second act? Where is her bio pick? Where is the respect?

I just want you to have and it's not there. And Diet Coke was doing ads with Caterina of it, you know, and like not to be all raggedy about it, but like the East German like do an ad with an American. So Debbie Thomas is like, at this point in the story is coming up through the rankings. She's like on your way to being an Olympian. It's also like she really can't expect another American woman to meddle in 88 because the rest of the team is Karen Kadevi and Jill Trennery. And Jill Trennery is not a strong jumper and Karen Kadevi has the flu.

And also the Olympic alternate that year is little Tonya Harding. And so Debbie Thomas comes in, she's in this field where I think people, I remember like their breath being kind of held like, it'd be really great if we could just crown her now, but we can't. But do we want to? We'll see what the white girls do. That's terrible. But it's true.

So it doesn't work out for the other two skaters. And in 96, in 86, rather, she'd won the singer women's title and the world championship title, which was stunning to people because it's like, it's not just the way that we were trying to grade her here. We judge her, you know, Germans even, you know, no one could deny her. Right. Everything was great. So in 1988, Debbie Thomas comes into the Olympics as one of the favorites.

As we mentioned, the other favorite was Katarina Witt, who was a beautiful East German lady who was white, who was thin. Yeah. And she was like, I feel like sometimes they were like, Katarina is a little too sexy, but she was like too sexy in a very like predictable white woman way that I feel like people, like she was kind of like giving bombshell, you know? Yes. It was as friends of mine referred to as spicy white.

Katarina Witt had this very, she's gorgeous, just gorgeous, very talented. And so because the media, which I'm a part of, can't help but, you know, make things worth the spectacle, found out that both of them were doing pieces from Bizet's Carmen. And so I don't know, to this day, I'm like, would it be different if the music was different? Like if they had done different pieces, if this could have been hyped in this way where it was all or nothing, because it just, it was just so ugly, but it was the battle of the Carmans. And so the difference is that at the end of Katarina Witt's performance, the Carmen was

supposed to die. And Debbie Thomas's, she lives victoriously. It did not go that way. Debbie Thomas missed several jumps and my whole family stayed home on a Saturday night to watch this. So we're watching this and she starts and we're cheering for her. We're so proud she slips the first time. And it was like a small error the first time too.

It's the kind of thing that like it would have been possible potentially for her to just like move on, but you can see her not moving on. Yes. So by the time the third one happens, and it's clear that she can't do this, this isn't working. I remember going into the back of the basement with the door where our laundry room wasn't just closing the door. And I remember whispering, I don't want to know.

I don't want to know. It's over. We come back out. We see the scores. To this day, I was a crashy meddled. I just remember this moment where it felt like the whole country was waiting for Debbie to win, not just for herself, not just as a black person, but as an American. And that it felt like she had failed everybody and herself.

And I read something that said recently that said that she, once it didn't go well, she just kind of gave up your peppermint patty out there with no music. Your Mary Anderson, knowing half the country hates her, knowing that something bad could happen to you, but you still have to perform, you still have to skate, you still gotta sing. And how unfair that is. I always think about the little black kids that integrated schools. And I remember being in a class where they go, what would you have done if your child was asked, I would say, I wouldn't do it.

I would be like, are you kidding me? Let someone else risk their life. And it's terrible, right? But when it's personal, when it's your body, your child, your physical well-being at stake, it's not so easy because now we look at those people and we go, oh, isn't that great? Look at them. How brave they were. So great.

But now we also see the pictures of the angry white mobs behind them yelling at them. And it feels like our concept of social change is based on this idea that like there just have to be these chosen casualties who go first and probably are extremely traumatized by it. I mean, and going back into the Battle of the Carmins. I mean, this is like, I think one of the best skating Olympics to watch because there's so much drama for both the men's and the, what it was called at the time, ladies event. And just, I mean, I'm kind of fascinated by Katarina Witt's performance in this Olympics

and her story. I feel like one of the things about her in the 80s was that she was this competitive juggernaut, that she was like this very consistent competitor that seemed to have this sort of intense like mental fortitude. And then, you know, you see interviews that she's done more recently and learn about why that was. And it's like, well, she literally had to win, according to her, a second Olympic gold medal.

She had already won one in 84 in order to get out of East Germany. I would also just love to like take a moment to appreciate, I mean, the Olympics are like at their core about diplomacy, I think, but there's something so odd about how figure skating, how because it's relevant primarily to Americans in connection to the Olympics, that it's a diplomatic post, especially to be a female skater and that this effectively was like our second Reaganite Cold War Olympics and that those were part of the stakes. Well, if you remember in 1984, where the Americans boycott, the Russians boycotted. Right.

And so there was an asterisk in some way put on, say, the American men's gymnastics team, who had never won gold before, they go, well, the communists weren't there. So of course they won. Of course the Russians are going to be your primary people, just like where the Russians still represent this indomitable force in sports and in politics and in a real dangerous way and that your body as a boxer, a skater, a gymnast is the cannon fodder for this war that someone else picked a long time ago. Oh my God.

And then you look at that and you're like, I mean, imagine explaining this to a Martian, right? They're like, you're showing a Martian that the battle of the Karmans sounds like a good Saturday night. And they're like, oh, what beautiful skating, what is the significance of this? And you're like, well, you know, so this skater represents the first of any black person in this country that historically discriminates against black people to be allowed to skate. And now she has to win against East Germany.

She has to win against communism, which is the opposite of capitalism, which is the ideology of her country, which hates her. And she has to skate the best to prove that capitalism is correct. Yes. And the Martian would be like, this is insane. We're just going to belirate you all. We're going to start all over because this is messed up. And this gets into the whole, you know, what does 4th of July mean to the Negro?

You know, Frederick Douglass' wonderful speech about what does this patriotism and the mantle of the responsibility of representing a country that hates you, that to this day denies the existence of either your existence or your history? What does this nationalism mean to you? And Debbie Thomas, she represented a lot of things to a lot of people. And I think that her failing for a lot of people was justification for their own racism. Oh my God, completely. He tells you she couldn't do it because we have to be at the same time, feminine enough

to be innocent, sexy enough to be interesting, white enough to be competitive, exotic enough to be interesting to give them something to write about. And we have to be all of these things at the same time, also while landing your entire body on a tiny blade. If you can't focus on that moment, if you're Debbie Thomas and you admit later that you just gave up in that moment when you're Mary Ann Anderson, your peppermint patty, and everybody is watching you and you are never, you have now blown your shot to be the thing. And I don't think it was a, like, and now I give up.

It's just like your body just says, I can't do this anymore in this juggernaut of pressure and xenophobia and nationalism and all of these other things. And in this moment, it's all on me in this three and a half minutes and I just can't do it. Yeah. Can you imagine? No, and just, and the thing of like, you know, skating and gymnastics, you know, probably again, any sport, but these are the ones I think about, like they seem to be so much

about trust, right? You have to trust your sense of where you are in space. You have to trust your body's ability to do what it needs to do. Like there's, there's like a fundamental sense of trust involved. And then what happens when you can't trust any of the governing body of your sport, which of course is so huge a thing in gymnastics now too. And of course we have to like reckon with the fact that, you know, the infrastructure of American gymnastics is an utter horror show and kind of always has been, but we've

been mostly able to ignore it until recently. But like the battle of the Carmans had both of them skated at their best. I think I would have had to go to Debbie Thomas because she was so much stronger athletically and the jumps that she was attempting were so much harder. Oh my gosh. But as it was, it went to Katerina Vitt who had, I think like four triple jumps in the whole program, just like by today's standards, like very easy, like even for the time, it was like, it was like the last of this era in terms of lack of kind of demands in terms

of triple jumps that the skater had to do. Absolutely. So there was the exhibition after it's over, she's in third. The exhibition skate is where they like put you in a spotlight like they do in movies whenever they show skating competitions and never in real life where people have to compete under the harsh, horrible lights of a stadium. Yes. So Debbie Thomas's big triumphant moment after was George Michael's One More Try.

And it was literally One More Try, it could not have been more perfect. The song is about, you have these expectations of me and I can only do what I can do and I can only, the one thing I have is my pride. And she nailed every jump in that song because the pressure was on longer and she did it. The after this performance retires from amateur skating and becomes professional once again because skating is this thing that says, you know, once you start making money, you can't skate in the Olympics anymore. Makes perfect sense.

Jesus Christ. You know, do you, because like there's something unclean and materialistic about wanting to make money. And they say, well, you can go and become a professional skater and do ice capades and do skating on ice and all this stuff, but you can't be in the Olympics anymore. So you have to decide if I'm going to waste the next four years of my peak health and my peak athletic ability to wait to be an Olympian again, or am I going to make money? And there's no going back.

So she, she went professional and she had some successes as a professional while she was going to Stanford, got her bachelor's at Stanford. She retired the next year, went to Northwestern University in Chicago for medical school and she became an orthopedic surgeon living in LA. Things did not go well after she was married twice. The second marriage was did not seem to go well. She has a child who is now actually a college football player named Luke, but she lost custody of him.

She went into bankruptcy. She wound up in 2015. This was sort of the public re-awareness of Debbie Thomas was when she was on Ionla Fixed My Life, which Ionla Van Zant of the Oprah network does the show where she was mostly going to some normal people, but many celebrities. And so she would go and tough love them and yell at them, whatever. So Debbie at the time was living in a trailer in Virginia. She'd lost all her money.

She even lost her medal because she went to bankruptcy and they came and took her medal. Yeah, Debbie. No. Yeah. Took her medal. Like to lose your medal. Like the medal that you got for skating for your country, the thing that you sacrificed everything for.

And I know that it's like, it's no surprise to anyone that athletes get chewed up by their sport. But I think that figure skating, it just doesn't have a reputation for being quite as ruthless as it is. I think it always kind of surprises people. Because it looks so pretty. Yep. She stopped being a doctor.

Her practice was in shambles. She was diagnosed as bipolar and she was living with her boyfriend and his two sons in a bed bug infested trailer in Virginia. And she was defensive. She does it at this point that she hadn't been to the doctor in years. There was also a story in the Washington Post at the same time about it. And I hated that story. If you get a chance to read that story, do it holding your nose because it's very much,

it seemed to be so salacious. And so then the beginning of the story is that she can't find her skates. Yeah. It's not the life that she thought she was supposed to have. And certainly there was mental illness and stuff. And obviously things happen in 30 years, right? You know, you're not the same person. There's no guarantee you're going to be the same person at one point that you are at another.

All of that to say, so many people, I think we're willing to, oh, well, see, it wasn't our fault. We don't have to feel bad for, we don't have to feel bad for her anymore because look at her. She's a loser living in a trailer with a dude she's not married to and his kids and she lost her kids and oh, so sad. And it made me want to punch everyone involved. Maybe want to shake her a little bit because she's like, oh, I don't get a doctor.

She doesn't believe in, you know, medicine anymore and she's completely turned off. But once again, I don't know what that experience is like for her. So I can't tell her she's wrong to think that I can't tell her that she's wrong. You know, so the good part, here's the good part recently, as in the last week, she has made a bit of a comeback to skating, not competitively, but a gentleman who's involved in figure skating world, invited her to come to Lake Placid, home of the Olympics, to skate. And she had not skated at that point, I think, in about 15 years. Wow.

And can you imagine what all that entailed and having to face who you used to be and who you were supposed to be and other people's ideas and disappointments in you and maybe your disappointment yourself. But I saw pictures, I saw a video of it and she looks like she's doing okay. Like I said, I think she's still with that dude, not my business, still living in that trailer, I think, not my business. But she had three turns, loops with her head, rush and backward crossovers. So once again, she's 55 years old.

She's never going to be the skater that she was. And that's okay. But the fact that the video is pretty great of her doing it and enjoying it. And she just, this is her moment, I think, and if you're out there, Debbie Thomas, talk to me. I want to write your story. Truly. It's back once again, part of what we want to do, the reason that we like comeback stories

is so we can feel better about our faith in these people. Sports is about tribalism in many ways. Sports is about you root for a team because you're from there or because your dad rooted for them or because that's where you went to school or that's where you wanted to go to school. And I think that individual sports, even though they are not tied necessarily to a geographical place, they're tied to a country, they're tied to an idealism. And so you have to decide if you are an American, but you don't really love black people, do

you vote for Sabrina Williams and do you root for her in a way that is about embracing her as an American and not just as the black girl who happened to be the person that's representing you. And I think we're better now. I truly think we're better. I think that one of the things that I know, little kids, she will white, black, whatever, who will root for anybody who's the American because they recognize that. Well, and like, right.

And this is like the kind of classic idea that you kind of certainly is like a part of the American history I was raised with, which is like, well, you know, feminism or you know, progress of any kind is like, people are going to think less of you. So like a woman has to work twice as hard as any man and get paid half as much or, you know, a black woman has to work eight times as hard as any man and get paid nothing or whatever. And this idea that like, that that can be sold. And I think in Debbie Thomas' competitive years was still being sold as like, yeah,

isn't that, I mean, we still do this. We obviously still do this, but the thing of like, isn't it great? You can work so much harder and do so much more, you know, and that it was such a thing that Debbie Thomas was like, she's a national champion and a Stanford student and she's going to be a doctor, you know, and just that she was like, that the way her personality was packaged for the public was that she was just like, achieving so much all the time, like every second of her day, she was getting something done and it's just like, what if you didn't have to do that, right?

Like what if the question was not how hard do you have to work to get sort of seen the same way as, you know, as the baseline of a white man or a white skater or whatever. Yes. And what if they then didn't guess like you into believing that it was noble that you had to work that hard? No, no, no, we love you because you had to work so hard. You know, this is our love and appreciation because you're plucky and strong and persevering. It's like, but I'm also sweating and I'm tired and my back is breaking.

Yeah. Also, I wanted to like look at some videos and just like talk about, yeah, talk about Debbie skating. So I don't know if this makes the most sense to start with this, but I would love to watch her Olympic short program and then the score is coming in. Let's do it. Hold on. This is going to be very emotional for me.

I haven't watched this in a while. I've watched it, I've watched it since then. Yeah. Okay. Three, two, one. Go. Remember, she's a risk taker and she has the potential to seize the day. Yeah.

Just hold this glory here. I am crying. So, try and see. Look at her. Yeah. Just look how energized she is and look how happy and a little poofy hair and she knew she nailed it. Five eight from Soviet Union Czechoslovakia, Japan, East Germany, five nine from the US

and Switzerland. It'll be very close, I think. See what the marks and presentation are. But these marks you see are not. These marks are considerably lower. Wow. Considerably lower. Five six to five eight.

But Debbie has taken the lead. She's still in the lead. Let's go down to you Peggy. Debbie it's been this short program in the past that has given both you and Katarina trouble tonight. You're an even match. What can we look forward in the long program on Saturday? I think it's gonna be a real battle. I hope we both get well. I think my program. How do you feel about the marks? No, no, I think it's a good program and of course I hope to have a higher rate.

She's got two 5.7s, the rest are 5.8 and 5.9 for technical score and you can hear the crowd reacting to our artistic scores. Once again, they will get you on the artistic. Let's talk about the artistic score because we talked about leaving room. Yes, and I believe that they looked a Debbie jumpsuit and that it did not artistically speak to them, the music did not speak to them, the modernness of it did not speak to them and so they penalized her for it because the artistic score is where the favorites will gain points. Right because you can wiggle around a little bit and I mean weirdly the compulsory figure is being so important. One thing you can say about them is that they made the whole thing more objective because you either traced this

figure eight the number of times you needed to sort of with the precision you needed or you didn't and that's so much less arguable than like how much do you deduct based on your taste and then I guess like the artistic score and we have a version of this in the scoring system we have now like if part of it comes down to personal taste then like how can it also not come down to personal racism. I would love to have to find an African-American female skater who has like an afro I would love it or you know locks or something you know I also want women who want to be ballerinas to be able to do that I want them to go and be judged on their their technicals the same way anyone else would. So okay I want to run my personal like Debbie theory by you because like who knows why

things happen the way they do I sure don't but here's kind of what I wonder we have the Olympics she skates in the short program she does this amazing routine in the unitard to the song by Dead or Alive and she still is first after the short program partly because she also did so well in figures before that. Absolutely. But you see her demeanor change as the scores come in and like the crowd booze the scores because they're so clearly like not in keeping with the performance they just saw and like the crowd doesn't booze scores that much in skating for the record they could do it more if if I'm being honest and I feel like you can see all the air go out of her and she has to talk to Peggy Fleming who literally shows up like a freaking cipher.

She does she just pops up out of nowhere like I don't know like a clown in an urban legend but like you can see her just like I don't know I imagine that one of the things she could be feeling is like oh right like it doesn't matter like I can do I can skate like truly the best I possibly could I can like show up and like do everything I came here to do and just put it all out there and I'll still get a five seven and then like what's the point you know. Yeah the realization that okay I'm screwed and you also watch her trying to be upbeat because she knows this should be a triumphant moment and she's trying not to let it get to her and she goes well they said I knew there's I had to do I have a head right I had to get one or two like so in her head

she's still gaming for the next round but she's still positive there's still not a reason to believe that A she's going to completely blow it although I would not I would imagine I would love to talk to her if I ever got to talk to her and say if you want to talk about this when you fell did you know that you had been graded down enough in the short program that there's no way that you could get back up. Like yeah like what would you ask her you know. I would ask her if this space and time between now and then has given her any perspective I'm gonna ask her what she might have done differently if I got to know her really well I would ask her what she might have done had she had her bipolar diagnosis earlier and had they been treated I want

to ask her does she feel any connection between herself and the younger people particularly those of color who are coming up and now that she said first she just really did want to be the first black anything she just wants to skate does she still believe that now that we are in a place where we discuss race differently and we can discuss race differently people are still mad about it but we can do it and because there's precedent for these conversations I would ask her has she reconsidered these things if she were coming up now how would she approach it differently you know does she regret it yeah you're a part of this history and it's and it's important to us that you be here to talk about this because we consider you a pioneer we

consider you an important figure in the sport we consider you one of us yeah and just and you know something that this made me think of is that you know that it's like this very classic thing whereas a skater like when you're coming up you will often cite like when you realize that that skating was for you and I feel like for most of the stories that I've heard it's watching somebody else compete in the Olympics and you know what you're like a little girl watching Christy Yamaguchi or you're a little girl watching Tara Lipinski or you're you know now a little girl watching well you can't because it's on peacock but hopefully you can see star Andrews or Amber Glenn but like what about all the little girls all the little kids who watched Debbie Thomas skate and

said I want to skate like Debbie Thomas and then you know the sport wasn't interested in having them it didn't want black skaters and it and I imagine that there was also a really pervasive sense of like we tried yep we like one black skater had her shot and now it's over basically it's beautiful to know that just by being out there with brown skin or in a woman's body or with natural hair or you know with big hips or whatever it was that somebody said you can do that so I can do that and I think that the Debbie Thomases of the world whether or not they asked for it or are in the position to inspire people and we just need more of them not because of quotas but because we're missing people we're leaving talent on the table if we don't open up these spaces

I mean what I kind of wonder about now is that it feels like the technical bar is so high to be competitive internationally that like it seems like countries like Russia are doing so well a because of all the judging scandals that they seem to be implicated in but b because like they do have infrastructure for training skaters some might say too rigorously and from too young an age and with too much pressure and it I almost feel like I don't know like skating like it is impossible it seems pretty impossible it is at least it clearly it is very hard to have like a balanced life or a happy life while skating competitively and like I don't know but that like skating is such a special thing and it's so fun to watch and to experience that like I

really this is kind of a ridiculous thing to be like this is what we should prioritize as a society and you know a time when skating rinks are like not good for the environment and like there's a lot of other stuff to do but like more skating for the people I still care about it me too I still care about it and I care about access one of the conversations that you and I had before we did this when we were talking about what we were going to talk about was the prohibitive nature of these sports on purpose and so it just becomes a sense of how badly do you want to do this how badly do the people the athletes and their families want to be involved and how badly does the sport actually want to integrate in every way possible yeah including economically

you know the more we talk about it the more it feels obvious that like any institution dedicated to maintaining what it recognizes as the the broader culture's definition of like the paragon of white femininity is like that's a very dangerous goal that shouldn't be anyone's goal no yeah like because what because what is that right like that's a goal with who's only motive could be white supremacy yeah but think of it the way that white supremacy is spoken of in terms that they they want you not to know what they're saying about tradition and it's about heritage all these words that can be icky if you say them what's with certain intent yeah heritage you're right that's such a big one and so I guess where we are is that we have to keep encouraging and hoping

there is space for people to in these spaces to continue to do themselves and be themselves and it's easy like I said when you have a rebel like a tanya harding class wise or background wise or racially like debbie thomas it's easier to say oh let's find some other reasons we can explain our low scores for them but if you have more diversity in every way racially financially identity wise whatever if you can find ways to be more diverse it's going to be harder to just pick from the thing and say well that's the one different person so we can play in their faces and you know I truly believe that that we can get there but yeah and I mean the sport needs all the help it can get clearly like try and watch figure skating sometime I dare you you can't watch it anymore the

sport like it's dying it was everywhere NBC CBS ABC any of them you turn on the tv there was some sort of skating mm-hmm it's a sport that asks us to trust ultimately human subjective judging a lot and I think it just like it has a greater responsibility than it's fulfilling mm there should be more debbie thomas's now mm-hmm and it's a failure of the sport that there are not is a failure of the sport and then I look at that moment and say not just racially but from every opportunity who are we missing who are we not looking for what are we doing you know I seriously doubt you'd have to go outside the sport to find and recruit talented black Latina Asian non-binary lesbian skaters don't believe you'd have to look that far but you do have to look and the trans skaters where

are the trans skaters oh but see but where would they put them though that's the other thing putting people together against each other just because they share a sensibly agenda is so backwards but we have to talk about who's aging appropriately the answer is no one American Debbie Thomas getting set to skate here in Tokyo before the competition we asked her how she got started at all my mom took me to see ice shows and I thought well that's neat you can go without without having to walk and it took me a while before I I really got into the competitive skating well Debbie Thomas began skating competitively at the age of nine eight years later she is not only the second best skater in the US but the first black American woman to skate at the worlds

it's a rare thing to be at this level and there aren't many black skaters and so you know the the probability of having a black skater at this level is is slim and so I just happened to be the first one so it's it's uh I guess it's it's an honor and that's our episode thank you so much for listening I hope you're passionate now or even more passionate than you were before thank you for joining the Debbie Hive thank you so much to our incredible guest Leslie Gray Streeter my favorite person to talk passionately about 80s figure skating with thank you to Miranda Zickler and Carolyn Kendrick for editing thank you to Carolyn Kendrick as always for producing and sitting right next

to me on my hotel bed and telling me what to say if you want to learn more about figure skating and specifically what me Carolyn and Jamie Loftus think about it I have incredible news for you we did a bonus episode on it a couple months ago you can find it on patreon or apple plus subscriptions we went to us nationals together and watched the juniors compete and had the time of our lives and are here to tell you about it so if that's interesting to you I've got you covered thanks for joining us if you will come to one of our shows or have come to one of our shows thank you so much for being there and if you can't make it don't worry we'll come back we'll see you in two weeks