f course he was going to skate. As soon as the test came back and the doctors gave him the green light, Steve Hartsell knew he'd be back on the FleetCenter ice last night, risking another tumble, another bloody whack on the head - and maybe worse. There was a pairs title to regain, a world team to make. Of course he was going to skate.
''I knew I was going to compete,'' said Hartsell after he and sister Danielle had won the short program at the US Figure Skating Championships, beating defending champions Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman. ''That's what I was worried about the most, that the test result wouldn't be negative.''
It didn't matter that Hartsell had taken a terrifying spill Tuesday, that he'd split open the back of his head, that he'd been taken to Children's Hospital on a stretcher. He and his sister had a 6:39 p.m. starting time and a medical thumbs-up. ''He'll skate,'' Danielle predicted. ''He's an animal.''
It didn't matter that Hartsell had a headache, that he felt queasy. In this sport, the rules of showbiz apply: The show must go on. If you can skate, you skate. If you can't skate, you skate. Or at least you try like hell.
This is supposed to be a sport of sequins and sparkle, of bouquets and teddy bears. The place where skaters await their marks is called the ''kiss-and-cry'' area. ''But it's not all frou-frou and beauty,'' said Michelle Kwan, who was walking right behind Nancy Kerrigan when she was kneecapped by a hired thug in Detroit seven years ago.
Beneath the mesh and spandex are fractured hips, cracked ribs, jammed vertebrae, pulled groins, sore knees. Everything that would put you on an NFL injury list gets covered up with a smile. Because they can't play four minutes of music with the ice empty.
''This is an individual sport,'' Michael Weiss, the two-time men's champion, was saying yesterday, as people were asking about his broken toe and his balky back. ''On a hockey team, you have five other guys out there carrying the weight. In this sport, you carry the weight yourself.''
The Hartsells had to give up their title last year after Danielle broke her kneecap in two on a fall. If they'd pulled out last night, somebody else would have gone to the World Championships. Somebody else would have skated before international judges. Somebody else would have shouldered past them on the road to Olympus. ''We really needed this performance,'' Danielle said.
The Winter Games come around once a quadrennium. That's why Elvis Stojko gritted his teeth and took the ice in Nagano, Japan, three years ago with a torn groin muscle that had him limping like Walter Brennan in ''The Real McCoy.'' ''You worked 20 years for this moment,'' Stojko reminded himself. ''It's 41/2 minutes.''
And when he pulled an abdominal muscle midway through his long program, Stojko sucked in his gut, kept going until the end, and won the silver medal. He could skate, so he skated.
Kerrigan labored for a month on a knee that was swollen like a melon, working her way back from baby jumps to keep her ticket to Lillehammer, Norway. At the 1994 nationals, Renee Roca collided with another ice dancer in warmups and broke her wrist. She went to the hospital, had the bone set, took a shot of Novocain, dashed back to the arena, and did the rhumba with the tips of her fingers. Surgery could wait a day.
This is a sport, figure skaters keep reminding people. We're athletes. Athletes play hurt. Amy Webster dislocated her shoulder 13 times as an ice dancer and kept competing. Occupational hazard, she shrugged.
Skaters learn one thing the first day they lace up. The ice is hard. When you fall, it hurts. If you can't take a tumble and get back up, you do something else.
A few years ago, Todd Eldredge tripped on a frozen chunk of ice during warmups for Skate America, threw his shoulder out of its socket, and writhed screaming on the ice. Then he went backstage, had the shoulder popped back in, and went out and won the title again. He could skate, so he skated.
For pairs skaters, crashes are part of the job. The man lifts the woman over his head at full speed. He throws her spinning toward a wooden wall. He pitches her in the air, watches her rotate, then catches her. The woman breaks her nose, her jaw, her ribs. Alice Cook, who competed in the 1976 Olympics, had four concussions in one summer.
When the man falls on a lift, the woman usually falls on top of him. If he can, the man makes sure of it, to protect her. That's the deal, and it almost killed Paul Binnebose before last season. He fractured his skull, went into a coma, and nearly died when infection set in. He hasn't competed since.
When Hartsell fell while lifting his sister in practice, all anyone could think of was Binnebose. But even as doctors were putting a dozen stitches in his head, Hartsell's coach was saying, of course he'd put him out there if the tests came back negative. ''This isn't the NHL,'' Johnny Johns said. ''This is figure skating.''
They wear helmets in the NHL. A figure skater wouldn't be caught dead in a helmet. It would ruin the artistic mark. So when his group was called last night, Hartsell took the ice without even a bandage covering where his head had been shaved. ''Everyone already knew what had happened,'' he said. ''Let's just go out and skate.''
He and his sister powered through their program without a hitch - jumps, lift, spins, twist, throws. When the music stopped, Steve pumped his fists and pointed to Binnebose, who'd been watching and cheering from the loge seats. ''I am so, so happy to see them come back,'' Binnebose exulted. ''This is so awesome.''
They'd been on the world team together two seasons ago, before the fractured skull, before the busted knee. Last year in Cleveland, they'd sat in the stands together in street clothes, consoling each other. Last night, Hartsell was Binnebose, if Binnebose had had better luck.
Binnebose wanted to skate, but couldn't. Hartsell could, so he had to. ''If there's any way you can do it, you go out there,'' Paul Binnebose was saying. ''You don't know anything else. It's in your blood.''
