Background and career
Oksana Serhiyivna Baiul-Farina (née Baiul; born November 16, 1977) is a Ukrainian retired competitive figure skater. She was the 1993 world champion and the 1994 Olympic champion in ladies' singles. Baiul is the first Olympic Champion from Ukraine to compete under the Ukrainian flag. Baiul is the second skater representing Ukraine to win gold at the Winter Olympics after Viktor Petrenko in 1992. She is also the first Olympic champion of independent Ukraine in any sport. After winning the gold medal in 1994, Baiul decided to move to the United States and participate in professional ice skating tours and shows. She followed one of her coaches to Connecticut. Later, she also became involved in a variety of TV appearances, and benefit skates. She has lived in the United States since 1994. In 1997, she published two books, a memoir about her life and one on skating.
Baiul was born on 16 November 1977 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union, an industrial city famous for manufacturing Soviet missiles. Her parents divorced when she was two years old, and her father, Sergey Baiul—who died in 2006—disappeared shortly after. No one is certain whether he deserted his family or was pressured to leave town when he and his wife divorced. She was raised by her mother, Marina, a French teacher, and her maternal grandparents. In addition to having Ukrainian ancestry, she is of Romanian-Jewish descent through her maternal grandmother and of Russian descent through her maternal grandfather. Her grandfather died in 1987 and her grandmother in 1988. In 1991, her mother, who had been very healthy, died suddenly of ovarian cancer when Baiul was 13. Her father appeared at her mother's funeral, but Baiul wanted nothing to do with him. She lived with the wife of her coach, Stanislav Koritek, who had moved to Canada, and then with friends. After moving to Odesa in mid-1992, Baiul lived chiefly in a dormitory. Her expenses were covered by the state because of her promise in skating. In 1993 she lived for a month with coach Galina Zmievskaya between the European and World championships.
After the 1994 Winter Olympics, Baiul moved to the United States and started living in Simsbury, Connecticut, the home of the International Skating Center of Connecticut. In the late 1990s, she followed her coach, Valentyn Nikolayev, to Richmond, Virginia, where she lived for several years before moving to Cliffside Park, New Jersey. After residing there for 14 years, Baiul moved to Pennsylvania in March 2012, settling in Upper Makefield Township, Bucks County. In January 1997 (three years after winning the gold medal), Baiul was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol after crashing her car into a tree in Bloomfield, Connecticut. The charges were dropped after she met the terms of probation and completed an alcohol education program. Her drinking problem worsened, however. In May 1997, she entered an alcohol rehabilitation program for two and a half months. In a 2004 interview, she said she had been sober for six years, adding,"This is more important than Olympic gold."
Baiul was raised as a Russian Orthodox Christian. As a child, she heard rumors that her maternal grandmother was Jewish. In 2003, years after her father left the family, she phoned her old rink in Dnipro to ask for assistance in locating him. Assuming it was a prank, they hung up twice. Eventually Baiul convinced them of her identity. The rink manager helped her reunite with her father Sergey Baiul in September 2003, when she was 25 years old. He confirmed that her Romanian maternal grandmother was Jewish. According to Orthodox Judaism, her mother and Baiul would also be classified as halakhically Jewish. Baiul decided to identify as Jewish because of the custom of matrilineality in Judaism. In 2005 she said, "Being Jewish, that feels good. It feels natural, like a second skin".
As a child, Baiul was interested in ballet, but was told she did not have the right body type. Her grandmother took her to skating lessons, saying it was ballet on skates. Her grandfather was also supportive of her skating, which she began at age three in Dnipro. He believed that she could be a future prima ballerina and that skating was a fine training ground for dance. Baiul pursued ballet, but ultimately chose ice skating. As she trained, her mother paid for her training expenses, including lessons, costumes, and equipment. By the age of five, she was studying with Stanislav Koritek, a prominent Ukrainian coach. She was coached by Koritek until he was offered a coaching job in Toronto, Ontario, in March 1992. He accepted due to lack of support for the sport in Ukraine, which was struggling economically after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In August 1992 his father, Alfred Koritek, vice-president of the Ukrainian skating federation, called coach Halyna Zmievska on Baiul's behalf. She took her on as a student, arranging for the girl to move to her home in Odesa. Zmievska welcomed her into her circle of elite skaters and provided her shelter in her family's cramped three-room apartment in the city. Under Zmievska's training, Baiul made rapid progress. Her other coach in Odesa was Valentyn Nikolayev. She represented FSC "Ukraine" (Odesa, Dnipro).
Baiul began competing and took the silver medal at the 1993 European Championships in Helsinki, finishing second to Surya Bonaly of France. Prior to the 1993 World Championships in Prague, Baiul had crashed into the boards and displaced disks in her back and neck. At the event, she stopped practicing and consulted a Czech doctor. She competed in skates with crooked blades because it was too late to try a new pair. Ranked second in the short program and first in the free skate, she finished ahead of Bonaly and became world champion at age 15.
