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U.S. Ice Dancers 'Buy' Russian Partners




NEW YORK -- What do you get the teenage girl who has everything? A horse? A convertible? How about a real live Russian ice-dance partner?


Two years ago, when Ariel Williams, then a 10th-grader at the Dalton School in Manhattan, began to show promise in ice dancing, her mother, Marian Williams, scouted for a full-time partner for her. The search led to Dmitri Boundoukin, a Russian-born skater who was soap-opera handsome.


But the economic imbalances between Russia and the United States being what they are, Williams found herself offering to cover all of Boundoukin's personal and training costs, which can run to tens of thousands of dollars a year. In the spring of 1997, she and her daughter moved from New York to Massachusetts so Ariel could train year round with Boundoukin, who was 19 and lived there near a favorite Russian coach.


The bills, Williams said, including living expenses for both partners, coaching fees, dance lessons and glittery costumes (which can cost $1,000 for women and $500 for men), were paid by her former husband, Gary Williams, a partner at the investment banking firm of Goldman, Sachs.


Such arrangements are increasingly common in ice dancing, a sport that attracts many American girls but precious few American boys, according to skaters, their parents and senior figures in the sport. They say that girls' parents often wind up dangling the keys to a car or a house, along with a promise of all expenses paid, to get foreign-born skaters to lead their daughters in waltzes and tangos around a rink.


"It's buying a partner," said Judy Blumberg, a former national champion ice dancer who finished fourth at the 1984 Olympics with American-born Michael Seibert.


The laws of supply and demand have led young men from Russia, where ice dancing is just another sport, to increase their demands for their services. Parents of girls are cultivating something like a class of foreign gigolos, Blumberg said.


"I think most Russian boys expect to be taken care of," she said. "They want an expensive costume, or this car and not the other car."


Not all the foreign-born partners are Russian. Susan Chalom of West Bloomfield, Michigan, said she scoured the nation for a year for a partner for her daughter, Eve, then 12. The search ended in Boston, where Eve tried out with Mathew Gates of Hitchum, England. In the seven years since then, Chalom said, she has paid virtually all expenses for Gates. Costs for the two skaters now top $90,000 a year, she said. Gates said he is thankful for the support. "But I am giving Eve as much opportunity as she gives me to go where she wants to go," he said.


The partnership has worked well. The couple have won medals at the national championships and were on the U.S. World Team in 1997.


But even with that success, Chalom agrees with critics in the sport who say that such partnerships often do not result in medals, because skaters are not matched by leg length and proficiency, but rather by financial factors. She said she knew of an American novice competitor whose parents went to Russia to find her a partner. Although the man was an elite skater in Russia, he agreed to compete as a novice in the United States.


"But he pulled her around the ice," Chalom said. "She didn't win."


Oleg Fediukov said Chalom must have been describing him. Fediukov, who is with his third American partner (all three families have supported him), said that six years ago his initial patrons, the parents of Julieanna Sacchetti, then 14, traveled to Russia in search of a partner and found him.


Soon he was installed in their home in Wellesley, Massachusetts. "They were pretty upscale people," he said. But he described skating with the inexperienced girl as "six months in hell."


Julieanna "didn't really trust me and my knowledge," he said. "We couldn't get along," he added. "I would say something innocent, and she would get upset and tell her mother."


Christine Sacchetti, Julieanna's mother, tells it differently. She said that Fediukov was too advanced to partner a novice, but that he did not explain that to the family. "He played dumb," she said. Of the conflicts with her daughter, Sacchetti said, "he was rude and unkind and unfeeling toward her."


"We were naive," said Julieanna Sacchetti, who is now 20. She said she knows other American families who were taken advantage of by what she called manipulative Russian skaters "because these parents love their daughters so much."


In any event, Fediukov left the Sacchettis. Since 1996 he has skated with Debbie Koegel, whose family has no complaints. Koegel's mother, Susan Clayman, said she and her husband, Martin Clayman, pay most of the $60,000 in training and living expenses for the couple, who finished second last month at the eastern sectional championships for senior-level ice dancers in Oldsmar, Florida.


Koegel's mother bristled at the suggestion that supporting Fediukov is tantamount to buying a partner. "Oleg is not paid to skate with my daughter," she said. "Oleg wants to skate with my daughter."


No doubt this is true, especially since Fediukov, now 26, and Koegel, 21, are a couple off the ice as well. Clayman said Fediukov "is not dressing in Calvin Kleins and Polos and driving a Corvette f he has a broken-down Honda that needs a radiator."


Many parents reject any criticism about their part in the ice-dance bachelor auction. Typically, they maintain that it is other families who are taken advantage of, that their daughter's partner is a hard worker with modest needs. Even when the partnerships win no medals, some parents say they would do it again.


Before teaming up with Ariel Williams, Boundoukin was the partner of Tara Modlin, whose parents, Sherry and Bobby Modlin, provided housing for him for two years in Lake Placid, New York, shopped for his groceries and covered all his training costs.


"Everybody I know thought I was nuts," said Bobby Modlin, who owns a textile exporting business in Manhattan. But he said he has no regrets. "It cost me a fortune, but I wouldn't give back one minute of it," he said, because Tara "earned it" by winning medal after medal as a novice.


After finishing last among the junior-level skaters in a field of 13 at the 1997 nationals, the Modlin-Boundoukin team broke up.


Tara Modlin said there were tensions after an unsuccessful competitive season capped by a last-minute change of coach and program.


The family said that there were also romantic problems. "It was uncomfortable that his attraction was bigger to me than mine to him," Tara Modlin said. (Boundoukin refused repeated requests for interviews on his skating career in the United States.)


Modlin, who no longer skates competitively and is majoring in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, said she misses her former partner, but she said he and other Russian skaters in the United States didn't understand her interest in academics.


The Modlins continued to pay Boundoukin's rent for a few months until he got on his feet, around the time he teamed up with Ariel Williams.


In interviews last year, her mother said the family at first provided sole support for Boundoukin, but eventually a group that helps "promising skaters" began giving him support. She later confirmed that the group was the New England Amateur Skating Foundation.


Herbert Kaplan, the president of the foundation, a charitable trust, said Boundoukin is one of 100 skaters for whom the foundation raised $600,000 last year.


Some people in the sport say that the foundation provides a funnel for families to give money to skaters while receiving a tax deduction.


"We support a lot of Russian skaters. I call it my rent-a-Russian program." He said donors cannot earmark checks for a specific skater (which would threaten the tax deductibility of their contributions). But he said they can "suggest" recipients, subject to the approval of a three-member foundation committee.


Don Roberts, a spokesman in Washington for the Internal Revenue Service, said the foundation's arrangements appeared to violate no tax regulations, as long as it remained in control of the funds.

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