SPECIAL SECTION/CANADA'S TEAM/ICE DANCING	FEBRUARY 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4
	Full Tilt Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz have a goal: to displace the Russians By MARY JOLLIMORE ictor Kraatz has a laser-sharp memory of the day Shae-Lynn Bourne waltzed into his life. It was in April 1991 in Montreal. Kraatz, 20, was holding auditions for a new ice-dance partner. No one had the combination of mesmerizing looks and physical strength he needed. Then in came Bourne, just 15. "We tried it out for five minutes," recalls Kraatz. "It was the best possible fit you can get." Agrees Bourne: "The luck for us was finding each other." In six years, the duo have climbed the international ranks at a glissando clip. At their first world championship, in 1993, they finished 14th. A year later, at the Lillehammer Olympics, they came in 10th. In 1996 and 1997, they won world-championship bronze medals. If their luck holds at Nagano, they hope to surpass Canada's Tracy Wilson and the late Rob McCall, who won a bronze in 1988 in Calgary. That's a big if. Few couples have wrested anything better than bronze away from the Soviet Union or Russia. (The most notable exceptions: the divine British duo of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, and the French siblings Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay.) Leading the list of competitors at Nagano are four-time world champions Oksana ("Pasha") Grishuk and Evgeny Platov, undefeated in 20 major events since winning Olympic gold in 1994. Right behind them are Anjelika Krylova and Oleg Ovsiannikov, silver medalists at the 1997 worlds. The Canadians are banking on the results of a three-year plan to displace the Russians. For guidance they turned to a coach who used to train their chief rivals. In 1995 Bourne and Kraatz moved from Quebec to Lake Placid, N.Y., where Natalia Dubova had set up a skating school. Back in Moscow, Dubova had coached Grishuk and Platov. "She's the ultimate," says Bourne of Dubova. Then, after their second world bronze in 1997, all three of them went back to the drawing board. The results of that makeover will be on display in Japan: two programs so technically difficult that the couple say they could not perform them a year ago. Bourne and Kraatz will skate their spicy original dance number to the Beatles tune I Saw Her Standing There. Their four-minute free program is an innovative take on Riverdance. In October the duo fine-tuned their footwork in New York City with the show's principal dancer, Colin Dunn. Kraatz, now 26, chooses his words carefully in four languages: English, French, Italian and German. Born in West Berlin, he grew up mostly in Switzerland. After his mother, a former ballet dancer, remarried, the new family moved to Vancouver Island in 1987. Intrigued by ice dancing on TV, Kraatz was first coached in Victoria by Joan Westwood, who won five world ice-dance titles for Britain in the '50s. Bourne grew up less exotically in Chatham, Ont. At age 7, she took her cue from her older brother and got hooked on figure skating--first in singles, then in pairs, then ice dancing. The sport is sometimes pooh-poohed as the most domesticated branch of skating. That doesn't mean it is risk-free. A 1991 collision in practice left Bourne with a hairline skull fracture. There is always the potential for disaster when the couple perform their signature "hydroblading," tilting impossibly far over on the edge of their blades. With their 1994 Olympic experience under their respective belts, Bourne and Kraatz say they will treat these Games differently. "The most thrilling thing about 1994 was just being there," says Bourne. "It's great to have that behind us. We'll know what to do." And besides, they're feeling lucky.
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