Page 38 of Off the Edge

The two days of waiting were going to be emotionally tough. I hated waiting. Waiting meant thinking, and I’d vowed not to go there.

Training was light, mostly practice on the rink alongside the other teams. Ren was there, but I wasn’t thinking about him, or watching him perform those elegant backward crossovers and how he made his blades dig deep, gliding like something out of a fairy tale.

After my session, the team coach collected me for cool-down and medical. I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until leaving the rink, that I realized I was the only one being escorted out. The rest of the team continued their practice.

We walked to the small medical building, going from bitter cold to stifling warmth, which seemed to be the rhythm of the Village—from hot to cold to hot and back again, throughout the days. I was taken into a waiting area, then handed a urine sample pot by the nurse.

I frowned.

“Just random drug testing, you’re fine,” Coach Miles said. The Canadian coach was a good guy, physically wiry but loose, like all athletes who’d been honing their bodies for decades. He had about thirty years on me but didn’t show it or throw his experience around too often. “But I gotta escort you there,” he said, all business.

“Sure thing.”

I was fine with it. The drug tests were routine, especially a few days before the competitions. I did the necessary and handed it back to the nurse, then Miles walked me along a corridor, into an adjacent building. This part was not normal or routine. I should have been heading to the gym around now, not walking through an admin building.

“Where are we going?”

“Some of the committee members have a few questions for you,” he said, still sounding casual.

The committee? Like . . . the Olympic Committee, or one of the dozen other committees who all had their hand in organizing the Winter Games?

I walked in silence, entering the elevator alongside Miles. This was beginning to feel a lot like being back in high school and that long walk to the principal’s office, where I’d sit in a chair and be told a list of things I’d done wrong, and then told to do better as though I could magically change my whole personality.

It probably wasn’t that. Because what could I have done?

The drug test didn’t seem all that random now.

Neither did this walk.

When you have a history like mine, you start to expect the worst. Your body gets ready for it before your mind has fully caught up. I’d tensed, and could feel my palms getting clammy. Were they about to tell me there’d been some mistake with selection and I didn’t belong here? It was crazy. Stuff like that didn’t happen. Athletes didn’t get this far by mistake. But there was a first for everything, right?

Miles knocked on a blank door with no identifying names or marks. A woman’s voice from inside said, “Come.” Miles opened the door into a plain room, not unlike the office Ren and I had recently met in. But this one had a long table, with three people on one side, and two empty chairs a few steps ahead. Snow fell outside the windows, quiet and peaceful, reminding me it was cold out there and too hot inside.

“Take a seat, Mr. Navarro,” the woman on the left said. Tall, rake thin, dark hair, thin face. “My name is Dr. Helena Varga. I am the International Skating Union’s director of integrity and disciplinary affairs.”

I sat. Coach Miles sat next to me.

Integrity and disciplinary affairs. Oh-kay then. I had a horrible feeling I knew where this was going, even if I didn’t know why.

I was fifteen again, heart racing, palms sweaty, sitting outside the principal’s office.

A slim, beige folder rested on the table beneath Varga’s neatly folded hands.

This did not seem like the kind of meeting where I was going to be congratulated about having made it to the Winter Olympics.

Dr. Varga indicated to the man on her left. He was somewhere in his fifties, broad shoulders, with a maple leaf pin fixed to the lapel of his jacket. “Mr. Simon Avery, director of athlete relations for the Canadian Olympic Committee.”

Avery gave me a brief nod.

“Hi.” I nodded back and shifted in my seat, making an attempt to get comfortable on the rigid plastic.

“And Ms. Naoko Ishikawa, deputy director of athlete services and Village conduct for the Sapporo Organizing Committee.”

The Japanese woman inclined her head. She wore a pale-gray suit that pulled all the warmth from her face.

Three organizations.

I smiled, but inside I knew I was so fucked. Whatever I’d done, whatever they thought I’d done, these people weren’t here to wish me well and send me on my way back to the Games, they were here to kick me out.