From tragedy to triumph, Randy Gardner’s life and career could make for a play… and in fact, it is

In 1979, the American figure skating pairs team of Randy Gardner and Tai Babilonia were at a peak — of skill and of popularity. Fast becoming household names, they had won four U.S. Figure Skating Championships, placed fifth in the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, and were favored to win Olympic gold in 1980 in Lake Placid. But first there was a crucial performance to conquer: the final round of the World Figure Skating Championship.

The YouTube video showing that particular performance shows a team at the top of their game. The resolution may be a bit grainy, the hairstyles a wee dated, but it’s all there: Gardner and Babilonia’s opening power moves — a powerful throw triple Salchow; a confident split double twist; an elegant swan lift — followed by the last few moments of their polished precision. Synchronous, skillful, sublime. They nailed it.

Their dominating performance in that final round became only the second U.S. pair to ever win a World Figure Skating Championship — a title second only to the Olympics as far as prestige goes. They were at the top of their talent and athletic ability.

And yet Gardner couldn’t come out.

“I was keeping a secret, and I was OK doing that,” he told us in a recent phone conversation. “The skating overshadowed everything.”

It was a different time back then. Even post-Stonewall, out athletes were few and far between, and those few who came out (or were outed) were publicly ostracized, losing friends, sponsorships and careers. (The 1976 Summer Olympic Games in Montreal also saw another American athlete achieve great acclaim: Bruce Jenner. He wouldn’t come out as trans until 2015.) The AIDS crisis was just beginning in 1980, triggering a new wave of hatred and fear of gay men. Let’s just say closet doors weren’t exactly busting open.

Gardner did eventually come out publicly, in 2006, after an incredibly successful career… and several decades of a life far from ordinary. He’s in a new confessional performance piece called Go Figure! The Randy Gardner Story, co-written and directed by Joshua Ravetch (co-author of Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking).

Go Figure! focuses on Gardner’s fascinating career — everything from his and Babilonia’s beginnings as a preteen skating pair (they have been close ever since; she even appears in the show with him) to their most crushing moment: the 1980 Olympics. Favored heavily to win the gold, Gardner and Babilonia were forced to withdraw when Gardner sustained an injury. It was supposed to be the pinnacle of their career; instead, it was their lowest moment.

“It was devastating,” Gardner says. “I went on autopilot. The thing in my mind was ‘Am I ever going to skate again?’”

The play covers other parts of Gardner’s life as well: coming out; surviving gay-conversion therapy; and, at age 40, discovering he was adopted… and that his conception was the result of his mother being raped. Hardly the stuff of sunny self-reflection.

“It’s emotional. I choke up sometimes doing it,” Gardner says. “But if you’re gonna get up there and tell your story, you might as well dig deep.”

While his story does have its heavy parts, it’s tempered by appearances by Babilonia and former skating icon Dorothy Hamill (of the famous “Dorothy Hamill wedge” hair style that was the “Rachel” of its day), along with tales of meeting luminaries and the sometimes-wild world of figure skating.

“I laugh a lot in it, and the audience laughs along with me,” Gardner says. “It’s not just an hour and half of sadness.”

Once Gardner did come out, when he was free of career pressures and the world was a different place, it was a relief. “I was comfortable with myself, I was ready, and I didn’t fear anything,” he says. “No regrets.”

— Jonanna Widner