• May 04, 1992
• Vol. 37
• No. 17

Katarina Witt

• 

From PEOPLE Magazine

She could have wound up in an ice show playing sidekick to a Smurf. Instead the two-time Olympic gold medalist is showing off nightly why she is still the best figure in skating. Witt—sultry, sexy and squeezed into airtight sequined numbers—and her partner, Brian Boitano, are causing rink meltdowns in their passionate Carmen on Ice show (a 1990 telecast of which won an Emmy).

The skater knows she wasn't asked to endorse products from Danskins to Diet Coke or become a CBS Winter Games analyst merely for her ability to skate 6.0s. But, notes Witt, "beauty didn't put me on that [winner's] pedestal. Being good-looking has taken away from the things I've worked hard at." Bushy of brow and pouty of lip (once, she recalls, "somebody told me I looked like Brooke Shields"), the East German native, now 26, has cooled off suitors like Donald Trump and just helped jail a lovelorn schizophrenic who'd pursued her across two continents. Today, she says, "I think I'm in love." Witt is coy about naming names, but no one else is: He's Richard Dean (MacGyver) Anderson, 42, himself an avid hockey fan. Two soulmates on ice? "What's beautiful is when you meet someone and, wow, you feel something coming from them," she says. "Sometimes I express my feelings better on the ice. I don't know what you call it in English, but our word for it is Ausstrahlung." That translates as "charisma," a word to which Witt is no stranger.