Have Skates, Will Travel

Somewhere in Germany, a young woman with small feet — and we mean really small feet — is no doubt enjoying the use of a comfortable, well broken-in pair of figure skates.
At least Anabelle Langlois figures that what had to have happened to her custom made pride and joys, which still haven't caught up with her since her Lufthansa flight left Toronto on Nov. 21 for the Cup of Russia Grand Prix event in Moscow. Langlois watched them make their way along the luggage conveyor belt at Pearson Airport in T.O., and knows they got as far as Frankfurt.
After that ... well, it couldn't be a bigger mystery.
She's been to Russia and back. The skates — not to mention a bunch of jewelry and competition makeup, a national team track suit and several pairs of skating tights — long ago lost touch with her.
“I have no idea where my skates are,” said Langlois, 25, of Hull, Que. “I was looking at pictures from Skate America that I was signing (autographs on) and I was saying 'those are my skates, those are my skates that are gone!' ”
Lufthansa has offered to reimburse her $500 for her losses, but the skates alone are worth $2,700.
“That ($500) wouldn't even cover what was in my makeup case, or a (skate) blade,” said Langlois.
Ordinarily, you might think getting a new pair would be easy enough. But Langlois takes a tiny 3-1/2 skate size, and the pair she lost had to be custom made.
“I'm not very tall ... they don't come much smaller than me,” said Langlois, who stands a mere 4-foot-11. “I'd look really silly if I had big feet.”
“They're almost not there,” said Cody Hay, her pairs partner from Grande Prairie, Alta.
Fortunately, Jackson Skates was able to get Langlois a new pair, but not until they lost three weeks of training. Then there was the painful process of breaking them in — something Langlois normally starts in the spring, not a month before the Canadian championships.
“As much as I was trying not to build up any anger over this, when I had to break in the new ones ...,” she said. “Let me tell you, the first couple of blistering days and bruising days and weekends ... poor Cody had to deal with me.”
It certainly gave him a new perspective on pain.
“Any time I felt like complaining, I'd look at her trying to break in her skates and thought 'maybe this isn't the best time to complain,' ” said Hay, 23. “It helped me with my training, seeing what she was going through.”
Added Langlois: “One day, he tried to tell me his foot was hurting and just gave him this glare (think Barbara Fusar-Poli giving Maurizio Margaglio the death stare after their original program flop at the Turin Olympics) ... The skin on my feet was ripped, I had bruises all over my ankles.”
The boots fit fine now, and Langlois says she's well stocked again in the makeup department.
“Everybody gave me gift certificates for makeup for Christmas,” she said. “I was in Russia with nothing but the lip gloss in my purse. No mascara, no nothing ... it was very tragic.”
The latter line was followed with a laugh. Then again, with Langlois, it's always something and she's gotten pretty used to that fact.
“Someday, I'll write a book ... The Adventures of Anabelle,” she said. “I love drama.”
Sounds like a good read to me.
Hell, I'd make myself available to write it. You just can't make this kind of stuff up.