Figure Skating Champ in Meth Ring Bust

No, it isn't Tonya Harding. I have vague memories of this girl from back in the 1990's when she was a U.S. champion. Now she's behind bars charged with being a major player in a methamphetamine ring.

Chances are former U.S. and world bronze medalist Nicole Bobek won't "skate" if she's convicted of conspiring to distribute methamphetamine. Bobek was "actively involved in the upper echelon of this ring," said Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio.

"She played a significant role in this operation," said DeFazio, whose office conducted a probe that led to more than a dozen arrests.

Bobek, 31, who lives in Manhattan and Florida, was brought back north this week from Florida by Hudson County sheriff's officers to face the charges. She did not fight extradition.

Today she appeared via video link from the county jail in Kearny -- dressed in green prison attire, her hair short and dark-colored -- where a judge ordered her to remain held on $200,000 cash bail.

It was a far cry from the blonde bombshell who skated her way to several figure skating titles.

Bobek was part of a major meth ring busted by authorities, but her name was being withhold until she could be arrested, DeFazio said today.

Cue up all the ice jokes.

This apparently isn't her first brush with the law.

When she won her only U.S. figure skating title in 1995, Bobek was on a two-year probation for a felony charge under terms of a Michigan program for young adult offenders. A judge later dismissed the probation because he felt information leaks had subverted confidentiality terms of the program.

She had been arrested in November 1994 and charged with first-degree home invasion of the residence of another skater in the suburban Detroit club where Bobek was training. She entered a conditional plea of guilty on the charge, which was to have been expunged if the probation were completed successfully.

That followed by less than a year the Harding-Nancy Kerrigan affair, in which Harding would be stripped of her 1994 U.S. title for her role in the attack on Kerrigan.

A few hours after Bobek won the 1995 championship, Frank Carroll, then Kwan's coach, noted the link.

"I was just thinking,'' Carroll said, "that we've gone from Tonya Harding to Nicole Bobek. Oh, my God!''

By 1995, Carroll had been one of Bobek's seven ex-coaches. Her teenage rebelliousness and indifference to training (like Harding, she smoked cigarettes) drove most of the coaches crazy, but all of them were as crazed by her talent.

Bobek's mother, Jana, and her mother's friend, Joyce, bounced around the country looking for the coach who could harness it, which Richard Callaghan did for one season.

Renee Roca, a U.S. ice dance champion who had choreographed some of Bobek's programs, gave a chillingly accurate analysis in 1995 of the skater's future.
"It is hard to say what will become of Nicole,'' Roca said.