The Ice Has Its Perks

Nobody warned me about Dancing on Ice. One evening it was on, and then several evenings later I realized I was actively planning my schedule around it, which is not something I expected to be doing with a celebrity ice-skating competition. I don’t even like ice skating, not really—occasionally I’ll go down a YouTube rabbit hole of Russian athletes performing as Sailor Moon on a frozen rink, but that’s about as far as it goes. Until now.

Annette Dytrt is the reason I stayed. Five-time German national champion, now coaching a celebrity partner through the mechanics of pair skating on live television. She talks about being on blades the way most people talk about walking—effortless, automatic, no big deal. For her celebrity, it’s apparently something close to life-threatening. She broke her jaw once, she mentions, the way you’d mention having spilled coffee. Katarina Witt was her childhood idol. She was simply the queen on the ice, Annette said, and you can hear the inheritance in how she carries herself.

And then there’s the Playboy. February 2019, photos by Irene Schaur. Figure skaters in Playboy have something of a tradition at this point, as Annette herself acknowledged, and she honored it thoroughly. I came for the show, stayed because the skating is genuinely impressive, and now I know considerably more about Annette Dytrt than I did a month ago. Not a complaint.