NEW YORK — Nancy Kerrigan‘s laced up ice skates and performed on rinks more often this year than in any in her husband’s recent memory.
And she’s going to stay busy.
Kerrigan, 46, will be the main choreographer for an event for the first time at the Skate Niagara Ice Show in Saint Catherines, Ontario, on Feb. 26, husband and agent Jerry Solomon said Tuesday.
“It’s been nice for her to start to ease into doing something else, because she’s not going to skate forever, but she does feel, and this is probably a big reason why she still is skating, she does feel a big responsibility to continue to give back to the sport and to be visible because the sport hasn’t been as strong in the United States over the last several years, as it certainly was when she was competing,” Solomon said.
Kerrigan performed Tuesday at the Bank of America Winter Village at Bryant Park tree lighting ceremony, under chilly rain in Manhattan along with U.S. Olympic champions Brian Boitano, Meryl Davis and Charlie White and two-time U.S. Olympian Johnny Weir.
That came after a three-week, 15-city Halloween on Ice tour across the Northeast and Midwest. It’s put on by Solomon’s StarGames production company.
“I love doing skating shows where there’s some sort of story involved,” said Kerrigan, who joined Twitter in May and has performed as a vampire with fangs during the Halloween tour. “I’ve done shows for the last bunch of years, different shows here or there, maybe one or two or five, depends, but I haven’t done a tour. Just sort of one-off things. Why? Because I’m a mom, and I have three kids.
“We’ve talked about Halloween [on Ice] again next year, we’ve talked about doing that, but there aren’t many tours out there anymore.”
The year has been busier for Kerrigan, mostly because the off-and-on annual Halloween on Ice production turned into a larger tour.
“Fifteen [shows] might be one or two too many,” Solomon said. “I think everybody was pretty beat up by the time the tour was over.”
But the two-time Olympic medalist is enthused about choreography.
“Which she’s never really done before,” Solomon said. “She worked very closely with [four-time Canadian World champion] Kurt Browning on Halloween on Ice [choreography]. She was involved in a little bit of some of the choreography here [at Bryant Park].”
Solomon didn’t rule out Kerrigan crossing over into helping current competitive skaters with their programs.
“Maybe, but I think that her feeling is that in order to do that, she has to be really up on the rules, and I don’t know that she’s going to have that level of desire,” he said. “She, I think, likes more so the creative side of what it is that we do when we produce these shows.”
