Oksana Baiul

Oksana Serhiyivna Baiul-Farina (Оксана Сергіївна Баюл-Фаріна; born 16 November 1977) is a Ukrainian retired competitive figure skater.

Baiul was born on 16 November 1977 in Dnipro, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union, an industrial city famous for manufacturing Soviet missiles.

Her grandfather died in 1987, and her grandmother in 1988.

In the late 1990s, she followed her coach, Valentyn Nikolayev, to Richmond, Virginia, where she lived for several years before moving to Cliffside Park, New Jersey.

In 1991, her mother, who had been very healthy, died suddenly of ovarian cancer, when Baiul was 13.

Her father appeared at her mother's funeral, but Baiul wanted nothing to do with him.

She lived with the wife of her coach, Stanislav Koritek, who had moved to Canada, and then with friends.

After moving to Odesa in mid-1992, Baiul lived chiefly in a dormitory.

Her expenses were covered by the state because of her promise in skating.

She is the 1993 world champion and the 1994 Olympic champion in ladies' singles.

Baiul is the first and only skater representing Ukraine to win gold at the Winter Olympics.

She is also the first Olympic champion of independent Ukraine in any sport.

In 1993, she lived a month with coach Galina Zmievskaya between the European and World championships.

After winning the gold medal in 1994, Baiul decided to turn professional in order to tour in the United States and have a career based on her skating.

She followed one of her coaches to Connecticut.

Later, she also became involved in a variety of TV appearances, and benefit skates.

She has lived in the United States since 1994.

After the 1994 Winter Olympics, Baiul moved to the United States and started living in Simsbury, Connecticut.

It is the location of the International Skating Center of Connecticut.

In 1997 she published two books, a memoir about her life and one on skating.

In January 1997 (three years after winning the gold medal), Baiul was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol after crashing her car into a tree in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

The charges were dropped after she met the terms of probation and completed an alcohol education program.

Her drinking problem worsened, however.

In May 1997 she entered an alcohol rehabilitation program for two and a half months.

In 2003, years after her father left the family, she phoned her old rink in Dnipro to ask for assistance in locating him.

Assuming it was a prank, they hung up twice.

Eventually Baiul convinced them of her identity.

The rink manager helped her reunite with her father Sergey Baiul in September 2003, when she was 25 years old.

He confirmed that her Romanian maternal grandmother was Jewish.

According to Orthodox Judaism, her mother and Baiul would also be classified as halakhically Jewish.

Baiul decided to identify as Jewish because of the custom of matrilineality in Judaism.

In a 2004 interview, she said she had been sober for six years, saying "This is more important than Olympic gold."

Baiul was raised as a Russian Orthodox Christian.

As a child, she heard rumors that her maternal grandmother was Jewish.

In 2005, she said, "Being Jewish, that feels good. It feels natural, like a second skin".

Her parents divorced when she was two years old, and her father, Sergey Baiul—who died in 2006 —disappeared shortly after.

No one is certain whether he deserted his family or was pressured to leave town when he and his wife divorced.

She was raised by her mother, Marina, a French teacher, and her maternal grandparents.

In addition to having Ukraine ancestry, she is of Russian descent through her maternal grandfather.

After residing there for 14 years, Baiul moved to Pennsylvania in March 2012, settling in Upper Makefield Township, Bucks County.