Johnny Weir sure got INTO it with Howard Stern this morning. Johnny is out promoting his memoir, Welcome to My World and making the usually stops: The Today Show, Good Day New York, and Joy Behar, but per ushe, it’s Howard Stern who will pull out the most candid and revealing interview on any press tour. Let’s dig in, shall we?
Listen to the full interview:
First up, Howard grills Johnny on his bottom line, and finds out that a career as an Olympic figure skater doesn’t really pay all that much, despite the great notoriety Johnny has achieved. Johnny says he’s only made about $500,000 this past year, which is a fraction of the inflated paychecks of professional athletes, and even a far cry from when fellow figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Oksana Baiul were raking it in with endorsements back in the 90s.
Remember the theories floating last year questioning Johnny’s low scores, despite his mad skills on skates? Johnny concedes that the generation gap between he and the judges might explain it, and also revealed that a lot of people felt he had an advantage over his competition because he trained in Russia. People were also telling him he was too flamboyant and acting “too gay” for the conservative judges as well. Even so, he knew he got the reality show, Be Good Johnny Weir, because he was flamboyant and the producers knew people would tune in. [For our thoughts on this subject see Johnny Be Good, Johnny Be Robbed]
Johnny also chats about how he achieved his Black Swanesque figure while training: one small salad and tiny piece of chicken or beef A DAY, a total of around 200 calories.
Okay, now that Howard has Johnny nice and comfortable he finally digs in: When was the last time you got laid? What celebrity do you wanna fuck? What age when you first hooked up with a guy? How often do you have sex? What’s your type?
Have you ever seen a book cover this gay?
Johnny talks about first thinking he was gay at 6 years old when he was watching Pretty Woman and kinda wanted to be Julia Roberts. Growing up in a very conservative town in Pennslyvania he had no other gay friends but says his teen years were nothing like Kurt Hummel‘s on Glee, which he says looks like a horror story. As a teenager, he already felt he was better than everyone else because he was such a brilliant skater, so he had enormous self esteem and built his identity around that. He talks about his first kiss with another male skater at 15 years old, a guy who hated being gay so much that he was “straight” and had a girlfriend.
He expands on why he’d marry a woman:
“I would marry a woman and have that partnership, that friendship, that love and I could have a boyfriend on the side and she could get her rocks off on the side. It’s a win win. But, we’d be in a union and that’s my opinion of what marriage should be. You have to be with your best friend.”
It goes on and on. Howard finds out his sex preferences: top or bottom, why he doesn’t have a boyfriend, whether he’s ever slept with a woman, details of anal sex, how often he cross dresses, his crush on Justin Timberlake, why he refuses to give up wearing fur and his affinity for Kelly Osbourne and Christina Aguilera. Pretty much required listening if you’re a fan of Johnny Weir.
why does him being proud of only eating 200 calories a day annoy me so much?
Especially because it seems so backwards–he’s training for hours a day, his body needs fuel.
Because it sends a dangerous message — that eating 200 calories a day is enough to fuel any body at all, let alone an athletic body
omg the more that i listen to it i can’t even listen to it! he is describing anorexia and i feel like his fan base is a little susceptible to these messages and they don’t need to hear that 200 calories makes you “stronger” to reach your goal.
i don’t like johnny weir anymore, it’s official.
Yeah, that part was crazy. I think it’s only one aspect of the figure skating nuttiness. I mean, it is a sport where they literally judge you.
I don’t think it makes Johnny Weir bad, it just indicates that he was swept up into a certain mentality this is unhealthy. It seems he may not be completely out of it, so he may not fully grasp the problem with what he is saying. Hopefully enough other people are communicating a different message.
It’s funny, we associate athletes with health, but sometimes the opposite is true. Look at Jose Canseco, Mark McGuire, and all the others on crazy steroids. Some of these marathon runners who look like they’re about to faint or snap in half can’t be healthy. It’s wild.
yeah there’s a lot about this in the book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters, which i’ve read like ~12 times.
and totally i agree — it’s INCREIDBLE what the human body can withstand, of course. especaially these athletes, particularly gymnasts and figure skaters.
i think most people, regardless of lifestyle, don’t realize that and the shock/surprise of how much your body will endure continually propels us forward towards additional self-destruction in hopes of further transcendence.
i guess the way he’s talking about it here strikes me as incredibly problematic — like he’s a sane, conscious person claiming that 200 calories is indeed good for the human body rather than framing it as a conscious choice to do something unhealthy for other reasons. i don’t know if that makes sense.
It does, now that you mention it.
I don’t even know how that’s possible.
I don’t either, but I’ve known people who are struggling with eating disorders, drug addiction, etc., and it’s pretty surprising what the body can deal with.
Of course, I hope people eventually learn to treat their bodies with respect, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
I’m hoping there’s at least a little bit of exaggeration in there.
I don’t think he says he’s proud of it–he says it worked for him. At the end of the program he gets a call from a man whose daughter is a figure skater, and Johnny tells him not to let his daughter try his diet. In other words, he’s quite aware that it is not a healthy diet and he does NOT recommend it to anyone else. How he’s managed to survive and compete successfully on that diet is mind-boggling…
@ elena
Perhaps because your avatar is Oprah?
This isn’t the full interview, it’s only about 18 minutes of it.
Refresh the page, it’s the full 40 minutes.
Yes, eating 200 calories a day is pretty ridiculous and no, not every competitive figure skater adheres to this sort of diet, but I think Johnny’s point in mentioning this is that he had to condition his mind to be stronger than his body. This is the essence of figure skating; A skater’s success is as reliant on muscle as it is on mental strength, visualization, and confidence. Now I’m not denying the sport’s promotion of a nearly unhuman physique, but I’m just saying that I believe that Johnny’s goal was to push his body to its limits in order to achieve an olympic standing, not to minimize his eating for caloric purposes. I personally have been able to have successful skating practices while being on a cleansing diet (liquids only) for nearly a week, and once you get over the initial hunger, just knowing the physical extremes you can push your body to perform under is an incredibly empowering tool that will give you a mental advantage that physical training alone cannot. just felt the need to defend that misinterpretation.
hey, howard, please. change the subject! Its not only about the boy being gay. he’s a Olimpic medal winner, he has a book out, and he’s a whole lot more things than his sexuality. I think you pushed waaaay too hard! I want to know more things about the boy that your interview gone to.
cmon, “what do you feel when u have something in your ass”
lke….really? REALLY DUDE?
omg.
I appreciate his desire to bring something different to the world of skating, but I just don’t like him. I’m not down with his “I’m better than anyone else” attitude. I feel as though he tries too hard to convince everyone else how wonderful he is. I think that he’s probably a deeply insecure human being, and that he needs to keep ruffling other people’s feathers to validate himself.
I’m not crazy about his skating, either. He’s got some good moves, but I find that he relies too much on his outfits and doing these Lady GaGa-esque hand gestures to try to be unique. It’s distracting and superfluous. I’ve seen him perform several times, and I’ve never been spellbound.
I’ve been reading his book, and yeah, I’m thinking that if he writes another version in 25 years, he’ll acknowledge anorexia. I still love him, and its heartbreaking to see this denial through the text.
I wonder how widespread it is in the sport. From what I can tell from the text, he’s in denial that it’s a problem, just acts as if it’s an aspect of the sport. Ahhh.
The bio is interesting in how often he discusses his conflict with the US Figure Skating Association. They have a huge amount of control over who goes to what competition, and what kind of skating gets presented. Lots of internalized homophobia/gender norms policing.
See, that’s why I believe that he’s got a lot of self-esteem issues. The way he spoke about knowing that he’s better/stronger than the human will to REQUIRE food by not eating is a huge cry for help. I have and continue to struggle with disordered eating myself; I can see the signs.
What does he say in his book w/r/t his diet?
not a ton (and caveat- i’m not all the way through), but he mentions that on his first date w/ his first boyfriend, he only eats a tomato, and how he was grateful that his sweetie was also a skater so he knew not to call an anorexia hotline. There’s another point when he mentions that he should have only eaten a tomato, so I wonder if that’s a dietary habit or a figure of speech.
He also will reference both hard training and “hard dieting” in preparation for competitions. Also- he mentions his physical stats, and if I recall correctly, they’re a little more dire-sounding than what I am now hearing in the interview. The difference in what I’ve read and what he’s saying in the interviewer makes me want to check before I post them.
He says he’s 5’9 and 136 lbs presently, not what he weighed during training
yeah, i know. the difference is pretty large, so i’m going to look at the book after work to make sure i know what i’m talking about.
Disordered eating is rampant in figure skating, especially at the elite level. Evan Lysacek (Olympic Gold Medalist) has also talked about this. His competition diet sounds exactly like Johnny’s — small amount of lean protein plus greens (Evan mentioned swiss chard and kale). Evan has stated that even 1 extra pound on his super-skinny 6’1″ frame is enough to mess up his jumps. Also, Evan’s coach, Frank Carroll, is infamous in figure skating circles for the following quote: “You can either eat OR you can compete. You can’t do both.”
I’m with ‘Clarissa’ on this:
I know the point of Howard Stern’s show is to be shocking and explicit, but some of the questions made me just think “Really? Come on.” I was more surprised that Johnny answered them.
I’ve heard alot from gay celebrities after an interview stating “I’m not just gay you know”. That’s what I thought after this interview, ‘yeah he’s gay, he’s also a Olypmic level athlete.’
Hmm, if that is true with his 200 calories for a day diet than he looks pretty healthy! He must be looking skinnier, exspecially as a athlet! Of course he doesn’t look fat but I don’t look at him and the first thing what I think is that this is a person with a eating-problem! But with Weir you never know what he is saying next!
I think it’s more that he has other problems, that he wants to be a star for example!
I NEVER KNEW