At the novice and junior levels, Tiffany Stiegler achieved major results in pairs with older brother Johnnie, winning both 1995 novice and 1997 junior national titles, a fourth-place finish at the 1999 World Junior Figure Skating Championships, and three medals on the Junior Grand Prix, as well as two pewters at the senior national level while still a young teenager. (As a sidenote, if proof is ever needed that the Internet lives forever, these 15-year-old Stiegler fan pages are two more reminders.) Injury and height challenges, however, contributed to diminishing results at the senior level; Johnnie left the sport in 2003, while Tiffany teamed with Bert Cording for one final season in pairs. But in 2004, Tiffany, among the taller pairs females, relocated from Irina Rodnina’s pairs camp in El Segundo, California, to Igor Shpilband and Marina Zoueva’s training facility at Canton, Michigan’s Arctic Edge and switched disciplines to ice dance, teaming with Russian-born Sergei Magerovski, who had previously skated with wife Rebecca.
Success came quickly for Stiegler and Magerovski, who earned pewter at the 2005 U.S. Championships and, for their accomplishment, an assignment to Skate America for the following Olympic season (for which Magerovski was able to obtain American citizenship in case of a Torino berth). But their trip to Skate America suggested a learning curve for the team and still-developing ice dancer Stiegler, with the team moving to Nikolai Morozov’s camp in Connecticut. And at January’s national championships, the team would drop two spots from the previous year to sixth — including a seventh-place finish in the Yankee Polka compulsory — in a deeper field that included the addition of Kim Navarro & Brent Bommentre and Jamie Silverstein & Ryan O’Meara.
Though their program to Notre Dame de Paris may not have been as difficult a program as those from the most elite teams, their fifth-place free dance from that event is a worth a view, particularly as a demonstration of the differences that do lie between pairs and dance. Where Stiegler’s performance ability, extension, and core and positions in lifts are quite strong, depth of edge and power in stroking were works in progress.
But the team and Stiegler, unfortunately, would end their run here. As discussed by fans at the time, the team was not assigned to any events for the fall of 2006 and soon announced their split, elaborating in a later article Magerovski’s disappointment and desire to return to Michigan. Stiegler, meanwhile, was ultimately unable to find another partner — certainly a consequence that binds her to many a more veteran female ice dancer.