(Photo: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)

Figure skater Oksana Baiul isn’t following the Olympics. “I don’t watch TV, and I don’t read anything in magazines,” she said at a benefit for Tikva, which supports needy Jewish children in Odessa, on August 12. So why was she schlepping her gold medal? “They said, ‘Please bring the medal.’ I told them, ‘I’m not wearing it,’ and they said that’s fine,” she explained, the medal mounted in a frame and resting in a shopping bag. “I had it for ten years in a shoe box. The jeweler says you have to polish it, because it’s not real. It’s bullshit.” (They’re composed largely of other metals, with gold plating.) “You really have to take care of it,” she continued. “I’m like, ‘I’m not paying any more money to make this thing look like gold.’ ”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
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