Everything that I’ve ever been able to accomplish in skating and in life has come out of adversity and perseverance.
For ice skating, you really have to block out your fears and throw yourself into it – there must be trust in your partner and a trust that you will be safe.
Right now it looks like skating is done for me. I’m ready to move on. But if baseball doesn’t work out and I still have that itch for skating, I may be back.
I was a tomboy who liked to play rough just like my two older brothers. That’s probably why I liked the athletic part of skating – especially the jumping!
Passover and Easter are the only Jewish and Christian holidays that move in sync, like the ice skating pairs we saw during the winter Olympics.
Figure skating, especially the longer performances, are such a feat. It requires so much stamina and is so beautiful.
I want people to see a real person on the ice. I want to seem tangible, hard-working, passionate about my skating, not just going out and doing something I’ve rehearsed a million times.
My skating is a very emotional thing that comes from the heart, never doing it for the medal.
Baseball is my true passion. Skating was more of a short-term goal.
Skating was popular, but it wasn’t mainstream. It had this underground following, and you could go on tours, win decent prize money, and make royalties from signature products – that’s how I came to buy a house when I was a senior in high school.
Think about it – pro wrestling as an Olympic sport would be pretty cool. Look at figure skating or gymnastics – what is it? It’s a choreographed performance that is judged.
The skating world is a very small world.
Vancouver is an amazing city and luckily, growing up in the Seattle area, I was able to immerse myself into the culture at a young age, traveling back and forth across the border for skating competitions as a youngster.
Skating is big in Chicago. There’s a lot of hockey; a lot of the boys play hockey. And figure skating is big.
Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.
Although in skating you compete with other people, anyone who achieves a certain level of success is first and foremost competing against themselves. And for me, the idea that I could always do better, learn more, learn faster, is something that came from skating.
Some communities are formed through schools, churches, workplaces. But much of how we learn about one another as a society comes from physically being together in places like skating rinks.
I skate a lot with my shirt off, so working out has always been important to me. I almost have as much fun working out as I do skating. And seeing your body change, and seeing yourself get bigger and more toned and cut, makes a big difference in how you feel about yourself.
All those years of skating and dancing have carried over. I can’t design anything without thinking of how a woman’s body will look and move when she’s wearing it.
Music is fun, but I’m an ice skater. I may sing songs and do shows, make movies and other things… that’s all well and good and I enjoy it, and I would never trade any of those for anything. But figure skating is who I am.
I started skating and I kind of liked it because I could run circles around the guys that wouldn’t pick me to play baseball.
Education is more important than skating. I want to keep up with my schoolwork and my skating.
I love figure skating and what I am able to express creatively. I want to leave a legacy in the sport.
Stacy had this more fluid style. You meet him, he’s just such a nice guy. Tony’s an awesome guy too, but back then, he was a real aggressive kid and they were in such a different place. Stacy was so sensitive and at the same time so competitive when it came to his skating.
My Olympic moment from the individual event was that I was really able to enjoy my skating, and so that meant a lot to me, and I didn’t portray that accurately.
The skill set for hockey is so specific to skating and if you haven’t been skating as a kid it’s impossible to play – and I wasn’t a skater.
2017 was probably one of the hardest years of my life. There were a lot of personal struggles. I lost some very important people. I had a best friend and then a grandfather pass away. Through it all, skating became an anchor. I used to think of it as a job. Now it was getting me through and giving me hope.
What our generation hopefully is doing is not believing in that so-called bad luck that Canada has with figure skating at the Olympics.
The first time I ever sang in front of a crowd of people was, like, 10,000 people in Japan at a skating exhibition.
I was just ice skating. I had no concept of that. In those days you couldn’t see the judges. I was this little person on the ice and they were just people that would stand around the boards.
Our father got us into skating and built us many ramps around our yard.
I’ve always wanted to make a music video with skating and different imagery, something very artistic.
Figure skating has been a great influence for me. I took dance at the School of American Ballet, which helped my own skating. And whether you are a skater or a dancer, without sounding narcissistic, it is all about looking in the mirror.
I began skating in the official practice venue of the 2002 Games. It was a huge Olympic atmosphere with Apollo Ohno sitting on the wall every day when I walked into the rink. That was really cool and very inspiring to see.
Skating has given me so many opportunities.
I love figure skating, so I do that as often as I can. Other than that I just go to the gym or swim. I love swimming.
I have so much to give to skating in Canada.
Baseball is my true passion. Skating was more of a short-term goal.
Just a whole different style, just a whole different way of going about an audience and a way about skating. And they are so brilliant in their own way, which is great, and that’s what Brian was saying; is the styles are different, and it’s the whole mentality.
Because I don’t look like I’m skating around as hard as Bobby Bassen doesn’t mean my mind isn’t working twice as hard as Bobby’s mind. Just because I can’t fight like Kelly Chase doesn’t mean standing in front of the net getting cross-checked and slashed isn’t toughness as well.
I think back to my time when I was skating: I was 15, and there was no such thing as Instagram.
In figure skating, you have four minutes to do your best. It’s your time; you do your best.
I was passionate. I found something that I loved. I could be all alone in a big old skating rink and nobody could get near me and I didn’t have to talk to anybody because of my shyness. It was great. I was in my fantasy world.
I grew up figure skating, and in figure skating there is only a handful of black people at the time figure skating with me.
My mother introduced me to many different things, and figure skating was one of them. I just thought that it was magical having to glide across the ice.
In skating or any amateur sport, as athletes we share something in common: the cost of training is quite a burden on our parents or on the athletes themselves trying to find a way to pay for their costs.
There were many times that I took such a big hit that I was dazed; I’m not going to lie. I’d see black, but I’m still looking for the puck. Where’s the play going? I’m going to keep going. Same thing in figure skating. If I take a hard fall, I’m going to get up, and I’m going to do the next jump.
Power and strength are most important for my skating.
I was just kind of sour with the sport. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I went into a period of excessive partying and doing anything that wasn’t figure skating, really. I went and built a house with my brother. I shut the whole world out and shut everything down.
My parents always tell me that they never would have let me start if they had known how expensive and difficult figure skating is.