Why I Never Took Home the Gold in Figure Skating

With the Winter Olympic Games underway in Beijing, I find myself reminiscing about my own experience as an Olympic figure skater. Or rather as a child with an overactive imagination and easy access to ice.

Every winter, my father flooded the vacant lot across from our home for the town’s children to skate on. One of the benefits of living so close to the skating pond was that I could put on my skates in our warm house instead of in the skating shack. Then I’d walk across the gravel parking lot and through the weeds surrounding the pond wearing them. And no, I didn’t have blade guards. Nor was there a Zamboni to clear away the gravel and weeds I no doubt carried with me. In fact, up until I attended my first hockey game a few years ago, I thought Zamboni was some kind of fancy pasta.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time on the ice back then, some of it upright. And the winter Olympics always inspired me to skate more than usual. I’d watch the figure skaters, then head out to do my own triple axels and toe loops. I’m kidding. I never learned to do an axel or a toe loop, triple or otherwise. But I’m proud to say I did learn to skate backwards and not just when it was windy on the ice.

I was convinced that skating backwards was an important step on the road to figure skating stardom and one day, listening to a TV interview with an Olympic figure skater, I learned another one. She said she practiced skating for four hours every day. Aha, I thought. That’s the ticket. More practice.

So, I skated more. But alas, more time on the ice wasn’t enough to overcome a lack of lessons and coaches, not to mention talent. Of course, I didn’t skate for four hours a day either. I had homework and chores to do. Also, no way to record Bewitched and The Beverly Hillbillies for later.   

I took my share of falls as all figure skaters do. The most serious one happened when I skated over a hockey stick and landed smack on my chin. If you think weeds and gravel are hard on skate blades, try skating over a hockey stick.

Maybe it was that incident that finally led me to give up my dreams of Olympic glory. Or maybe by then I’d moved on to that other equally realistic goal I had as a child, that of becoming president. And as you’d expect from someone who didn’t want to put her skates on in a cold ice shack, I dreamt of being elected as a write-in candidate because I thought campaigning would be too much trouble. 

Eventually I gave up that dream too, but I continued to skate through high school and college—literally though not metaphorically. But as the years went by, I skated less and less, and I haven’t been on ice since I chaperoned my son’s class on a skating field trip many years ago. By the way, that was nearly as challenging as becoming an Olympic figure skater. A skating rink full of young children is like a bowling alley without any lanes. I barely managed to stay upright.

If you’d been watching me skate that day—or any other day for that matter—you might have thought I have nothing to show for all the hours I once spent on ice. But that’s not exactly true. I had a wonderful time skating. And I still have many good memories, a great admiration for figure skaters and a barely visible scar on my chin.

  Dorothy Rosby is the author of three books of humorous essays, including I Used to Think I Was Not That Bad and Then I Got to Know Me Better. Contact drosby@rushmore.com.