JANUARY 2012
Live from the 2012 US Figure Skating Championships in San Jose, California. In addition to capturing some sounds and flavors of the event. There are clips from both the Friday night and the Saturday on-ice event, with remarks from Brian Boitano, Pat St. Peter, and Dr. Lawrence Mondschein. There are interviews with: Rockne Brubaker, choreographer Robert Mauti, Allison Scott (Jeremy Abbott’s mom), Heather from the Michelle Kwan Forum, coaches Christy Krall, Karen Kwan, Peter Oppegard, and Tom Zakrajsek, The Boys Who Score, and a fan named Peggy who thought she’d see what a live skating event was all about. 42 minutes, 30 seconds.

Jeremy Abbot gets his Short Program scores

Win two DVDs of your choice from Sk8Strong!
There is a contest running with this podcast: you can ‘create your own’ 2 DVD set from Sk8Strong, the complete off-ice training resource for figure skaters and coaches. Great for all the coaches out there! To enter, send me either through email. my Twitter or my Facebook page the answer to the following question: How many 6.0s did Michelle Kwan earn in her career?

All entries received between February 3 to February 29, 2012 are eligible. The winner will be picked at random from all correct entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

Day 3 for me here at Nationals, and I finally got some of my voice back so I could do some podcasting! I spent the morning sleeping in a bit to get really rested (a rare thing for me with two little ones at home) and went for a nice long walk. I ended up sitting next to Danny and Estelle Kwan in a cafe, and then walked back to my hotel to get ready for the Original Dance. A picture of Davis & White, who were brilliant as usual.

I also finally got to meet choreographer Tom Dickson in person, who I’ve interviewed but had never met in the flesh.

Then there was the on-ice Hall of Fame ceremony for Michelle Kwan:

And I gave a HUGE hug to Phillip Mills, who was the choreographer for Ashley Wagner’s two brilliant programs. He was standing with Paul Wylie’s mother:

So the interviews I got today were plentiful, which was good considering I missed two days after being sick and losing my voice! I got: Karen Kwan, Peter Oppegard, the Boys Who Score, Christy Krall, Allison Scott, Tom Z, Robert Mauti, Rockne Brubaker and a random fan.

After a good night’s sleep (thanks Nyquil!) I woke up feeling . . . well, not a whole lot better. Ugh. So I decided to skip the Short Dance and sleep some more so I could push through for the Men’s Short Program and the Michelle Kwan Hall of Fame induction. I was NOT going to miss that! So I didn’t really rally until about 2:00 pm. This was not the way I intended to spend this California vacation, I can tell you. I was looking forward to getting to work out, do lots of interviews, enjoy San Jose, etc. But now I’m in triage mode just trying to get better.The one thing I did have to do though in the morning was pick up my Hall of Fame ticket at the Fairmont. And guess who I ran into there:

Finally after sleeping most of the morning, I felt better by the Men’s event! But when I get sick my voice is always the last to recover, so I still sound like Brenda Vaccaro with a bad smoking habit. No interviews for me yet! But I did get to enjoy all the men. I was sitting with my good buddy Doug Mattis and his partner Terence:

And just a few seats away were Emily Hughes and Tenley Albright’s daughter, choreographer Erin:

A few images from the Men’s SP itself: Jason Brown (who I adore as a person since I skate with him occasionally in Chicago . . . he’s a great kid!) getting his scores while Jeremy Abbott takes the ice underneath:

And Jeremy with Yuka Sato and Jason Dunjen getting his monster SP score!

Then it was time for the Michelle Kwan Hall of Fame Induction! I headed over to the Fairmont Hotel with a friend from FSU, “peibeck”:

. . . and there was an embarrassment of riches there as far as famous skating people. Frank Carroll indulged a young fan with a photo:

Doug Wilson of ABC with Peggy Fleming:

Tom Collins of Champions on Ice:

Charlie Tickner and Karen Kwan with some young fans:

Allison Scott, Leah Adams, Allen Scott and myself:

And then there was the induction itself:

Wait . . . who is this obscure skater I’m with?

And after much patience, we got a picture of “peibeck” with Miss Kwan as well:

Well, crap. Not much to report since I brought the bad sinus cold that my toddler and baby had with me to California. So instead of enjoying the warm sun of San Jose and getting lots of podcast interviews, I can barely speak due to having such a sore throat! I had to cancel both of my interviews with John Zimmerman and with Tom Collins. Wahhhh! I even had to leave the Ladies SP early in order to get to CVS and buy some drugs before they closed. But I did manage to get to the FSU meetup for lunch at a sushi place, so here is a picture with those lovely folks:

And here’s the view from my seats of the end of the Opening Ceremonies:

DECEMBER 2011
An interview with Lucinda Ruh. Ms. Ruh is a 2-time Swiss National Champion, star of both Stars On Ice and Champions On Ice, and was twice named one of the “25 most influential people in figure skating” by International Figure Skating Magazine. She astounded crowds worldwide with her gifts in spinning as an amateur skater throughout the 1990s, competing in eight World Championships and on the Junior and Senior Grand Prix Circuits. Her spins influenced how spins were judged when IJS was adopted, and in 2003 she became the World Guinness record holder for the longest spin on ice. Her own website is www.lucindaruh.com, and she is the author of “Frozen Teardrop: The Tragedy and Triumph of Figure Skating’s Queen of Spin.” We talk about her fascinating life story, how she was never interested in an Olympic Gold medal, and how she came to wear that iconic gold jumpsuit. 1 hour, 5 minutes, 23 seconds.

Win a copy of Lucinda Ruh’s Book!
Two lucky winners can win a copy of Lucinda Ruh’s book, “Frozen Teardrop: The Tragedy and Triumph of Figure Skating’s Queen of Spin.” It’s a fascinating look inside Lucinda’s experiences growing up in the sport, and is at once both devastating and uplifting. (Read my review of “Frozen Teardrop” here)

To enter, send me either through email, twitter or my Facebook page the answer to the following question about Lucinda Ruh: she mentions during the podcast (about 32 minutes in) that there is one spin she does that she wishes were named after her and known as the “Lucinda” spin. Instead it is commonly referred to as . . . what?

All entries received between December 23, 2011 and January 30, 2012 are eligible. The winners will be picked at random from all correct entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

Read my review of Lucinda Ruh’s “Frozen Teardrop”

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On her most embarrassing skating moment: I was quite young, maybe 11, 12 years old, and I was living in Japan, so I had to keep on going back to Switzerland to do their tests. Because even if I wasn’t doing the Japanese tests they weren’t counting them for Switzerland, to compete for Switzerland.  So I always  had to go back, and I would always do a couple of tests in a row because it was quite a long trip. So I was about 11, and everyone was like, oh my gosh, this girl is coming from Japan, and no one really knew me yet, but, you know,  my name was buzzing in their ears so they were all expecting this incredible girl [laughs]. And the first thing I do is go on the ice with my guards, and fall, like, flat on my face. So that was the very first thing they saw of me.  But afterwards I did really great and passed all the tests. So probably that moment was quite embarrassing. All the way from Japan to go on the ice with my guards [laughs].

On training in Japan with coach Nabuo Sato, and not getting a lesson with him for the first six months:  In Japan, respect and loyalty and discipline are so important that, in a way, I think [working on her own] taught me great lessons, even though I was only about seven or eight years old. In one way, it’s kind of painful to think, gosh, I really had to do that, all your friends are having lessons and you’re kind of like training by yourself. And I really had to go every day — otherwise he would think, well, this child is really not motivated in skating, and not disciplined. And that’s when my mother really became my constant, you know, because I had nobody else. I was eight years old so I really leaned on my mother at that time, and she was helping me with my skating. Not really my coach, but as a mother and guiding me a little bit. That’s when we became really really strong together.

This was also what was kind of hurtful but also helpful to me, as a person, not always as a skater. I was an outsider. We were in Japan, we were the only foreigners. I think my mother and father felt like, if we’re not going to follow their rules we’re not going to be accepted into their society. So that’s very strong….but we were always in a foreign country, always the outsider, always the only one out. So they probably felt like, if we don’t do that, no one’s going to take our child. And that’s how I kind of started feeling about myself, too, that I always had to conform to someone else’s beliefs or to someone else’s culture, and I could never really be me.

On how her success while training in Japan led to her being bullied and more isolated: As a child, it’s not easy to deal with, because you’re trying to do the best at whatever you’re doing. And I had a very strict coach, and then I still have Swiss-German parents, who are very tough, very disciplined, and hard work comes first, there’s no excuse…and so, as a child, I thought, I have to work hard, I have to get better. And then the more I got better, the more I was isolated.  In that part, you become very alone. And I think skating in general is quite a lonely sport, especially singles. Pairs, maybe you have that bit more of camaraderie with your partner. But as a singles skater, sometimes — at least, I did, I felt everyone was against me, except my mother, maybe.

On her training regime in Japan:  My father came home from a trip and said I have to spin better than the Swiss spinners — at that time there was Denise Biellmann and Nathalie Krieg. And he said the only way I would leave my name in history was to do something that no one else has done, and he wanted that for me. And he was quite stern about saying that to me, and I was only about seven and that really stuck with me. So that was kind of my goal. And so that was like a snowball getting bigger, and that was our goal, so we worked and worked and we just had to get there, without question. And we never questioned anything, and we worked like crazy. I mean, I woke up and I’d have to run in front of the car, my mom would drive behind me, for about ten minutes, and then I’d jump in the car and eat some breakfast, and then she’d drop me off again, before the rink, and I’d have to run to the rink and warm up, and skate, skate, skate, and I went to school full-time, I didn’t home-school…so I went to school, and then went to the rink and skated until about 10:30 at night, and then ran home. It was non-stop, and Saturdays was non-stop and Sundays was non-stop. And going on something like a sleepover, that was unheard of. But you see, I didn’t know it either, so I didn’t really miss it growing up. I was at school but I was so far removed from their life outside of school that I didn’t know it really existed. I was in my own little world.

On seeing Japanese coaches beating their students, and then being beaten by her own mother:  If you didn’t work hard enough, or didn’t do something good enough, you had the consequences. And then the parents would take over off the ice. It was something of a normal occurrence. One was really terrible. I remember going to the rink in the mornings and the evenings, and there was this little café right next to the rink. And so there was a big rink and this smaller rink where we used to do compulsories, and right next to it was this long café. And [the coaches] used to bring this boy, he was about 12, 13, into this café, and the mother would watch, and they’d beat him for the longest time while we were training. And they’d beat him and beat him and he’d be screaming, and we’d try to play the music a little louder so we wouldn’t hear him. And he was shaking. This boy could barely walk straight, he was so shaking every day. And the memory of that, I could barely skate while this was going on because it made me so sick to my stomach. But no one did anything. You know, it happened, and the next day it happened again…

My coach never hit me, he never touched me, so I think my mom thought it was her turn to take over. That’s the way everyone was doing it. I think she watched and she took over. Nobody knew [that she did this] — in public, she would not. And [when writing the book] I wanted to be sure that, you know, so many people say they are hurt by it and upset by it, and of course I am. I feel like, especially when it’s your own mother doing it to you, of course there’s a lot of pain there. But there was so much frustration behind there that caused her to do that, that I can understand, almost. I’ll take the beating for her frustration. Because my dad was travelling about 95% of the time, and again, we’re in a foreign country, foreign language. It’s not like we’re going from Germany to Paris or America to Canada – from Switzerland to Asia, it’s a big difference, culturally, language-wise. And to be a mother with just one child, it’s very hard, and I think my father was not able to be there to support her in that way, emotionally. And with the frustration of skating and maybe getting only 20 minutes a day for a lesson, I think the competitiveness took over, and I think watching what the other parents were doing, and the teacher did not touch me, I think maybe that put pressure on my mother to make me perform better…as a child, I didn’t understand quite why she was doing it to me, because I thought I was working so hard, it wasn’t like I was lazy or wasn’t trying. So that part hurt me more, not understanding why she could get so mad at me. That was more hurtful than the actual hitting. But I don’t know, it happened and you can’t do anything about that, so all you can do is look back and try to understand it and try to move on.

On why Swiss skaters are known for spinning:  [I had] no Swiss coach, no Swiss water, maybe Swiss chocolate during Christmas time [laughs]. Unless it’s really in the Swiss genes, something about spinning, I don’t know, maybe it has to do with what the watches do, the spin, I don’t know [laughs]. But I really self-taught it. My coach in Japan, he emphasized very much on the back scratch spin from a very young age. He didn’t really tell me how to do it, but he emphasized that it become really good. And that became the basis for a lot of the spins.

On the innovative spins she created:  I invented so many different spins, especially if you count all the different arm movements I had. I started with the side layback, and the pancakes, and the twisting sits, and they were all from me. But the one that’s so popular right now, the pancake one, I would really love it if they called it the Lucinda spin [laughs].

On changing coaches throughout her career, usually without a tryout with the new coach first: That’s also why I wanted to write the book, because as a first-time mother or parent in the skating world, there’s so many things that you don’t know and there’s so many things that are not exposed. So I felt like I also had the chance to help first-time parents. We just did not know [to have a tryout first].  But then again, I don’t regret anything.

On being sick or in pain from injuries for seven years:  Nobody told me to stop. The spinning — gosh, I don’t know, at that time I was the only one in the world doing those spins, and I was like, I’m the only one so I have to do it for everybody. No matter what you’re feeling, it’s not the spin’s problem. That’s what we thought. I’m not being arrogant in saying this, but they were beautiful, and people were saying, they’re so beautiful, there’s no way you’re going to stop, that’s your livelihood. So no matter what, you’re going to spin.

In one way, that was kind of exhilarating to find out [that the ongoing injuries were caused by concussions from the force of spins] but it was also very painful because it meant that I couldn’t spin any more. So it was almost like the thing I loved the most, the thing I did best, was taken away from me.  I did not quite understand why something that made me so happy and was making other people happy was causing me so much pain. That was incredibly hard, to have that taken away, not me deciding I didn’t want to spin any more. It was not a choice.

Now I still bump into things, I still drop things because I lost a lot of equilibrium in my ears and my eyesight. And I just feel kind of out of balance for most of the day. But I’m much much better. I was basically bedridden for two, three years where I couldn’t basically walk upstairs. But now I can go about daily life so it’s better.  But it will probably take more years, given how many years I inflicted on myself.

On what she tells the students she coaches: I’m fortunate in that the kids that I have, they’re very competitive but they’re…let me see, how can I say this? I really try to instill in them that it’s not just landing a double axel that’s the most important thing in life, it’s really becoming a champion in life. And to me, becoming a champion in life is achieving their dreams, whatever they may be, but without losing yourself and your self-worth and your self-respect. Because at the end if you’ve lost all of that, what did you win for? Because that’s kind of what I went through. I lost everything and I still had my spins, and in the end  I didn’t even know who I was without the spins. So I really try to instill in them the whole character of a champion in life and on the ice, while achieving their dreams. And I also explain to them that the most important relationship they will have is the one with themselves. Once they truly understand themselves and respect themselves, then they can really have a relationship with anything else, with skating, with their parents, with anybody or anything that they really want to achieve.

On how she feels now about her accomplishments in skating: I can’t do what I used to be able to do, but now I can actually watch my videos and enjoy and appreciate what I did. My biggest regret is that I never enjoyed it as much as I think I should have. I think humble pride is always good to have within yourself, of what you’ve accomplished and what you’re doing. Without that, it’s hard to keep on going and be successful. Not an arrogant pride, but at least to acknowledge to yourself what you have done, and I don’t think I ever did that. Now I can look back at the videos and think, maybe I did something a little good [laughs].

Canada has such a long history of fantastic figure skating talent that to cover it all would take several volumes. “Taking the Ice: Success Stories From the World of Canadian Figure Skating” is a wonderful overview of stories of skating from a wide selection of Canadian skating stars. As a coach, PA announcer, commentator and blogger, Ms. Kwong has seen the sport from all angles, seen all the major events first-hand, and is the perfect figure skating insider to write this compilation and share her views with us. Her own enthusiasm for the sport is evident on every page.

The book is broken down initially into covering each discipline of Ladies, Mens, Dance and Pairs, with a the landing page of each section covering notable milestones from that group. The next section covers other Canadian skating legends, including coaches and choreographers. Third, there is a section of stories regarding the 2002 Olympic Pairs scandal, with the perspectives of all those Canadian legends who saw it live and their impressions of the events that transpired. This covers skaters, coaches, commentators, judges and more. Lastly there is a chapter covering the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Each person interviewed is given the same amount of page space of about four to five pages, and is asked to define themselves by finishing the statement “I am . . .” Ms. Kwong explains in her introduction that tough choices had to be made in editing, since many of these personalities easily warrant a book all unto themselves. Some of the omissions are obvious: Bob Paul, Francis Dafoe, Lloyd Eisler to name a few. Additionally, I found it odd that such major players as Elvis Stoijko and Don Jackson were not included for the Mens section but rather are placed in the Living Legends section. But as she explained in my podcast interview with her, the intention was to start with a single person who made strides in Canadian skating in the early days of each discipline, and who then directly influenced the skaters that followed.

The stories range from funny (Tracy Wilson asking everyone “How is your sex life?”) to heartbreaking (the loss of Joannie Rochette’s mother just before the Ladies Short Program). Some of the stories might be repetitive for the hard-core skating fan who has read every autobiography of every skater, or follows skating news closely. But even the seasoned fan will find something new to learn from this book. For the newbie skating fan, “Taking the Ice” is the perfect introduction to Canadian skating, and will help get them hooked on learning more about the intriguing figures in the sport.

Enter to win a signed copy of this book! Details here.

I was contacted out of the blue by Lucinda Ruh to be interviewed for the skatecast. Imagine my glee at finding that email in my inbox! Of course I was thrilled. She graciously sent me an advance copy of her new book “Frozen Teardrop: The Triumph and Tragedy of Figure Skating’s Queen of Spin” which was released in the USA on November 15th, 2011. In her podcast interview we discuss the book at length.

While the book is 243 pages long in paperback, it’s a fascinating and fast read. She chronicles her life starting before she was born and up through her career-ending injuries, and it’s a remarkable tale of courage, pain, tenacity and redemption. For those of us who watched her skate and grow up before our eyes in competition after competition, the tales she tells of her training schedules and conditions will shock you. I was brought to tears several times. Little did those of us watching her elegance and creativity on the ice know what she had to endure for her art.

It is well-known that Lucinda was truly a global skater: born Swiss, but raised and trained in Paris, Japan, Canada, China, and the USA. Initially she trained for years as the lone westerner in Japan. Her auspicious start begins with revered coach Nabuo Sato (father of Yuka Sato) telling her as a very young child of just seven years old, that if he wants her to train with him she must come to the rink every day for six months before he will even consider giving her 20 minutes of his time each week. And here is where Lucinda first develops her fierce determination, because she actually does it and earns Sato as a coach. As she and her mother are isolated by geography and culture, they turn to each other for support and her mother does her best to raise an extraordinary child in extraordinary circumstances with no role model to follow or local support system. Lucinda endures bullying by peers for being the sole westerner, and eventually severe beatings by her own mother as her talent becomes evident and the desire to succeed becomes all-encompassing.

Eventually Lucinda must switch coaches after Sato feels he cannot develop her talent any further, and Lucinda make some rash decisions to head west. A few short stints switching coaches and not finding a right fit, she finds the perfect coach back East as she travels to China. Again as the sole westerner under shocking working conditions (any skater that thinks their training conditions are tough have nothing on Ruh), her talent thrives, only to be taken away from her as the Chinese Federation interferes with her coaching arrangement. Lucinda and her mother continually lean on each other to an unhealthy degree, as they have nobody else to support them. Even the Swiss Federation never considers Lucinda as one of their own since she never trained in Switzerland, and they choose to waste the opportunity to send Lucinda to the 1998 Olympics and let the spot go unused.

Where she found solace was when she was spinning. Fans will be surprised to know that she is self-taught in spins (so much for the theory that the Swiss coaches produce the best spinners). Her father tells her that he will be proud of her if she can find one thing that she does better than anyone in the world, and as we all have witnessed she surpassed that goal by miles. How equally tragic that she is no longer able to spin since she was diagnosed with brain damage caused by the very spins that gave her peace. Both she and fans have been robbed of her extraordinary gift, as none of us will see her perform these spins again, and we are thankful for many videos of past performances that we can watch as a reminder of her remarkable spinning ability.

Ultimately Lucinda’s body breaks own slowly over the years, as injuries from skating, beatings, eating disorders, and the slow onset of concussions in her brain take their toll. Despite all this, the reader finishes the book feeling uplifted. This is due to Lucinda’s incredible ability to see the positive in everything, and her amazing gift of forgiveness. Her relationship with her mother is made stronger by the experience (her mother writes the afterword of the book) and she walks away with few regrets from a sport that took her body but never dampened her spirit. As an armchair psychologist with no training at all in how victims’ minds operate, I have to wonder if Lucinda suffers a bit from the Stockholm Syndrome, as she defends her mother’s actions throughout the book.

Lucinda Ruh made spins important. I would argue (and I can expect many will agree) that while Lucinda was at her physical best well before the International Judging System came to replace the old 6.0 system, her spins are the benchmark set by the ISU by which all other skaters today are ranked in the quality of their spinning ability. How I wish we could have seen a Lucinda Ruh spin marked under COP!

What really struck me as an untold story of the book was her acceptance rather than condemnation of the Japanese coaching system. Lucinda tells of students being regularly beaten when they didn’t perform well. Why have none of us (or myself, if I’m the last to know) heard this before? With the recent rise of the Japanese skaters in the past 10 years, it makes me wonder if the tactics were abandoned or are still in use to produce such recent success in both the Men’s and Women’s fields. And yet while she was beaten, pushed, drilled and generally worked to the edge, she seems to almost yearn for the body-breaking discipline once she moved west to train in North America.

All the more remarkable is that while English isn’t her first language, the book is almost perfectly written in English with only a very few odd phrases or grammatical errors scattered throughout. In the past when budgets in the publishing industry were larger, I’d assume a proofreader was involved. But these days you can never be assured of that. After speaking with her on the phone, her near-flawless command of the English language made me realize that she did it all herself. I just respect her more and more!

I highly recommend this book to all skating fans so they can be inspired by Lucinda’s story. We can all only hope that we can learn to overcome our adversities with similar grace and forgiveness. While we can no longer have the pleasure of watching her perform live, all skating fans are enriched by how she changed the sport for the better. As Dick Button once quipped, “Good for you, Lucinda Ruh!”

Some performances via YouTube:
1999 Worlds Short Program: “Lawrence of Arabia”
1999 Worlds Long Program
2000 World Pros: Artistic Program “Mercy Prayer Cycle”
2001 Star Skates “Blues for Klook”

NOVEMBER 2011
An interview with PJ Kwong. Ms. Kwong is a Canadian figure skating coach, television commentator, public address announcer, blogger at www.pjkwong.com, and author of “Taking the Ice: Success Stories From the World of Canadian Figure Skating.” We talk about how she got into commentating for television, why Canadian choreographers are so talented, and she reveals what her initials  “PJ” represent. 1 hour, 5 minutes, 26 seconds.

Win a copy of PJ Kwong’s Book!
One lucky winner can win a signed copy of PJ’s book, “Taking the Ice: Success Stories From the World of Canadian Figure Skating.” It’s a wonderful book for any skater’s library, and it gives a terrific overview of Canadian skating through interviews with many of Canada’s brightest stars.

To enter, send me either through email, twitter or my Facebook page the answer to the following question about Canada: how many Winter Olympics have been held in Canada?

All entries received between November 23 and December 21, 2011 are eligible. The winner will be picked at random from all correct entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

Read my review of Pj Kwong’s “Taking the Ice.”

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On all the different jobs she has had in her career:  You’ll get no complaints from me. I’m surprised as anyone to have landed where I have. And when I look back on it, it’s like each thing seemed to prepare me for the next. It’s very strange. But you know what? If I weren’t me I’d want to be me too [laughs]. It’s been a pretty interesting ride so far, with more to come, I’m hoping.

On her most embarrassing figure skating moment:  I’ve got a really good story that’s the truth, and it’s one that I share with my students when they get really upset about a result or whatever. When I was eight years old, I had pretty much the same body type I’ve had all along, meaning adorable yet somehow dumpling-like. So not the typical skater’s body. And my classmate Clifford Jansen, who now lives on the West Coast [of Canada] with his wife Pamela, and they’re adult skaters now, he and I were put together by my coach Wally Distelmeyer to be a little dance pair. And we were adorable, but Clifford, not only were we classmates but he was at a phase where he didn’t particularly like girls. At the time, holding hands with a girl was not his most favorite thing to do. So practicing became a bit of an issue. And then for some reason his mother decided that it would be a good idea that in addition to being a little dance pair, we would be a little freeskate pair. Now Mr. Distelmeyer didn’t feel that this was the world’s best idea, but Clifford’s mother persisted and my mother kind of went along with it, so we ended up as a little freeskate pair. So we competed in our club carnival, let’s say around 1967. And Mr. Distelmeyer had given us some music, Sorcerer’s Apprentice or Night on Bald Mountain or something like that, very very dramatic, it could have been its generation’s Carmina Burana. It was not particularly suitable for eight-year-olds, even more so for eight-year-olds that wouldn’t skate together holding hands [laughs]. So we weren’t as well prepared as maybe we should have been. In any event, we competed and we came second. The only problem was that we were the only team that competed. So we came second in a field of one [laughs]. Which was terrible! I was mortified. Now at the time skaters had to skate to a standard, so if you were the only person in the event it was possible to come in second. But when I tell today’s skaters that I came in second in a field of one, and I’ve been in therapy ever since, they don’t believe me. But that is without a doubt one of the more embarrassing stories.

On how being a coach affects her skating journalism: To tell you the truth, my interest in journalism, my interest in reporting has always been about the human aspect of the stories. The fact that I’m a coach gives me a bit of a shortcut as to what people may be thinking, or how they’re experiencing things, or what they’re doing.  But I think that in truth what I’m more interested in is and what I have a keener sense for is, what is the story – putting myself in that person’s shoes and how they might be responding or reacting. Now what coaching does do for me is give me credibility in certain situations and with people who don’t know me.  So I can approach a legendary coach and say “I am also a coach” and they immediately realize that you’re a skating person, and it becomes a kind of a shorthand exchange – where if they think you’re strictly working for a newspaper or a website or television or whatever, they might not be as candid, or you might not be able to get the same answers that I can as a result of coaching.

On how she started as a television commentator: I have a very strange, strange life, in that if somebody says to me, “Hey! Would you like to do this?” [I say yes]. I’m a risk taker and I’m adaptable. And I take the work seriously, but I don’t take myself seriously, and I’m willing to make mistakes along the way. What happened was in 1999 – OK, I started doing commentary first for synchro, and Rod Black [Canadian TV sports announcer] didn’t want to do synchro with Debbi Wilkes [Canadian TV sports announcer]. So they needed a second person, and I was asked if I wanted to do it, because I knew synchro, so I just said “Sure! Why not!” And I’m sure I was terrible, but I was better than nobody, and I made a commitment to myself that I was going to get better. And oddly enough, as the world kind of moved on, by the time the world figure skating championships were in Canada, in 2001 in Vancouver, the ISU had organized that they wanted each of the host broadcasters [for major events] to [provide] a guide track commentator, meaning they wanted a commentator who was able to do all of the events and all of the skaters. And they really only wanted one person, because it was going to get complicated to hire more than one person. And what they found was, they could either find people who spoke English who didn’t know skating, or they found skating people who spoke English who didn’t know ice dance, and I was a person who could do all of it. So that’s how I started with the broadcasting stuff in earnest.

On interacting with fans and being visible through social media: When CBC took over the rights to figure skating [broadcasts] in 2007, I said, “You know what? I really want to bring people back in, even if it’s one person at a time”. So I think it’s really important, it’s the way that I work, if somebody writes me, I think I owe them a reply. And at first CBC wanted me to have a CBC address, and I said “If you want to have me do this, if you want me to answer people, it has to be on my own account.”  I’m not going to in any way compromise CBC, or make them look foolish or anything like that, but I really believe that people want to know, and they want to express themselves. And I really appreciate it. I love hearing from people.  And people have often said to me, I can’t believe you wrote me back. And I say I can’t believe you wrote me. Why wouldn’t I write you back? [laughs] And I know I sound totally lame, but that’s really what I think. And even the people who don’t like me, who take the time to write to say “you’re an idiot”, I’ll write them back and say, “You know what? I appreciate that I’m not for everybody, and that’s OK too, and I’m just glad that you’re tuning in to skating.”

I’m not a trained journalist – I’m not a trained PA announcer either – so maybe if I were trained I would have a different perspective [on not being anonymous on social media]. Maybe there are certain guidelines I would follow, but I don’t really care. For the way that I work, it’s as a freelance person, like for all my little skaters and their parents, if they drive me crazy I can get rid of them. So it’s the way that I’m kind of built. I’m somebody who believes in saying, here’s what I think, here’s my name, here’s my contact information, feel free to contact me, and let’s have an exchange about it.

On working as the rink announcer at the 2010 Olympics: One of the reasons that I think I’m a good announcer is that I don’t really get too involved in any of the sports and what’s going on at the field of play. For instance, when I was in Vancouver and Joannie Rochette came and did the short program [after her mother had passed away three days before] I knew if I watched her I wasn’t going to be able to do my job. So as much as I wanted to see what she was going to do, I knew that I sort of had to keep myself distracted, or I was going to get swept up in the emotion of the moment. Because it was….unbelievable. But my job was to be the PA announcer. So what I had to do was basically distract myself throughout her entire performance. I didn’t even look at her bows, I just sort of looked at her quickly on the monitor to see where she was, to do the tag line. And then I got through her marks and got on to the next skater. And the reason why I felt that was important was I thought, you know, this moment is in no way about me. This is about this Olympian. And I may not detract from that in any way with my own story, my own feelings, whatever. The best possible thing that I can offer this event, offer this young woman, offer the rest of the women skating, is just to be exactly the same for her as I was for the skater before her and the skater after her.

On writing her book, Taking the Ice: You’re going to laugh, because it happened like everything else. The publisher wrote me and said, I’ve been following you for a while, would you like to write a book? And I said, “Sure!”  without any more thought than that. See, that’s the problem with me [laughs]. So we met, and the only thing he wanted was that the Canadian champions, the possible Olympians – I was right, thank goodness – would all be in the book. And I said, “What should it be about?” And he said, “You’re the writer, you figure it out” [laughs]. So I got to write the book I wanted to read. I hoped to write a book at some point, and I’d love to say it was some sort of angst-driven story, but the hard work began as soon as it was put to me and I said, “Yeah, you know what, I’d like to do that, I bet I could do that, I’d like to try.” The worst thing that can happen is it will be the only book I’ve ever written, but either way, good book or bad, you’re still an author.

On the judging scandal at the 2002 Olympics: We were all shocked. Truly, all shocked. It’s not to take anything away from Elena and Anton, who are wonderful skaters, but to my mind, on that day, the Canadians won. Elena and Anton didn’t do anything wrong, no matter what other shenanigans went on, but you can’t take away a title that they’re earned. So in my mind, [giving two gold medals] was the only possible outcome. I didn’t know that anybody knew [about the alleged predetermined outcomes], that’s how little I knew about it. We all heard it at the same time, about the judging scandal, but [for the book] when I interviewed Lori Nichol, [she had heard rumors beforehand], and Benoit Lavoie, who’s the president of Skate Canada and who was on the judging panel, he had also been tipped off by Marie-Reine Le Gougne herself [the French judge accused of cheating].  And how many times have we heard rumors in the skating world all over the place? But when you’re doing your own job or your own function, you’re not always looking for clues for what’s going on. But the interesting thing about any event, you have your own little section of work life, so people hang together, the judges hang together. So I would know more maybe about coaches and skaters, and the judges would know about the judges, and the skaters would know about the skaters. So we all have our little intersecting circles that we hang with. So the fact that all of this came out was a huge surprise, to me anyway. But obviously other people knew, because the event coordinator kept the French judge on the stand, would not allow her to pass behind us to get off the stand, for the medal ceremony. And I kept looking back at her, and she had her fingers to her forehead, rubbing her forehead as if she had a really bad headache. And I kept thinking, there’s that nice French lady, maybe she needs an Advil [laughs], without any more idea than that. But I couldn’t figure out why she was being blocked from leaving the stand. So it wasn’t until much later on that the pieces got put together.

On why Canadian choreographers are so good:  [David Wilson, Lori Nichol, and Sarah Kawahara] were all honest skaters, not world champions, just beautiful skaters. And they all have the soul of an artist, Marina [Zoueva] as well, and they just see things in a different way. So I think it’s kind of serendipitous that they all come from the same area. What I do really appreciate about David and Lori’s work in particular is that they seem really to be able to find the heart of a skater. I was at a Toronto-area rink a few weeks ago and Lori was there working with Zhang and Zhang [Chinese pair skaters] and she just seemed to really be able to connect with them.  And she’s said to me at times that she didn’t really even need a translator,  that it was like they were in each other’s heads. And David can do the same thing – he has a way of capturing the essence of the person. It used to be in days gone by that people would get a piece of music and impose the choreography on the skater, and that still happens lots, but what makes these people so special is that they get inside the skater and find what’s there and help the skater bring it out. I love that about them. Sandra [Bezic] is very artistic, very creative in her own right, and I think all those years producing Stars on Ice has given her a movement vocabulary that is very playful. They’re all warm, wonderful people, and if you get a chance to play with skaters, you can often draw the best things from them. So I think that’s the secret.

On what “PJ” stands for: You know what I tell all my little skaters? “Pure Joy”. [laughs]. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you [laughs]. It’s totally mundane, it’s “Patricia Joanne”. But when I tell my little skaters that, they go “Really?” And I say, “No. Go do outside edges” [laughs].

OCTOBER 2011
An interview with David Kirby, who knows everything there is to know about figure skating. His father show skated with Sonia Henie. His parents were Canadian champions. He’s been a Novice champion. He skated in Ice Capades. He owns ice rinks. He coaches. He was PSA President. He’s one of the first members of the IJS Technical Committee. He runs SkateRadio. He’s a consultant on skating movies. Did I miss anything? In other words, he is a very interesting interview subject! Hear about how he lived in a motor home with the Protopopovs, his opinion on how the mainstream media treats the television audience, and why Sonia Henie once gave him a quarter. 1 hour, 9 minutes, 18 seconds.

Win a copy of Michael Kirby’s Book!
One lucky winner can win a copy of the book written by David Kirby’s father Michael Kirby: “Figure Skating to Fancy Skating-Memoirs of the Life of Sonja Henie.” It’s a fascinating read about what it was like traveling the world with Sonia Henie and her shows, and thought on skating at the time. It’s a wonderful book for any skater’s library.

To enter, send me either through email, twitter or my Facebook page the answer to the following question about David Kirby: who was David Kirby’s pairs partner? Listen to the podcast to find out.

All entries received between October 8 and November 8, 2011 are eligible. The winner will be picked at random from all correct entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

JUNE 2011
An interview with Timothy Goebel, 2001 US National Champion, and 2002 Olympic Bronze Medalist. Also known as the “Quad King,” he was the first person to land three quadruple jumps in one program (and one of the few to accomplish that to this day). We discuss his quads, the change from 6.0 to the International Judging System, and his role as a Technical Specialist. 1 hour, 13 minutes, 28 seconds.

Win autographed photos and posters of Tim!
One lucky winner (or perhaps a few winners?) can win signed photos and posters of Timothy Goebel. I don’t know exactly how many he’ll be sending me, but he’s got something up his sleeve!

To enter, send me either through email or my Facebook page the answer to the following question about Quads: who was the first person to land a ratified quadruple jump and what year? (If you’re a hard-core skating fan, this is really easy!)

All entries received between June 30 and July 31, 2011 are eligible. The winner will be picked at random from all correct entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

I’m thrilled to be in this month’s Skating Magazine! Especially with such a generous article in terms of space. Thanks to Lexi Rohner for contacting me about doing an article on my SkateCasts, and to all of you who sent me kinds words about it via email/Facebook/Twitter. These really are a labor of love for me, so to know that there are fans out there who enjoy and appreciate what I’m doing is really tremendous.

Click here for the online version. I’m pages 26-27.

MAY 2011
An interview with Randy Gardner, 1979 World Champion in Pairs with Tai Babilonia, two time Olympian (1976 and 1980), choreographer, star of Ice Follies and head of Randy G Productions. We talk about his experiences with Mabel Fairbanks, his injury during the Lake Placid Olympics that caused them to withdraw, and who he’d love to do choreography for next. 59 minutes, 21 seconds.

Win a DVD/Booklet for Moves in the Field from the PSA (Professional Skaters Association)!
One lucky winner can win both the DVD (5th Edition) and the booklet (Edition 5.1) explaining the current Moves in the Field from The Professional Skaters Association! Worth $55, these are invaluable to coaches and students who are looking for guidance from the top coaches and judges in skating on how to properly execute the MIF. They cover Pre-Preliminary to Senior plus Adult Moves.

To enter, send me either through email or my Facebook page the answer to the following question: which skate does Randy always tie first, his left or right? All entries received between May 30 and June 30, 2011 are eligible. The winner will be picked at random from all correct entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

MARCH 2011
An interview with David Jenkins, 1956 Olympic Bronze medalist, 1960 Olympic Gold Medalist, 3-time World Champion and 4-time US National Champion. We discuss how he and his brother Hayes worked together, his loathing of figures, how a boxing promoter came to own the rights to his performance from CBS, and how he was the first person to figure out and land a triple axel (see the YouTube video here). 58 minutes, 58 seconds.

Win a private box for six to Skate For Hope in Columbus, OH on June 18, 2011!
There is a contest running with this podcast: one lucky listener can win a private loge box for six people . . . that’s you and five friends . . . to Skate For Hope on June 18th, 2011 at the Nationwide Arena in Columbus Ohio. Skate For Hope is A premier figure skating event benefiting Breast Cancer Research & Awareness and it raises many tens of thousands of dollars for research. This year it stars Sarah Hughes as the guest emcee, with performances by Johnny Weir, Rachel Flatt, Ryan Bradley, Caitlin Yankowskas and John Coughlin, and Emily Hughes.

FEBRUARY 2011
An interview with Yuka Sato, two-time Japanese Champion, World Junior Champion, two-time Olympian, and 1994 World Champion. Also known as a choreographer and coach to Alyssa Czisny and Jeremy Abbott. We talk about her having Olympians as parents and coaches, her training philosophy, and how she got lost on a bus in Canada while still not knowing much english. 53 minutes, 38 seconds.

Win a photo of Yuka Sato!
There is a contest running with this podcast: win either a photo of Yuka Sato by herself, or with student Jeremy Abbott. The photos are NOT signed. To enter, send me either through email or my Facebook page the answer to the following question: Who became Yuka’s coach when she moved to Canada? All entries received between March 7 to March 31, 2011 are eligible. The winner will be picked at random from all correct entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

JANUARY 2011
Live from the 2011 US Nationals in Greensboro, North Carolina. In addition to capturing some sounds and flavors of the event, there are interviews with: Charlene Wong, Todd Eldredge, Sylvia Fontana and John Zimmerman, Alison Carey, Rusty (the In-Arena Host) Dan Diamond, Kori Ade, John Lee, Michael Parsons, Doug Razzano, Jerod Swallow and Ben Agosto. 1 hour, 2 minutes.

Win a DVD/Booklet set of the Moves in the Field training materials!
There is a contest running with this podcast: win $55 worth of a DVD and booklet set from The Professional Skaters Association. Great for all the coaches out there! To enter, send me either through email or my Facebook page the answer to the following question: Who is the Executive Director of the PSA? All entries received between February 7 to February 28, 2011 are eligible. The winner will be picked at random from all correct entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

Debashish B. of Gibralter and Brian R. of Baton Rouge, LA, were the winners of the autographed Barbara Ann Scott photos. Congrats to you both!

DECEMBER 2010
An interview with Jojo Starbuck. With partner Ken Shelley, she won three US titles, two World Bronze medals and was in both the 1968 and 1972 Olympics. We discuss her career on and off the ice, her love for performing, and her incredible story of why the Japanese Federation made her miss a skating practice at the Sapporo Games. 1 hour, 2 minutes.

Win an $100 Gift Certificate to Rainbo Sports!
There is a contest running with this podcast: win $100 worth of merchandise from Rainbo Sports. To enter, send me either through email or my Facebook page the answer to the following question: Jojo is just a nickname . . . what is Jojo Starbuck’s real name? All entries received between January 5 to January 30, 2011 are eligible. The winner will be picked at random from all entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

NOVEMBER 2010
An interview with Canadian legend Barbara Ann Scott, 1948 Olympic Champion, 4-time Canadian Champion, World/European/North American Champion, and the classiest woman in the sport of figure skating. We discuss her career on and off the ice, her numerous experiences with Sonia Henie, and why her little dog Pierre was her most embarrassing moment in skating. 1 hour, 13 seconds.

Win an autographed picture of Barbara Ann Scott!

There is a contest running with this podcast: Ms. Scott sent me two signed photographs of herself to giveaway to two lucky listeners. To enter, send me either through email or my Facebook page your favorite photo of Barbara Ann Scott between December 4, 2010 to January 4, 2011. The winners will be picked at random from all entries sent. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

Out of 31 entries, Georgene T. of Nashville, Tennessee, was the winner of the free pair of SP-Teri Zero Gravity Stock boots! Congratulations, and send me a picture wearing your new boots when you get them. And thanks to everyone for your continued support!

I’ll be uploading the next podcast in a few days: Barbara Ann Scott. She’s an icon and a great lady.

OCTOBER 2010
An interview with George Spiteri, President of SP-Teri Boots. SP-Teri has been making boots since 1963. We talk about the history and evolution of the skating boot, the worst pair of boots he’s ever seen, and dealing with stinky feet. 39 minutes, 36 seconds.

Win a free pair of SP-Teri Boots!
There is a contest running with this podcast: SP-Teri is generously donating a free pair of Zero Gravity Stock boots (a US $505 value) to all supporters of the Manleywoman SkateCast from October 20 to November 20, 2010. Click here to learn more about how to enter.

. . . Magdalena K. of Ontario Canada! She is the winner of the timeshare in Park City, Utah. Thanks to everyone who supported the SkateCast by entering. It’s very much appreciated.

Next week I will be uploading the next podcast, which is George Spiteri of SPTeri boots. He is generously giving away a free pair of SPTeri’s Zero Gravity Boot, so stay tuned for that next week.

Congratulations Magdalena!

I’m so excited to be able to start giving away cool stuff to my fans! A skating friend and fan of the show has generously offered me her timeshare in Park City, Utah, to be my first giveaway! This Park City resort package is available from December 25th 2010 to January 1, 2011 (though this property can be exchanged through Interval International to a location and week of the winner’s choosing world-wide). It does not cover airfare, meals, beverages or sightseeing, etc. It is for the use of the timeshare property only.

All Manleywoman SkateCast supporters who (1) become a fan on Facebook, and (2) donate a least US $3 to the podcast between now and October 12th, 2010 will be automatically entered into the trip drawing.

For more details, see the contest page. Good luck, and please spread the word!

JULY 2010
Part two of the 70th Reunion of Ice Capades in Las Vegas, NV. This was a reunion of about 600 former skaters, costumers, organizers, engineers, and technicians who were involved in the show. Interviews range from those involved from the 1940s to the 1990s. 51 minutes, 10 seconds.

Check out the post from July to see photos I took at the event.

Interviews with: Alex McGowan, Marshall Sanchez, Marjorie McChesney Kunik, Mary Sleichter Hummel, Sarah Kawahara, Will Grendahl, Bob Young, Fred Huffman, and Randy Gardner.

JULY 2010
Part one of the 70th Reunion of Ice Capades in Las Vegas, NV. This was a reunion of about 600 former skaters, costumers, organizers, engineers, and technicians who were involved in the show. Interviews range from those involved from the 1940s to the 1990s. 58 minutes, 25 seconds.

Check out the post from July to see photos I took at the event.

Interviews with: Ray Belmonte, Fran Bennett, Charlotte Honea, Richard Dwyer, Leila McKellen, Jared Hoadley, Maureen Butterworth, Melva Hart, Michael Garren, Michelle Urbany, Bob Bennett, Mark Rowland, Roxanne Wassil, Patty Davis-Gur, Stephan Klovan, Peter Tyrell Jr.

JUNE 2010
An interview with Tara Modlin, sports agent to Johnny Weir, Rachel Flatt and Jeremy Abbott. Hear how someone gets started in sports marketing, and how she works with her clients. 36 minutes.

I took a ton of photos. Check them out:

Richard Dwyer

Alex McGowan

Terry Kubika and Ray Belmonte

Roxanne Wassil (1972-1989)

Stephan Klovan

Old photo

Old photo

Richard Dwyer checking out the old photos

A box of old music tapes

Mary Sleichter Hummel (1944-1949) and Marjory McChesney Kunik (1944-1948)

Sketches for costumes

Vegas girls and the fabulous ice sculpture

Sarah Kawahara

Will Grendahl (1971-1974) and Patricia Davis Gur (1979-1981)

MAY 2010
An interview with Allison Scott, mother to 2-time National Champion Jeremy Abbott. She describes what it’s like balancing life, work, and parenting with an elite skater, and how to make lemonade out of life’s lemons. 1 hour, 3 minutes, 35 seconds.

From the Bob Paul episode (#38). It’s such a great shot, I had to put it here so you could all see it! Mr. Paul talks at length about the actual photo shoot during the podcast.

APRIL 2010
An interview with Bob Paul, 1960 Olympic Champion in Pairs with Barbara Wagner, Ice Capades star and top choreographer. 55 minutes, 29 seconds.

MARCH 2010
An interview with Rory Flack, top professional skater, coach, and creator of Ebony on Ice. 47 minutes, 25 seconds.

FEBRUARY 2010
An interview with Tom Dickson, one of the world’s top figure skating choreographers. Students include Lu Chen, Ryan Jahnke, Matt Savoie, and YuNa Kim. 44 minutes, 20 seconds.

JANUARY 2010
An interview with american skater Ryan Jahnke, 2003 US Bronze medalist and World Team member, and founder of www.myskatingmall.com. 44 minutes, 6 seconds.

DECEMBER 2009
An interview with american ice dancer Richard Dalley, a 7-time US medalist, 1984 Olympian, ISU judge, and 2010 Olympic Team Leader. 48 minutes, 17 seconds.

NOVEMBER 2009
An interview with Jennifer Kirk, 2000 World Junior Champion, US Medalist and World Team member, and a well-regarded skating journalist and commentator. 41 minutes, 20 seconds.

A few days after our interview, Barlow Nelson came by my office saying he had a gift for me. He brought for me a copy of Maribel Vinson’s 1940 book ‘Advanced Figure Skating’ and a screenprint of the illustration of him doing a spreadeagle for her 1960 book “The Fun of Figure Skating.” Wow! So nice! He also let me take a photo of Maribel’s inscription to him in his copy of the 1960 book.

OCTOBER 2009
An interview with J. Barlow Nelson, 1953 US Novice Mens Champion and International Judge. He explains how judging works and gives opinions on the 6.0 vs IJS systems. 1 hour, 4  minutes, 53 seconds.

SEPTEMBER 2009
An interview with Dan Hollander, 2-time US Bronze medalist, and long-time member of Champions on Ice. 55 minutes, 28 seconds.

Here’s Debi in her Def Leppard tshirt from the concert she attended the night before the interview. It was great having her in my office!

AUGUST 2009
An interview with Debi Thomas, World Champion, National Champion and 1988 Olympic Bronze Medalist. 1 hour, 24 minutes, 47 seconds long.

JULY 2009
An interview with elite coach Slavka Kohout Button, who ran the Wagon Wheel Skating Ice Palace in Illinois, and was coach to Janet Lynn. 54 minutes, 53 seconds.

JULY 2009
An interview with elite coach Slavka Kohout Button, who ran the Wagon Wheel Skating Ice Palace in Illinois, and was coach to Janet Lynn. 20 minutes, 14 seconds.

JUNE 2009
An interview with Tai Babilonia, who with her Pairs partner Randy Gardner was a two-time Olympian, World Champion, and star of Ice Capades. 1 hour, 30 minutes, 46 seconds.

MAY 2009
An interview with Charlie Tickner, 4-time US National Champion, World Champion and Olympic bronze medalist. 58 minutes, 30 seconds.

APRIL 2009
An interview with Michael Cook, who runs the off-ice training program at Skating Club of Boston. 34 minutes.

MARCH 2009
An interview with Alexander Fadeev, 4-time European Champion, 1985 World Champion, God of figures, and now coach. 43 minutes, 14 seconds.

Just wanted to let you all know that choreographer Phillip Mills has a new website, and that the ManleyWoman SkateCast got a mention! Phillip was one of my interviewees (episode #7) and I’m proud to s

FEBRUARY 2009
An interview with Lorin O’Neil, member of all three ice shows (Ice Follies, Holiday on Ice and Ice Capades), coach, and technical specialist. 1 hour, 23 minutes, 13 seconds.

JANUARY 2009
A compilation of interviews with various skaters and fans from the 2009 US National Championships in Cleveland, Ohio. 19 minutes, 3 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

Allison Manley, podcast host: I unfortunately was not able to make it to Nationals this year, new baby and all, but you regular listeners will know my good friend Kim Sailer. She offered to step in and do the podcast in my place, and a very wonderful job she did, I must say. She ran into some great people.

Rusty, “in-arena host”, on learning to appreciate skating: It’s an interesting sport. And I think what’s so interesting about it, and I’m guilty of this too, is that people watch, and they’ll see somebody change, you know, a triple into a double, and even as a casual viewer [you go] “Oh man, I can’t believe she did that, that’s really going to hurt”. And you sit and talk about how bad they’re doing, like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe he fell after doing that triple, that’s terrible. And then I start thinking, wait a second, I really can’t skate backward. And so it’s not really proper for me to be judgemental of these skaters. My wife has figure skates, but, I hope she doesn’t hear this, but she’s really terrible [laughs]. I like to skate with her because she’s about the only person I’m better than. I’m just happy that I don’t have to be out on the ice with a chair, pushing it in front of me.

Olivia Gibbons, novice pairs competitor: [My favorite event] has been all of them. I have a lot of friends in each event, so they’re all my favorite.

Chris Fernandes, novice men’s competitor: [Novice mens] was a very strong event this year. Everyone out there was doing all their triples, triple-triples, it was intense.

Tenley Albright, surgeon (and former world and Olympic champion): I was at the Cleveland Clinic today. The CEO has come to some of the meetings that I’ve been doing at MIT, as part of the initiatives at MIT where we get experts together on things like health care. And here we are in the midst of experts on skating, and it’s just so terrific to be here.

Peggy Northrup, fan:  I always like the ice dancing. I always like the novice event, to watch the little ones that are coming up. I was an ice dancer, so it’s always in my heart. And it’s really fun to come and see the compulsory dances, which you don’t get to see much any more.

Ryan Bradley, senior men’s competitor:  People used to actually relate me to Elvis when I was younger, but I never skated to Elvis. And they’d be like “Didn’t you skate to Elvis?” and I’d be like “No, I haven’t”. But then we just kind of thought it’s the right character, it’s the right time. So we just kind of put it together this year.

Mary, from the Cleveland Clinic: We’re here to show our support for these athletes, this city, and our commitment to all the attendees. We’re here to raise awareness of our group of our sports medicine physicians, who provide top-notch care and expertise in taking care of athletes.

Jeremy Abbott, senior men’s competitor:  Tom Dickson is an amazing choreographer and his wife Catarina Lindgren did both of my programs this year. They’re absolutely incredible choreographers. I’ve always kind of been drawn to ice skating as a competitive sport, and it’s through their choreography that [the creativity] has really come out of me. I feel what they give me and I feel the music, and it’s through them that I’m able to produce what I’ve done.

Kim Sailer, podcast guest host: It was a very exciting time being there, with three new national champions crowned. There was a lot of energy in the building, and there’s so many people you bump into and meet. There were so many other people that we didn’t have time to interview. But we had a great time and I would encourage anyone who can go to go see one of these events live.

DECEMBER 2008
An interview with Jozef Sabovcik, 1984 Olympic bronze medalist, 6-time Czech champion, and 2-time European champion, author and painter. 49 minutes, 19 seconds.

NOVEMBER 2008
An interview with Chris Howarth, 1980 Olympian, coach, and commentator for British Eurosport.39 minutes, 15 seconds.

OCTOBER 2008
An interview with American ice dancers Kim Navarro and Brent Bommentre. 44 minutes 4 seconds.

SEPTEMBER 2008
An interview with elite coach Ron Ludington, himself an Olympic medalist, coach of too many incredible skaters to mention, and head of Delaware’s incredible skating program. 56 minutes, 13 seconds.

AUGUST 2008
An interview with Richard Dwyer, also known as “Mr. Debonair” from Ice Follies. 38 minutes, 43 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On his most embarrassing skating moment: I’ve had a couple, performance-wise, and we were talking about this just the other day, about celebrities and meeting people, and Sonja Henie, being the great name in skating. And of course I started skating at her rink in 1944. Anyway, she came to the show a few times, but this one particular evening I was skating with Dorothy Ann Nelson, she had won the national championships with Pieter Kollen. We used to do the swing waltz, and as the couples came by everybody would applaud their favorite couple. It was kind of a spontaneous reaction. Anyway, we went by and Sonja stood up and applauded, and my God, I almost fell over Dorothy. I kind of acknowledged her and stubbed my toe and fell flat on my face. And Dorothy was “Whaaaa?” If I’d just kept going like I was, I wouldn’t have even looked at her. You feel like a fool at different times — I’m just thinking of the ice show embarrassing moments.  Another time, skating with Susan Berens, we fell, and the set at that time you could just slide under the curtain to the backstage. And so I flew back, and Susie was looking, and I kind of got wrapped up in a prop backstage, so I couldn’t get right back out. And she waited — oh, just seconds, but I didn’t come out, so she thought, oh, maybe he got hurt, so she went back. And I came out, and then all of a sudden a stagehand said, oh, he went back out, and I wasn’t back there, so she went out. But when she wasn’t out there I had gone backstage. And it was like a comedy for about 20 seconds, and the audience were just howling because we couldn’t get back together. But these are fun moments, and when you say “embarrassing”, well, they do happen. And the show is so beautiful and elegant, you know, you do feel a little red in the face after something like that.

On how he started skating: My father is from Nebraska and my mother is from Illinois, so I guess we have a little winter blood in us. We went to the Ice Follies in 1943, and my dad said, you know, I would love to take my family skating. And so he finally did at Christmas, we all went skating and had a great time. And then he got very much involved in wanting to do so, so we started going every Friday night to the public session. And that was through ’44 and then in 1945 we joined the figure skating club out in Westwood. And then I started taking lessons from Michael Kirby, my first pro. He took me through my first competition, which was the Southern California interclub, and I was in juvenile or whatever. I came in second out of two [laughs]. I don’t know what kind of beginning you’d call that, but it taught me that I was going to have to work harder if I wanted to participate.

On winning the bronze medal in US senior nationals at age 14, behind Dick Button and Hayes Jenkins: It was terrific, it was wonderful. I was young and I was awed by Dick Button. And the Jenkins were wonderful, we’re still good friends. And actually I got second in freeskating, and it was really close between Hayes and I. And that was a real compliment too. I have moments when I wonder if I should have stayed amateur, but my parents didn’t have a tremendous amount of money for the sport, and they had two other children, and they were trying to make sure that we all were getting an equal amount of their time and efforts.

On turning professional and joining Ice Follies: Ice Follies was a tremendous entertainment, very popular. It was a big decision. I don’t know, if I’d stayed amateur a couple more years it would have been great. [But] I grew up with Eddie Shipstad’s son, so we were great friends. And they had followed my career, I’d gone to Ice Follies and Ice Capades to watch, and it was that kind of entertainment, it was kind of a dream that I’d like to do it. But it came as a shock right after Nationals when Eddie Shipstad called my dad and said, we’d really like Richard to come to Ice Follies because Roy has retired. Roy Shipstad was the original Debonair, and one of my heroes. [And Eddie said] we would like to hire Richard as the young Debonair and to carry out the role with the top hat and tails and the six beautiful girls and giving out the roses. So it was a beautiful opportunity, and I think my dad decided, could we afford to stay in until ’52? Could we afford to keep going? And the Olympics would be another four years, if I made the team, who knows.

My first reaction was no, I don’t want to go, Dad, and he said, great. But then the Shipstads were very persistent [laughs]. And it finally happened that one of the most important things was my education. So my folks talked to Loyola High School, where I was just finishing my freshman year, and they said, oh, that’d be great, we’ll set up Richard’s education on the road. So I went to a different school in every city — 26, in fact.

And I do want to mention another factor — Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, they were great friends. And I used to go to their house, it was not too far from the rink in Hollywood, and Harriet was terrific. And [their sons] David and Ricky both skated. It was just a fun family. So they said, oh, Tony — that’s my dad — just let Richard go, it’s a great opportunity. And so there were a few people that really encouraged my dad to put me in the world of skating. And it’s just been great.

On traveling in the ice show with his mother and sister: My dad had to stay home to work [laughs]. He was at Warner Brothers for 40 years in the back lot, as the head of the sheet metal department. So he made many props and sets for fabulous movies, and I used to meet the movie stars through him. So he was in the business in many ways. But I have a brother that is older, and somebody had to be at home with Ron. And they didn’t want me on the road at 14 roaming around. And I think my mother thought, well, he’s got to get to school every morning. So she would be hammering on my hotel room door at 6 o’clock, “Are you up??”, because school started at 8 or 8:30. And my dad would come and visit us at Christmas, and whenever he could. And we were on the west coast all summer, training in San Francisco.

On finishing his bachelor’s degree at age 39: Yes!! [laughs] I always tell everybody, I graduated high school in 1953, and I started at the University of San Francisco that summer, just taking a few courses, and I should have graduated with my class in 1957, but I finished in 1975. So all I did was turn the numbers around [laughs]. But there were moments when I thought I was never going to make it. It was a long drawn-out experience, but a good one.

On being in ice shows for 30 years and doing almost 12,000 performances: We used to do about 400 shows a year and we would travel for 46 weeks of the year. When I think back — and you know, these kids do it today in Disney and these other shows — you know, it never fazed me. We’d do three shows on Saturday and we were right into it. And now, my God, one performance and I feel like I’m having a heart attack [laughs].

On ice shows today: I’m happy that [there’s shows] for the skaters today because there’s not the venues there were. We’ve lost that era and that entertainment, and I’m old-fashioned but I still would love to see an ice show done as we did. I love [shows like Champions on Ice and Stars on Ice] but to me, what made Ice Follies a great success was the ensemble, the variation of numbers, and the interpretive, whether it was Spanish or whatever theme it had. And the precision at the end with the 32 girls — like the Ziegfeld Follies or whatever. I have films and I get goosebumps when I see them doing these great things. And then we had some great stars over the year. But it was also a variety show, with comedy. I guess the only difference I would say that today if you are with a show a lot of times you are playing a personality or a character, and so you can’t make a name for yourself. And Stars on Ice and Champions on Ice always had the elite. So the guys who didn’t quite make it, that were still great performers and so talented, don’t have a place to go. I find that very frustrating. And then, you know, Ice Follies used to take people out of the ensemble and make them stars. They could see the potential of somebody, and then boom! They gave them a small step-out, and then next they had a feature, and they just kept growing. And I don’t think people realize how hard so many of the kids worked. They’d do shows every night but they’d be at that rink improving themselves, taking lessons.

On being in the “Peanuts” comic strip: In 1980, Snoopy wanted to be Mr. Debonair, Richard Dwyer. It was a Sunday strip and I was playing Boston with the Ice Follies, and my phone started ringing Sunday morning at the crack of dawn. “Did you see yourself? Did you see yourself?” [I have a framed copy] on my wall. And then in 1990 I was in it again with Peggy Fleming. It was a cute strip and so again I became famous. I always tell Charles Schulz, you put me on the map. More people were reacting to that than I ever had in my life [laughs].

On performing at age 72: I [still love it] but I’m probably frustrated because my body’s not cooperating with what I want to do. But I can still do the axel, I can do the double salchow, I try double loop, and I can still do my falling leaf. And the good thing that’s happened is I haven’t lost my flow and my spread eagles and my presentation.

On who he thinks could be the new Mr. Debonair: That’s a tough question. There’s so many talented people out there. I guess what the role calls for is a personality kind of like a Fred Astaire or a Gene Kelly, and it’s always been a smooth, not a frantic number — you’ve got the girls and the guy who presents the roses . . . boy, you put me on the spot there, Allison, I don’t know who to say [laughs] But there’s a lot of them. Even Scotty Hamilton, he said, Richard, I want to do Mr. Debonair. And he’d be great. It’s just funny how many people did come up to me at different times and say, I want to take over that number. And they were all great skaters. And Brian Boitano had me on his show on NBC and did Mr. Debonair with me. It’s just fun to know that they still recognize and honor me with the fact that they love that number.

JULY 2008
An interview with Charlene Wong, former Olympian from Canada, and coach of elite skaters including Amber Corwin and Mirai Nagasu. Still one of the smartest people and coaches I’ve ever met. 43 minutes, 18 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On her most embarrassing skating moment: In the warmup for the Calgary Olympics, long program. In those days [1988] we wore very low-cut neck dresses with the nude in the front. And my cookie, or the
padding in my dress, was detached. And in full view of everybody to see that I had padding in my dress
[laughs] — it had slid over. So I got off the ice and we snipped both of them out. So that was pretty
embarrassing, for my undergarments to be showing like that completely to the world in probably my
most important performance.

On how she started skating: I’m from Pierrefonds, it’s a suburb of Montreal, and most Canadians grow
up skating. We had a park down the street from my house, and in the winter time it would freeze over.
And my brother and sister would put my skates on for me at the house, and we’d literally skate down
the street to the park. In the suburbs at that time, they would seldom get the salt trucks or the rock
trucks out to do the roads, and so after snow or after freezing rain the road was pretty slippery. And we
would literally skate along the street to the park and then skate in the park, which was made to be a
little ice rink. And that’s how I originally learned how to skate.

On her double axel: It was very easy to get for me. I was landing clean double axels at nine [years old].
And when you think that in those days the emphasis was more on figures, that was pretty good. But at
the same time it wasn’t a good thing, because living where I was living in Montreal, in a smaller area,
they didn’t feel there was a need to learn triple jumps. So even though I had my double axel at a very
young age, I didn’t really think anybody knew that — not to take anything away from the coaches I was
working with at the time, but we didn’t really understand the technique of jumping the way we do
today. And so there was no urgency to start me on triple jumps or even on perfecting my double jump
technique. So I didn’t really start learning triples until five or six years later.

On figures: I loved figures. I wasn’t particularly great at them in competition. Well, I was strong when I
was younger, I won nationals in my first year in junior ladies in figures. But then I went through a spell
when I was very nervous under pressure. I remember one year at Skate Canada I got last in figures, and I
was devastated. And I called home to my mother and said, “Mom, I got last in the figures.” And she was
like “Oh, Charlene, stop pulling my leg, what did you really get?” And I’m like, “No, Mom, really, I placed
last” [laughs]. And then towards the end of my career I got it together again and ended up winning
Canadian nationals in figures. Not overall, in figures. And then doing pretty well at the Olympics and
world championships in figures.

On her experiences at the 1988 Olympics: For me, the biggest excitement was by far the process of
making it. Because I was training with my good friend at the time, Elizabeth Manley, and another girl,
from Great Britain, Gina Fulton. Mr. and Mrs. Dunfield, Sonya and Peter, were coaching me, and they’re
just phenomenal people, great human beings, and they made it a lot of fun for us. So the process was
great, and that combined with the fact that my parents got to go and watch, and see — it was like a
celebration of all their hard work as well. And the fact that Elizabeth won a medal, she’s a very giving
person and so she would share all the excitement of her success with all of us. So it was really fun.

Hindsight being 20/20, I wish that as a young girl I had set my sights a little higher than just participating.

Because I think you get what you aim for. I remember attending a national training camp when I was
around 10, and I was sitting on the floor in the room at wherever we were staying with Elizabeth Manley
and Tracey Wainman, who was another strong Canadian skater. And we were talking about what we
wanted to do with skating. And Tracey was just like, oh, I want to be Canadian champion, and Elizabeth’s
like, I want to win a medal at Olympics, and I said, “I just want to make it to Olympics!” And this was like
ten years before. And we all got exactly what we wanted. Not more, but not less. It’s kind of interesting.

On what she learned from the coaches she worked with as a skater: From my first coach, Helen Ann
Shields, I learned how to train effectively and the importance of family. And then Louis Stong was
great at packaging, and he introduced me to Sandra Bezic who introduced me to the importance of
choreography. The Dunfields just really instilled — started to get to the nitty-gritty of my technique both
in figures and free skating, and again the emphasis on life outside of skating, to use skating as a tool to
develop yourself as a person.

On the challenges of coaching compared to competing: For all the challenges I faced as a competitive
skater, an eligible and a professional, I think the challenges just become different. It’s more physically
demanding as a skater, but [coaching] is more demanding on your emotional resilience. Because there
are many more factors that are beyond your control. When you’re a skater you go out there and on a
day to day basis you have total control over how you train your body, how you train your mind, whose
guidance you choose to accept or to ignore. As a coach you can gather up all the resources, and you
can have tremendous resources, and a tremendous amount of confidence in your skater, and a sincere
desire to help from your deepest of desires and without ego. But at the end of the day, the skater and
whoever is closest to them in their circle, usually their parents, are only going to choose to work with
maybe one-tenth of what you have to offer. And then you have to detach as a coach. And that’s a really
hard thing, because sometimes you have to watch your skaters make mistakes that you can foresee and
that could have been prevented. And that’s a really hard thing, but at the same time you have to respect
that that’s part of their process, and still get up at the start of the next day and do your best and keep
putting the information on the table…If you hold the reins too tight, it’s not good for anybody.

On coaching Amber Corwin: Amber to this day remains one of the — I’ve been coaching for 20 years
now, and she is probably one of the hardest working individuals I’ve ever come across. And unstoppable
in her desire to be her personal best. She’s incredibly driven. What I love about Amber is her stick-to-
it-iveness. She may not have been the most beautiful skater or the best at any one thing, but she did
the best that she could do with each thing, and carved out a pretty fine career for herself, all things
considered. She has a lot to be proud of.

On coaching Mirai Nagasu: [At first] I never really watched her skate that much. So I knew Mirai was
out there, but I just knew her as another talented skater. So when her mother asked me to come on
board as her primary coach, I called her coach, and she was a little sad, but it was like passing the torch.
And when I started paying attention to what she was doing, it was like, “Oh, this girl is really talented”
[laughs].

[After her last competition with her former coach] I saw the DVD and thought, “Hmm. Well, if I’m going to be this girl’s coach then I’m going to treat her like she’s going all the way”. So the first two things I did
was emailing Lori Nichol and see if she would work with her, and secondly putting her on YouTube so
that people could see her, and sending out as many emails as I could to generate some buzz around her.

Honestly, my role with her is to oversee everything. And yes, I do coach her, and I do help her with her
jumps and her spins and her choreography, but I look at Mirai like a business, and I’m the president of
the business. And each department has someone in charge. And so when it goes well we all celebrate,
but when it goes down I’m to blame.

On coaching more than 40 skaters of different abilities: It’s like food on my plate. I don’t like to have
too much dessert, you know? And I think it makes me a better coach, working with a wide variety of
skaters. A variety of abilities and personalities, and different parents and different socio-economic
circumstances. It just helps me in every way and it helps me make my coaching experience more
rewarding.

I envisioned myself as a mom in a mini-van [laughs] and what gets me up in the morning is not so much
having a skater as a national champion or an Olympic champion, but how can I help the skaters that I’m
going to teach that day. And if helping them leads to that kind of success, then so be it. And if helping
them leads them to get their flip jump clean, or pass their pre-pre moves test after three tries, God
forbid [laughs], then that’s why I do it.

On being a vegetarian: I’m not as strict as I used to be. I used to be vegan, for many years, but
wearing leather skates obviously. I don’t cook meat or fish in the house. I do have dairy products now.
Occasionally if I go out with people I don’t know very well I’ll eat meat or fish if it’s more practical, but I
feel bad doing that.

I had a lot of issues with food as a teenager, but being the perfectionist I am, I was trying to find out if
there was any kind of connection with the ingredients of the food causing these issues. So I eliminated
everything that was refined from my diet and all the meats and stuff. And I slowly added things back and
that’s how I figured out what works for me.

JUNE 2008
An interview with Doug Wilson, producer and director for ABC. For 50 years he covered over 40 sports, and has been particularly influential in how figure skating is covered on american television. 1 hour, 18 minutes, 57 seconds long.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On his most embarrassing skating moment: It was many many years ago. I had gotten misinformation about how a young lady had performed. I had been told, I had thought, that she had skated very well in her competition, in her performance. And so when I saw her, I went up to her and I said, oh, wonderful news about the way you skated today, congratulations. And I looked at her eyes, and I was devastated because I’d obviously hurt her feelings, and she obviously thought I was being a wise guy.  And I just…aw, I didn’t realize it until a few minutes later when somebody told me, and I went “oh”.

On starting his career in television: I wanted to be a singer, and an actor. And I had my English major degree from Colgate University, in upstate New York, and I’d been very active in the performance side of things there…and I came to New York and was looking for a job as a star. And there weren’t any openings for a star [laughs].  So I ended up as an NBC page. And I was on a CBS show and I wore my page uniform on that show and got a lot of laughs. And then I got my draft notice, and I was supposed to get married at the same time that all this was happening. So I was able to get in the Air Force reserves, and served six months…and I got married, a couple of weeks after the six months ended. And I didn’t have a job, and I went back to NBC and they offered me my page uniform back, and I said I didn’t think so. And there was a gentleman named Harold Day, a Colgate man and a friend of the family. And he had come to me after a couple of concerts [at Colgate] and said he could help me if I wanted to be a performer, but if there was ever anything else he could do for me in broadcasting, he’d put a word in for me.  So I remembered that and I called Mr. Day, and went into ABC and talked to him…And ABC at that time was about to go into a new venture. They were going on network daytime television [laughs]. They were building back from a program they’d put on the network called American Bandstand, from Philadelphia, and prior to that was a game show called Who Do You Trust with Johnny Carson. And they were going to build back to 11 o’clock with other programs, so they needed productions.  So I told them money wasn’t the issue here, I just wanted to get into the business, and I wanted to find out about production to help me be a better performer, blah blah blah, whatever I said. And I got a call the next day to come in and start work as a production assistant at $60 a week. Before taxes [laughs].  That first day at work, I was assigned to a live Chevrolet commercial on the Pat Boone show…and I was standing there next to the camera, holding up cue cards, and thinking “I want to be Pat Boone. There’s something wrong with this picture” [laughs].  But out of that came an immersion and a fascination with television production.

On sports (and skating) as theatre: I think the two sports I became most closely connected with over the years were gymnastics and figure skating. That related to my philosophy with ABC Wide World of Sports which was that the only difference between what was going on in a theatre, on the boards, and the only thing that was going on in an athletic arena, or in a stadium, was that in theatre the script had already been written. And our job as producers and directors of sports television was to follow the plotlines as they developed, and our stars, the actors, of course are the athletes. And being a music guy as I was, it was a perfect fit because it was ultimate drama. Skating particularly was absolute sports theatre. And I became more and more in admiration of what skaters did, and skating became very much a part of my way of life  and I became immersed in it. And as the years unfolded, a couple of things [happened]. I started producing less and directing more…and I began to see at that point, as I sat in that chair and began to look at the tape – I realized first of all that in competitive skating in general, you want to see their whole bodies. Because they’re speaking with their whole bodies, and they’re being judged by their whole bodies. But every once in a while when they’re skating you can get a great moment when you can get a good close-up of them for a second, even if it’s just for a second, and celebrate the great expression on their face if they’re exhilarated, or see the disappointment if not.

On what a good TV sports director does: If someone is sitting in their living room, looking at the screen, and saying, “Oh! What a great shot!” then I have failed. Because that means they’re paying more attention to my camera work then they are to the skater. It should be seamless, as seamless as you can make it, and you should be enhancing what the skater does, and make the skater look good. I once said – I think at the Chicago Professional Skaters Association meeting – I asked around, how many times a skater like Scott Hamilton or one of the great skaters, how many times in their life, from the first time they tried to accomplish it, had they done a triple axel? And I got answers of everything from 5,000 to 40,000 times.  And so my viewpoint is, and always has been, that the next time Scott Hamilton or Brian Boitano or whoever is going out on that ice, and they’re about to do a triple axel, they’ve done 40,000 rehearsals for that moment for our cameras. And we’d better do our best, we’d better respect that one thousand percent, and make every effort, do everything we can, to enhance the look of that triple axel. Because it’s an extraordinary thing to do.

This reminds me of a major ego moment for me [laughs]. We were up in Calgary at the Olympics, and when the Battle of the Brians was over – I had been chronicling Brian Boitano’s competitive life for a number of years, since the early 80s, and was particularly excited about his long program. And he and I knew each other, of course. And so when it was over, and I had gotten the shot that people have seen hundreds of times now, when he clenches his fist and looks up at the sky thanking God for doing so well [laughs] – that was a moment that of course all [of us] can appreciate, the greatness of a champion when they do their best performance when the pressure is greatest.  That’s the sign of a truly great champion, and he had done that. Well, I followed him and waited until the event was over, and waited outside the press conference. He still had his skates on! And he came out of the press conference and he saw me, and I embraced him and said, “Congratulations”, and I looked up at him and said, “Brian, tonight you were great. And so was I” [laughs]. And he said, “Oh, really? Did you get it?” And I said, “Yeah. We got it” [laughs].

On whether he has a favorite skating discipline: No, I don’t think I [do]. I think it depends – I am uplifted by greatness. And whatever discipline it is, whether it’s a Peggy Fleming or whether it’s Torvill and Dean or whether it’s Brian or Scott or whether it’s the Protopopovs – it’s very interesting, too, we’ve all experienced it from the camera point, with my wonderful camera people, when we’re doing a host broadcast and we’re doing skaters with lesser abilities, we always feel like we’re struggling in the truck. Nothing’s working particularly right; [it feels like] something’s missing. And without exception, you get to the great skaters, and suddenly, we’re doing really well. Their greatness, and their capabilities, and their abilities to skate technically and to move people emotionally, directly affects the work that we do on television.

On whether he’s friends with people in the skating community: Oh, deeply so. I can explain it in a couple of different ways -  I’ll share this story with you. From 1988 to 1991 my late wife fought a battle with esophageal cancer, which she eventually lost. In 1990 the national championships were in [Salt Lake City], and it came to a point where I said to [my wife] that maybe this year I won’t be at nationals. And she looked at me and said, “But you have to. These are your people.”  And that probably sums it up. They’ve been so patient with me on occasions when I’ve asked for things that are probably beyond the call of duty. I’ve always tried to look at things from their point of view…They’ve been giving and supportive, and particularly during that time after I lost my wife in the early 90s, the skating community has just been wonderfully supportive. And then to be selected to be inducted into the Hall of Fame is just such an honor.

MAY 2008
An interview with John Nicks, world class coach of many top-notch skaters, including Tai Babilonia/Randy Gardner, Sasha Cohen, and Jojo Starbuck/Ken Shelley. And don’t think of calling him anything but “Mr. Nicks.” 48 minutes long.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On his most embarrassing skating moment: It’s very clear. [It was in 1953] and I had just won a world championship in Davos [in Switzerland] in pairs skating, and returned to London, and was giving an exhibition at an ice hockey game in Wembley Stadium, in the intermission, with my sister. And I stepped onto the ice in front of about 10,000 people, and fell over immediately, and got up and fell over again — and then realized I’d still got my skate guards on [laughs]. And then I took them off and joined in the laughter that about 10,000 people were indulging in [laughs]. And I’ve never forgotten that, ever. My sister was the only one not laughing. She said I was a damn fool, or words to that effect.

On how he began skating: [My father] had some sports stores in the south of England, and one of them was in Brighton, which is on the south coast of England. And when I was about 10 or 11 years old, a large swimming pool in Brighton, they changed this swimming pool into an ice rink, which was a real novelty in those days. This must have been, gosh, in the late 1930s. And he wanted to stock ice skating  equipment and didn’t know anything about it. So he took my sister and myself down to the ice rink, and for two or three years we were guinea pigs, trying out all different makes of boots and skates, and having lessons from different teachers. It was a long time ago but I can still remember it pretty clearly.

On competing in pairs with his sister Jennifer:  We were singles for about a year, and then the same old story as with other pairs happened with me. The coach that my sister and I had just suggested, well, you’re related, you’re the right size — she was shorter than I was and a better skater than I was, but I was older, so that sort of evened out [laughs].  Of course, you know, pairs skating in England then was not a popular discipline, and there weren’t a lot of pairs. And when you start, it’s often easier to be successful in pairs skating than in solo skating. Once you improve your ability and get into a high level of competition, then that’s different and you have to be good, but in the early stages, it’s easier to be successful as a pairs skater.

On his military service: In those days the British army had a two-year conscription period, and I was conscripted into the Royal Middlesex Regiment — signals, actually. And after training I was sent out to Hong Kong. I think there were problems between the British government and the Communistic government. Now what the hell 10,000 guys were going to be doing in Hong Kong, I have no idea [laughs]. It was really ridiculous. But I was sent out there and had some really interesting times there.

I was a corporal and after I’d been there about a month, I was summoned to the commanding officer, I think he was a colonel, and he was very keen to have something recreationally. And he said he’d heard I was a champion skater, and he’d arranged an exhibition for me to do, in a hangar. And I said, “Well, I didn’t know they had ice here.” And he said, “No, they don’t have ice here. It’s roller skating. You can do it in roller skates.” So I regretfully refused, and I wasn’t too popular there any more [laughs]. Anyway, I was fortunate. I was only there about eight months and the British Olympic Association petitioned for me to come home and train for the British championships, so I got transferred back earlier than I normally would have done.

On touring with an ice show in South Africa in the 1950s: [Skating] wasn’t very popular. There were only about three ice rinks in the country. But for some reason, although there weren’t a lot of people participating, there was a lot of interest in the show. In fact, in South Africa at that time, there was a lot of interest in anything that was coming from England or from Europe. I think they were starved of entertainment, and any show that was imported always did well.  So I did the show in Johannesburg, and I think a year after that I had a business partner and we formed a company and we took shows firstly down to Durban, and then we invested in a touring company with a portable ice rink that we toured all over South Africa.

That was the time of apartheid, which I didn’t understand too well coming from England, but I can remember that we had to segregate the audience. And not only that, but we had a promotion that allowed after the shows, during the day, for skaters to come and rent skates and try and skate. And that fascinated a lot of the people over there, whites and blacks and Indians, and I know we had to keep two different sections of rental boots, one for whites and one for coloreds. It was very different for me.

On how he started coaching in the United States: I’d taught for a year in Canada, and in those days and in that location, it was purely a winter season, like starting in September or October and finishing in March. And then if you were lucky as a coach you went to what they called summer school for two months, which I did. But it was not a year-round job, and I was married at the time and had one son, and, really, the abbreviated season wasn’t very good. I didn’t like to take six-week holidays a few times a year. So I advertised in the United States skating magazine, and had a lot of replies from a lot of places, but one of them was from Paramount in California, who had just lost their number one coach, a fellow called Bill Kipp who had died in the crash [of the plane carrying the 1961 US figure skating team]. And looking at all of the offers I had decided for a couple of reasons that was where I wanted to go — firstly because at Paramount, where he was, was the Arctic Blades figure skating club, which at that point was one of the premier clubs in the United States. And secondly, and I made a mistake here, my wife and I imagined that Long Beach was just a mass of wonderful white sands, and it wasn’t until we got down here that we saw the oil wells [laughs]. Not as many white sands as we thought. But I was very lucky because southern California is a wonderful place to go, with so many athletically inclined youngsters, the  population, and so many parents that are interested in their children excelling in one thing or the other.

On working with Frank Zamboni at Paramount:  One of the most influential people in my life. He taught me so many things. He taught me mostly about the business of figure skating. You know, I came there as a teacher, thinking, well, where’s your right hip going into an axel, and when you turn a three-turn, where’s your rotation, and that was about it. And he taught me about how to be a businessman, how to understand the workings of an ice rink, how to work with management — because if you don’t, you’re not going to be very successful — and taught me how to relate to the community, which he did there. He taught me a lot of things. I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for him. [But] I knew if I learned how to drive the Zamboni, I would be asked to do that. So I didn’t [laughs].

On coaching JoJo Starbuck and Ken Shelley:  I taught them when they were quite young, and they stayed together, which as you know is an important aspect of pairs skating these days, with so many people split up. They stayed together throughout their working years. Pairs skating was very different then, and they were a very different pair from what you see today physically. Their differential in height was only about an inch or two — that doesn’t work today. They were really a wonderful pair with great unison and great skating ability. And her mother was a secretary at one of the local airplane manufacturers, Douglas, and his father worked for Raytheon, and things were not easy for them. But both families really stuck it out and at the end, of course, they were well rewarded.

On coaching Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner: They had come together at a young age and were very successful. They were a little more classical in presentation [than Starbuck and Shelley] but they had the same physicality and the same ability. They had a special quality. Basically, they were both very nice people. They negated that ‘nice guys finished last’. They were nice people, and it came through that they cared a lot about each other, for anybody that wasn’t related. And they were not connected in any sexual way at all. They just had a..[like] a brother and sister and yet almost closer than that. And they had a relationship that was almost obvious to everybody. And some of the pairs that I’ve taught, the good ones, particularly them, seem to have a sixth sense of what the other partner is doing, so that if the other partner gets into trouble, they cover for them. They’re not looking at their partner but they know what they’re doing and where they are, and I think that comes through from skating for so long together.

They were very musical and artistic. I had a wonderful ballet teacher who worked with them that improved them so much, and I’ve always been sorry that she hasn’t gotten much of the credit there — a lady by the name of Terry Rudolph, who worked with them wonderfully.

On his experience with Babilonia and Gardner at the 1980 Olympics: I do remember that immediately after the pairs competition, I was asked to attend a press conference, and I think there were about 200 to 300 in this big ballroom where the conference was. And I can remember being very very upset and telling my team leader that I would not go in there unless I had the team doctor to accompany. Because there was a medical situation there and I’m not a medical man — I worked under the advice of the medical practitioners there. I remember that Tai and Randy were so upset that they did not attend the press conference, but I did.

I remember talking to them perhaps about an hour after that, when I think they were in a hotel, at the team hotel — they always have a team hotel with a couple of safe rooms. And talking to them was similar to talking to zombies. They were not crying, not laughing, not doing anything, speaking in a monotone almost as if they couldn’t believe what had happened in the previous few hours. The next day, I met with them and things were better. They were unhappy, but they were surviving. And then the next day things started to change, because I think over the next two weeks there was a total of about 6,000 pieces of mail that they received, all very supportive, all sending them, like, wooden gold medals, and pictures. And it was very obvious to them that the competition had not been a failure for them. It had been an unfortunate occurrence that wasn’t really their fault, but they were so happy that so many people thought well of them. And of course, as it turned out, although they regretted very much not being able to compete and possibly — in my opinion, they were about even money for a gold medal , it would have been close either way — it really did not hurt their professional career at all.

On coaching Kristi Yamaguchi and Rudy Galindo, who jumped in opposite directions: The difficulty really was in the judges’ perception that the unison issue was not as easy to judge. On the other hand, it did make a pair look different, which I’ve always enjoyed, and it also enabled me to create different patterns, and I quite enjoyed it. But in essence the unison side of pairs skating was absent in a lot of their moves. But [the different directions] is a handicap. I’ve seen a lot of wonderful pairs skaters skating in opposite directions that really haven’t received the credit they should.

On coaching Naomi Nari Nam and Sasha Cohen at the same time: With great difficulty [laughs]. Well, not so much at the beginning. When I first taught them, Naomi was one division ahead. So everything was fine up to that point [when they both became seniors]. Then of course when you have two talented skaters skating against each other with the same coach at the same rink, you are going to get some issues. And I can remember that there were some.

On coaching Sasha Cohen in two different Olympics under two different judging systems: It was fine because Sasha’s so talented, and very demanding. And directly the new system came about, she wanted to know everything about it, got all the written work she could, and we talked to a lot of people. As you probably know, she’s a very intense young lady, and really wanted to get into it very strongly — and at times was telling me what was best to do with the new system. Now and again she was wrong [laughs] but we had a good dialogue.

On being a judge on the Skating With Celebrities television show: It was wonderful. It was relaxing, and I had a good time and a lot of fun. I was supposed to be the bad guy there and that was pretty easy for me [laughs]. And for me, being used to — I think I’ve coached in 11 Olympics and 30-something nationals, and so it was quite relaxing and enjoyable and different. Bruce Jenner, he was a wonderful athlete but couldn’t skate at all. And although he didn’t win it, I think he was third or fourth, he was the one who improved the most, because of his athletic history and determination. I think you could see he was an Olympic gold medalist, and you could see the character and that he was determined to do well. But he took the most amazing falls — I think he had stitches over his eyes. I really admired him. He really improved and he was really into it.

On how he coaches in street shoes and stands in the centre of the ice: I haven’t worn skates in 30 years, ever. [After hurting his foot while skating in South Africa] in those tight lace-up boots there was some pain. And [when coaching figures] I felt that skating all over the patch and obscuring the tracings was not a very good idea. And I didn’t move very much off the patch, so I could teach just as well with boots on and not mess the ice up. And then when I got older, I began to understand that my demonstration ability was declining [laughs]. And the American youth are not very forgiving sometimes, and when I tried to demonstrate something [laughs] it didn’t go down too well. There were some laughs. So I decided the advantages of teaching in boots outweighed the disadvantages of not teaching in them. I haven’t owned a pair of skates for 30 years.

[And if someone runs into him] they will only crash into me once [laughs]. I tell them, I’m standing in one square foot of an ice rink that’s got 1800 square feet, so they should be able to miss me.

On his hobby of deep-sea fishing:  I go boating for fun. I go down to Mexico and go deep-sea fishing, that’s my fun. I caught a 220-pound marlin off La Paz, down in Baja. It took about an hour and three-quarters to get on the boat, with two gaffs and three guys.

APRIL 2008
An interview with Frank Carroll, world class coach of many fantastic skaters, including Michelle Kwan, Linda Fratianne, Evan Lysacek and Christopher Bowman. 1 hour, 1 minute, 35 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On his most embarrassing skating moment: I was appearing on television when I was in Ice Follies, and it was on a show very similar to Merv Griffin or the Donahue show, except it was from Cleveland and the host was a man who at the time was very famous. It was the 1960s and he had this show on national television. So we came and did a thing from Ice Follies, I was skating in a pair, and…I noticed that people were laughing and kind of smirking. And I remember thinking, oh boy, I must be skating really well, gosh, I’m bringing a smile to their face. And then as I finished the routine, I noticed that the fly on my costume in the front had completely broken open, so basically my underwear and the whole front of me was exposed on national television for about three and a half minutes.

On becoming interested in skating as a child: I really started in the wintertime, outdoors. In Worcester [Massachusetts] there was no artificial rink. But I would see – at the movies, they would have movie caps, like a movie reel with news, and I saw the different skaters doing well, like Barbara Ann Scott winning the Olympic Games, and Dick Button winning [his] first Olympics. And there would be all of these things on TV and I’d get very excited and I’d want to do that very much, and I wanted to learn how to skate like that. And also there were the movies with people like Sonja Henie and Belita. And I got very very excited about seeing skating on that level, and people that could really figure skate.

On taking lessons from Maribel Vinson Owen: It was very interesting to me, because my father was a professor in a university, and also in the school department in Worcester, he held various positions, and he was a very intelligent man. And I was very very good in school, and schoolwork appealed to me. And I had various teachers before Maribel who told me “this feels like that” and would press on my leg and tell me what the feeling was, but I really didn’t feel much. But Maribel taught it like school. She said, you learn this principle, this axiom of movement, how the weight is on the blade when you’re going forward, how the weight is when you’re going backward, what the outside edges are, how you held your hip and your body and what that position was called. So it was step-by-step progression, one axiom building on another axiom of movement. And that really appealed to me because I could think of it like school, I could learn the lesson and go on to the next one.

On being encouraged by Tenley Albright: When I was competing on the national level, she was always saying wonderful things to me like, “Frank, Frank, how do you jump so high? What’s your secret?” And of course, really, I didn’t jump that high, but Tenley always made me feel good about myself. She made me feel like I was special and that I was a good freeskater. And it meant a lot to me and it was very encouraging. Whether she really meant it or not, it was very sweet of her to take time out to encourage other people.

On seeing Sonja Henie at the rink when he moved to Los Angeles: She would drive up in a midnight blue Rolls Royce and she’d have two Norwegian elkhounds on a leash, and she’d let them out of the car to do their business, and then she’d put them in the car and tell them to be good. And then – I remember one day when she had on a yellow leotard, she never wore a skirt, and she had on a yellow chiffon kind of scarf around her waist, like a tie, and she had on her finger a yellow canary diamond ring that looked like the knob that boys back in the 1950s used to put on their steering wheels to turn their wheels. I’ve never seen a rock as big as that. And the rock matched the yellow scarf and it matched the yellow leotard. And she had full makeup on, like she was going to do a performance. And I thought, oh my God, this is only 9:30 or 10 in the morning and she’s fully made up [laughs].

On being in Ice Follies: My experience in Ice Follies, it was kind of like a hate-love relationship. I honestly don’t think Ice Follies was for me. For one thing, doing the same number night after night, week after week after week for a whole year was not very creative for me. Also, I was hired in the show as a principal male skater, and then after me they hired David Jenkins [1960 Olympic gold medalist]. So that kind of put me in limbo, it was like, oh, now we’ve got Frank, what do we do with him? So I ended up skating a pair, which I knew I was going to do so that was fine, but I kind of became everybody’s understudy, and in a trio here, and now you’re going to be the understudy for the Indian number. And one very funny story is one time Lee Carroll was the Indian princess, and one time I was doing this number, and standing on this drum with my arms folded and some sort of Indian costume on, and they announced, “And now the Indian princess is……Frank Carroll!” And of course I started laughing and all the kids in the show burst out laughing. It was very funny but I was mad as hell and told the technicians in the back, “What are you doing? I’m not the Indian princess!! I’m an Indian warrior!!” [laughs]

On starting as a coach: I did some movie things, I came to LA because I had some friends in show business. They said, come, come to LA and do shows. So I did some terrible, terrible movies – I ended up being in movies basically with a surfboard under my arm – and I’d go to the beach, and basically I got very bored. I knew I wasn’t going to be a successful actor because I wasn’t trained, and I’d go to these interviews with two dozen extremely handsome men who were trained in New York, and had done theatre majors in college. So I started teaching skating in a little tiny rink, Iceland in Van Nuys, California. But I quickly grasped the fact that most of the people teaching skating didn’t have a very good background and didn’t have a formidable teacher like I did in Maribel. And in just a few lessons I could get kids to do things that they had been struggling months to do. And so my teaching sort of snowballed from one month to the other and I developed quite a little league of very fine developing skaters.

On meeting Linda Fratianne: I saw this little girl with little spindly legs, and she could jump over the moon. And she absolutely was fabulous. The talent was oozing out of her ears. And I thought to myself when I first laid eyes on her and watched her do this, that this could be a world champion.  That’s only happened to me three times in my life. The other two were Christopher Bowman and Michelle Kwan.

On coaching Christopher Bowman: He had the greatest talent of anyone I’ve ever seen on skates. He was the most talented I’ve ever taught. And he had wonderful natural ability in figures. His problem with figures was that he was very naughty and wouldn’t practice with any kind of dedication.  But he had real figure talent. He had beautiful turns, And he had wonderful placements at Worlds and Nationals with about a third of the practice that other people did to reach that level and have success.

On coaching Michelle Kwan: When I took her to Nationals and she didn’t do well in juniors, because she really didn’t know how to go about it, I remember Mary Scotvold [coach] coming up to me and saying, “Frank, you have the most talented girl in this entire competition. I have a girl in juniors against her, I’ve watched the senior ladies, and your little girl is the most talented one here.” And I said, “You know what, Mary? Thank you for saying that. I agree with you completely” [laughs].  But you know, what was interesting about Michelle was, the talent and the determination, she was the one who could put the package together. And after that nationals, when I didn’t even know her very well, she skated that competition with filthy dirty boots, and just, you know, not groomed very well. But she didn’t know that that was all part of the shtick. And she said to me – I remember it so well, the conversation one on one – she said to me, “What did I do wrong? What is wrong? What do I have to do to crack this? What do I have to do to be successful at Nationals?” And I explained to her about training, about dedication, about never stopping in your program, about how to train to be one of the best in the world, about how to present yourself and what she had to look like, and how she had to play the game. And she shook her head and said, “Yeah”, and took this in, and right from then this little girl started with a vengeance about how to go about this, because she wanted to be better. She wanted to be a success and she wanted to be one of the best in the country and one of the best in the world. And it was amazing to hear somebody say, “Tell me how to go about it.”

On who he coaches: I have some of the most dreadful skaters the world has ever seen, but they like to skate and they like to have a lesson and they try. And I teach adults, and I like that. I don’t like teaching just the high tests and the championship levels, because they’re very intense and there’s lots of tension in it. And there needs to be a time for every teacher to hone their skills, and to teach somebody from the start, and how to begin to skate. I love watching the people who teach the beginner classes at our rink, and how they get these little kids to move, whether it’s blowing bubbles or bouncing a ball or whatever. That’s a whole different art.

On managing skaters’ emotions: It’s something you have to address. I think first of all that a coach has to be very calm and in control. They can’t become emotional and they can’t show weakness. And even though I’m a very very nervous person, I’ve always tried to stay a little away from the skater instead of being in their face and saying, do this, do that. Because I think that shows that you’re nervous, and I think you have to mask it in some fashion. And if there’s disappointment, you have to be calm even if the parents are starting to scream, and I think you have to explain to them that, you know, we will discuss this at a later time and put it in perspective. Or with a child that’s really sobbing away, you have to say, you know, look, sweetheart, you will live to skate another day. It’s not the end of the world, this is not the Olympic games here. You didn’t have a lot of success, but you’ll live, and life is filled with ups and downs, not just in skating, but life in general. You know, I try to be a little philosophical about it and I think I’m good at that.

On the most significant change in the sport: I think the biggest thing that’s come into figure skating is that money has ruled the sport now. I think that figures were taken out because of money. I think that the media have a lot more now to do with how the competitions are run because of money. I think that the athletes are doing endorsements because of money. And I think that money has crept in and ruined our sport, and I think that’s the major change that’s taken place. It’s not a sport like it used to be. It’s now a financial sport.

MARCH 2008
An interview with Jimmie Santee, National medalist, principal skater with Disney On Ice, and currently Executive Director of the Professional Skaters Association (PSA). 45 minutes, 22 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On his most embarrassing skating moment: Only one? [laughs] The one that’s kind of short but also the funniest one and probably the most embarrassing is…this had to be the mid-70s and I was competing in the Chicago club interclub competition, and I competed in an interpretive event in which I placed second to David Michalowski. And the interesting thing about David Michalowski is that he’s deaf. So I placed second in an interpretive event to a deaf guy. That was embarrassing [laughs].  He’s a great guy, he’s from my hometown and he competed with us, he competed nationally, and he’s a great skater. I interpreted what I felt and he skated to what he felt, so if it sounds like sour grapes, no. To help him, they picked music with a very deep bass line to it, and played it very loud, so he could feel the vibrations, so he could skate rhythmically to it. And you know me, I went out there and was kind of goofy and just playing at it. But it’s just kind of funny when I say I was second to a deaf guy in an interpretive competition [laughs].

On balancing skating and schoolwork as a child: [I did my homework in the car] if I did my homework [laughs]. I was not very studious. Skating was very important. But if there’s one thing I regret about that part of my life, it’s just that I didn’t apply myself in school as much as I should have.

On competing in both figure skating and speed skating: I got to short-track nationals in speed skating. I was a sprinter. Anything more than a couple of laps, I was exhausted. And if you look at my skating career, I was always more of a short-program skater, always good in the short. In the long I don’t know if it was a lack of focus or stamina. The figure skating helped the speed skating [more than the other way around]. In those days we skated what we called a safety track — it was kind of shaped like a diamond, where now it’s an oval. So it had very sharp turns. And my coach at the time, Chuck Burke, was an Olympian in speed skating and also skated with Sonja Henie. So he was also a figure skater and a speed skater. And he rockered my speed skate almost to the same rocker as my figure skates to give more agility and a sharper turning radius. It was fun.

On being a US novice and junior champion: The novice was a great victory. It was hard to describe. This morning I was sitting over at the host hotel (at US Nationals) and talking to Danny O’Shea, who just won novice nationals, just sitting there with him and his mother, having this great conversation, and just telling him, soak it up and enjoy it. I truly did not appreciate my titles until only about two years ago. I did achieve a lot of it very naturally and I had this very weird knack of knowing where I was going to be when I went into a competition. I just knew if I was going to win, or if I was going to be third or fourth, I just knew. So I expected it. There weren’t too many times when I didn’t end up where I thought I was going to. And being five years younger than David [Santee, his brother], I watched him and his success, and I was like, yeah, I’m going to go to Nationals. I didn’t really think of it in a cocky way, it just was. So I didn’t really appreciate it until after I’d been coaching for a long time, and watching some truly talented kids just kill themselves working so hard and giving so much of their soul and their heart, and struggling to make the final round at Upper Great Lakes [regional qualifying event for US Nationals]. And to see and watch the kids achieve nationals and then win a title, it’s special. And I didn’t really get that.

On developing the role of the Genie in Aladdin for Disney on Ice: Michael Eisner [head of Disney Studios] did not want to give up[Aladdin] to Kenneth [Feld, owner of Disney on Ice] because he felt that the way that the Genie changes shape all the time, and the voice, couldn’t be recreated on ice. So they went back and forth for a while, and Kenneth decided that he was going to create the Genie and deliver it to Eisner. So they flew me up to New York City and I met with the costume designer, and they took a full bust of my head and then they designed the Genie’s face over that. And while I was there, Kenneth kept calling and saying, “Tell them what you want. We want you to be able to manoeuvre in this, we want you to be able to do all your tricks, and we want you to do your back flip”. So they started with a bodysuit and laid the muscles out in foam, and it was air conditioning filter foam, so it was very light and porous. And they built it up so that when I made a muscle, the muscle would pop out. And [even with the bulk] it was a very light costume, it was less than five pounds. But the hands at first were made out of rubber, and they were like six pounds each, and I couldn’t move the fingers and with that weight my arms got tired really quickly. And then with the head, they built an apparatus that fit around my skull and then under my jaw, so that when I opened my mouth, the mouth moved.

So eventually [we went to Miami] and they got a television crew and rented out the St. Pete Arena for two days, to make this MTV-type video. And the first time I went out there in this costume and went up to do the back flip, I came down and landed on my head. The mouth was so loose that it came up over my eyes and I lost my sight. And the hands were so heavy that it totally messed up the timing. So at the end of the day I took the head out and ripped out all the metal, and they got a pair of gloves done really fast and made them out of the same air conditioning material. So the next day I completed the back flip without hurting myself [laughs]. And a couple of weeks later Kenneth walked into Mr. Eisner’s office and said, “Here’s the Genie”, and handed him the tape, and they made the deal right after that. I was pretty pumped about that. But then after they told us we could have it, Robin Williams was upset with Eisner because he didn’t get any royalties or points off the character, so he wasn’t going to give the rights to use his voice. So we rehearsed with the guy who did the voice of Roger Rabbit doing the voice of the Genie all through rehearsals. And then the week that we opened we got the rights to use [Robin Williams’] voice. But the whole time I had been preparing to be Robin Williams. I read how the animators drew the character — his shape was drawn from an S, like smoke. Very sss-y. So the lower half of my body, I usually took very small steps, and I tried to make the upper body bigger. And I studied a bunch of [Robin Williams’] films, I listened to a bunch of his audiotapes, to try to get the sense of timing and rhythm down. I really felt like I could mimic him. I was told that he came to the show, I never saw him so I don’t know, but Michael Eisner did and he came back and shook my hand, and that was pretty cool.

On competing versus being in ice shows: I wanted to be in the Olympics, but I really wanted to be in the ice show. I really wanted to be a comedian. I always told people I was born a couple of decades too late. I would have loved to have been in the heyday of [Ice] Follies, when they had the big openings and all the stars would come in Hollywood in limos and all that stuff. That’s what I always wanted to do, and when I was in it that’s what I was supposed to be doing. I grew as a performer over the 11 years [in ice shows]. I did appreciate it when I was doing it, but I really grew to appreciate it when I went back and watched other people perform, sometimes to a great standard, and sometimes not to a great standard [laughs] which actually bothered me more. I did not like to see people disrespect the craft, and when I saw people not being respectful, not respecting the tradition of either competitive skating or the show itself, that would bother me. You know, people who did not put the effort into performing, who would just go out there and go through the motions. It was hard to see that sometimes.

On touring with a newborn baby: He [his son Ryan] was born during our last tour. Jamie [his wife] went back to Montreal, where she’s from, and she went into labor. I was in Birmingham, Alabama, and she called at 10 am and said, “Do you want to get on a plane? There’s a flight at 11 and a flight at 1”. So I had to go to the building and pack up my skates and stuff, and I got out of there at 1 o’clock, and the plane was delayed, but I ended up landing about 9 o’clock and I got to the hospital and Ryan was born about 1 in the morning. And we had five days off and then I went back [to the tour], and the following weekend Jamie flew down [to Miami] with Ryan. He was ten days old. And my brother and my mom and dad flew down and they all sat in the front row at the very first show, and I jumped over the lights and picked him up in my palm and held him over my head, pointing at him like in Lion King [laughs]. It was pretty cool, people were laughing. And then we did the last six months of the tour with him. But we knew it was the last tour, it was time.

On his goals as the executive director of the Professional Skaters Association (PSA): [I wanted to] give the association back to the members. I felt it had gotten away from that. What I’ve been doing is involving as many people as I can in voicing their opinions. It’s really important. Some of it’s just basic marketing. Our current president was our ratings committee chairperson before, and she’s really turned it around. We’ve started training the examiners, where before it wasn’t formal and it wasn’t continual. Now the master rated coaches who come in, they’re trained in a classroom and they do a small test, and then they go and do their ratings. And this is something we do continually. We take surveys on everything. Unfortunately I think we’re still living down some of the mistakes of the past. We had some really serious issues of trust in California and in the East Coast as well. I think a lot of the people felt they didn’t have a voice.

On retiring from skating and then working for the PSA: I care about this sport. Everything I’ve had in life, and everything I’ve gotten or received in life, is from skating. When I retired from Disney, I retired, but I consider this my second career. I want to provide for my family, but I also want to enjoy them, and I want to enjoy them skating. I want them to get those moments, to watch them skating in the show, and I want to watch them fall down, and I want to watch them get up, and I want to watch them cry when they don’t do well, and I want to be able to hug them and pat them on the back and say, “I love you anyways, and the next time will be better”. And when they achieve those great things — that’s what it is, it’s the journey. And I’m so thankful and blessed that I have the family that I do. The skating, we’ve gotten everything from it, and talking to David — we just owe everything to skating.

FEBRUARY 2008
An interview with Phillip Dulebohn, former US National Pairs champion with partner Tiffany Scott, 2002 Olympian, and now a Coach in Delaware. 29 minutes, 17 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On his most embarrassing skating moment:  We were trying to make the world team for a second time, and we were skating at Nationals in Boston, and I remember we came around, did our first element, nailed our triple toes, which was our big thing, and then we had triple twist next. And I remember taking this big stroke, and at the time I had these really big fat boots that didn’t really fit my feet properly. So whenever I took a big deep edge my boot would actually catch on the ice, and it would make me slip. So I just slipped right off my foot, and I took Tiffany down with me, and we slammed right into the wall. On national television, and right in front of everybody, and trying to make the world team.  I remember it felt like it took about 30 minutes for us to get up on the ice, but in actuality we just sprung right back up. I don’t know if you’ve ever fallen on freshly cut ice, where it’s really slippery and you can’t quite get a grip on it, your knees are whipping out from beneath you when you’re trying to get your feet back on the ice. It was kind of like that. But we literally stood up, took two strokes, and did a triple twist. It was pretty cool.

On switching from singles to pairs: There was a period of about five to six years where I competed seriously as a novice skater, and I won in 1989 – I guess I’m dating myself now [laughs] – but I was in Baltimore for my first national championships, and it went really well, and of course I won. Really, one of the happiest moments in my skating. And then I competed as a junior level skater for four years and then one year as a senior. And then I started skating pairs, when I was almost 20. My choreographer at the time, Karl Kurtz, had another skater that he had taught starting from scratch, and it was a good fit for me. That year was the first year I did not qualify for nationals. So I was a little disappointed, and, you know, I didn’t feel that I was finished and I figured I was ready to try something new, and try pairs. I took it very lightly at first, when I was really kind of doing both [singles and pairs]. My first partner and I were really doing things on a trial basis at first and then it developed into a more competitive thing as time went on. We ended up skating for a year and a half together and then we disconnected, more because I felt like I didn’t get along with her very well and she was a little difficult for me at the time. We were both young, and it was just difficult for us to relate on the ice and I was really frustrated. It was really kind of sapping the life out of me. So at that point I decided to skate singles again for another season, and then the following year Tiffany [Scott] and I started skating together.

On competing in the 2002 Olympics: It was great. Honestly, it was a little bittersweet, because we had made the Olympic team and we were very proud of that – it was a great experience, of course – but at that time, things weren’t the best between the three of us, Tiffany, Karl and I. And it was a little strange. I felt that – I can’t speak for Tiffany or Karl, of course – but I felt that it could have been a better experience. And it has nothing to do with how we skated. We skated well there and we didn’t place that well. Irregardless of that, though, I felt that if things had been a little better emotionally between us we probably would have skated a little better and done better. But it was still a great experience.

On being an older skater and in charge of organizing his own skating:  It does make things a lot more difficult when you are trying to fund your own skating, and train, and, you know, do everything yourself. I had financial support through the USFSA but that didn’t really come into play very much until we were much further along. Tiffany and I both waited tables, we taught skating, we did everything we could just to make ends meet. It definitely gave us a big appreciation for what we did. It was never a bad thing. You just have to work harder. It develops your character and, I don’t know, just makes you really appreciate everything a lot more.  From the time I was about 19 years old, I mostly paid for my own skating. Not because my parents didn’t want to, but really, they just couldn’t afford it any more and they were at their wits’ end financially.

JANUARY 2008
A compilation of interviews with various skaters, coaches, and fans from the 2008 US National Championships in St. Paul, MN. Interviews with Del Arbour, Aaron Parchem, Figure Skating Universe (FSU) fans, Tanith Belbin, Brooke Castille, and others. 33 minutes, 33 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

Del Arbour, skating outfit manufacturer and designer, on whether she has a favorite client: I really don’t.  We dress some wonderful, wonderful people, high level skaters, low level skaters, all different, and they’re wonderful, all of them. For the most part. Once in a while you get one who’s not too great, but that’s life. Most of the time they’re just terrific.

Del Arbour

Daniyel Cohen, junior pairs competitor, on the best thing about the event: It’s Nationals, it’s the best. It’s so much fun. And we’re done! Now we get to go out and watch everybody. We went to the Mall of America the other day, but I think we’re going to watch skating now, just watch all the championships.

Arielle Trujillo, junior pairs competitor, on the best thing about the event: Just being here, the experience is great to have. Just watching everybody. And getting to see friends you don’t usually get to see, from across the country. That’s nice.

Aaron Parchem, former pairs competitor, on whether he gets less stress and more sleep at Nationals as a coach:  Less stress and less sleep. We have early morning practices now that I never used to have as a pairs skater, because nobody lifts a girl over their head at seven in the morning. I teach kids in the morning and pairs at midday.

Aaron Parchem and Kim Sailer

“JKL”, skating fan, on why she never reveals who she likes in the novice competitions:  I have a couple [of favorites], but generally it’s the kiss of death if I put a star by their name in the book, or, you know, if I tell somebody that’s the one to watch. Somehow or other they just….go away. But it’s fun to follow. Go to novice and see the ones we’re going to cheer for in about six years.

“UMBS Go Blue”, skating fan, on his favorite part of the event: I liked Tanith [Belbin] and Ben [Agosto]’s original dance. I liked Meryl Davis and Charlie White’s OD as well, they’re great. They’re fantastic. Also Mirai [Nagasu]’s short program, that was incredible. It blew the whole field away.

“My Little Pony”, skating fan, on her favorite thing so far: I like that they have the Habitrails so we don’t have to go outside. It’s like -30 degrees here, which is not really habitable for humans. But it’s like the city of the future but without any good stores. I went to the Macy’s and it was revolting.

“BelleBway”, skating fan, on her favorite thing so far: I just got here today so I haven’t really done that much.  Junior mens were really good. Adam Rippon is amazing, and I really enjoyed the whole event.

“Lizziebeth”, skating fan, on her favorite thing so far: I loved the junior men. Everyone skated to the best of their ability, and the senior men are going to have a hard time following that performance. I hope they all skate their best, so I’m in the mood for a good competition.

Tanith Belbin, senior dance competitor, on getting sleep at competitions: You know, I sleep great at competitions. It’s actually a relaxing week for me because at home I’m training nine to five, and here we have to skate only, what, an hour a day? It’s great. I get to go out to eat, spend time with my family who I almost never get to see, and all of my friends. So I sleep awesome. I find that I skate best when I get out and socialize and try not to stay isolated too much. It gives me too much time to get inside my head and freak out.

Kim and I with Tanith Belbin

John Baldwin Sr., father of senior pairs competitor John Baldwin Jr., on being a skating parent: It’s very nerve-wracking. When I was teaching him, right there at the barrier, it was less nerve-wracking, but all you can do now is sit up here and watch [laughs]. I have to turn into a parent, not a coach. I love to watch the women and the men and the dance. But not the pairs [laughs].

Jeff Schneider, trainer at the University of Delaware, on the work that he does: Every injury’s different. There’s been some catastrophic ones, there were some very basic ones. I’ve seen somebody just stroke and fall and break their arm, we’ve had severe head traumas, so there’s not one that jumps out, they’re all different.  [The most common] is treating overuse injuries, primarily caused by boots. If something’s added [to a skater’s workout] it’s due to a missed workout, not from being disrespectful or anything like that. When [the athletes] first get there, they think, “Oh, he’s really mean” but they’ve figured out by now that it’s really not the case. But that’s our secret. We won’t tell anybody that [laughs].

Alissa Czisny, senior ladies’ competitor, on her plans after finishing her event: I’m going to go to the party and party with all the other kids, enjoy my time with them because I don’t get to see everybody all that often.  [And then] I’ll take a break and then go back, talk with my coaches, things we need to change, and look forward to next year.

Allison Manley, podcaster, on interviewing Alissa Czisny: I feel like a complete moron for asking Alissa Czisny the generic question of “How’d you feel when you got off the ice?”. Like an idiot [laughs].  I won’t curse. Trying to keep this clean. But anyway, it was stupid and I feel pissed, and we’re just going to take it with a grain of salt and move on.

Brooke Castile, senior pairs competitor, on what it’s like to be thrown in a triple twist: I can’t really describe it. It’s not as spectacular as it looks [laughs]. It doesn’t really feel as if you’re flying – you kind of just have to do your thing up there. It’s so quick that you can’t really describe it. It doesn’t feel high, it doesn’t feel like you’re flying. For me it doesn’t. For some girls it might [laughs].

Interviewing Brooke Castille

Members of “Evan’s Elfs”, Evan Lysacek’s fan forum, on showing their fandom at Nationals:

Carly: We created these badges for anyone who wants to wear one, and we created a 3-by-5 [foot] banner which is on its way to Sweden for worlds with one of our members. We have members from all over the world, from China and Hungary and Poland, everywhere, that meet at the Evan Lysacek fan forum and discuss the main man, which of course in our eyes is Evan Lysacek [laughs].

Mary: We also have T-shirts with the same logo that we wore on Friday and Saturday around the arena, so we were like walking billboards [laughs]. And so people would come up to us and say, “What is that? What does that mean? Evan’s Elfs?” And so we would tell them. And we carry a bunch of the tags along with us in our bags that have pin backs, so we gave them out to people. If they said they were an Evan fan, I would say, “Oh, would you like to have one of these?” And I would tell them, it stands for the Evan Lysacek fan forum and you can find us online and join up if you want to. Or you don’t have to, doesn’t matter, but you’re welcome to have one if you want to.

I think we probably have ten [fans] here all together.  We haven’t spoken to all of them. But we have spoken to Evan’s webmaster and to someone from Ice Network. Evan hasn’t had a very visible support system, but we’ve been staying in the background, trying to make people aware that we’re around – and Evan is the most appreciative person that I’ve ever seen. He personally answers all the emails that he gets, and he gave us about a half-hour of his time at Skate America when we were there, signing autographs. We met him here, and he signed our banner and our T-shirts. Evan was just thrilled to death when he found out that we had a banner.

DECEMBER 2007
An interview with David Santee, two-time Olympian, World Silver Medalist, now Coach and Technical Specialist. 45 minutes, 28 seconds long.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On his most embarrassing skating moment: If you skate for as long as I have, there are many. I was at an ice show in Kansas City, and I had been there for several years as a featured skater, and it was right after I got the Rocky music, which of course became my signature. And we didn’t have time really to come up with a new costume, so we kind of made do, and created a costume of the proper colors based on Rocky I, which were red and white, from an old costume. And the old costume was from a Tony Orlando and Dawn number, for which I had white suspenders and a white bow tie and a straw hat and a red shirt. So we took off the suspenders and the bow tie, and had just the red shirt and the white pants. So I’m doing my number, and after you do a few ice shows you get a feel for what the audience is going to react [to], you know, like the death drop, and I had a pretty good death drop so I knew that the audience would react to that. So you’re used to that. And this one night in Kansas City, I started out, and I was landing jumps, and I wasn’t getting the normal reaction. It was kind of like, there was applause, but there was also a buzz. There was something that wasn’t right. So I finished the program with the death drop, got up, did a fast scratch spin, finished the program, and went to bow. And as I went to bow I noticed the zipper had broken, and the red shirt had come out through the white pants. So needless to say I didn’t stick around for the rest of the bows.

The funny part in retrospect is that the name of the show was That’s Entertainment, and the announcer on his script would say, “Now if you think that’s entertainment, let’s bring him back for more”. Well, by this time the crowd was completely in hysterics. And then they also decided that they were going to let people know that I was not coming out for an encore because of an “equipment problem” [which had been] very clearly noted by everyone in the audience [laughs]. And after the finale they let me come out and do my encore in black pants, which was just as embarrassing.

On some little-known facts about him: I played trumpet. And in 1975 I was Outstanding Teenager in Illinois, and I think I was top three in the country. That was pretty cool. They had an assembly at the end of the school year, and everybody else was getting these awards, and they announced this thing and it was almost an Emmy-like statue, so for one day I was like the king of this school with this statue [laughs].

David Santee with Agnes Zawadski

On being bullied in high school: One of the stories I like to tell is my freshman year, I was about 4’11”, 4’10”, and being a male figure skater, I used to get picked on by pretty much everybody, even the ones who were super small. They were small but I was even smaller, the smallest. So after my freshman year I grew about nine inches, and went back and found the guy who had really given me the hardest time. And I was now about five or six inches taller than him. I didn’t say anything other than “You remember me?” and he was like “Um, uh, yeah”. [And I said] “I’m the guy you picked on all last year, so don’t ever pick on me again”. No force, no nothing, but that was the end of that. The good part about that was maybe about five to six years ago, my older son was at the same school, and they asked me to speak for their homecoming. So I kind of gave that story in the speech, and I could see my son’s reaction -  he’s a late grower, too, he’s grown a bit in the last couple of years. He’s in college now but at that point he was one of the smaller ones in high school, and he thought that was great. And all of his friends thought it was great.

On what he learned about coaching from one of his earlier coaches: Rubin Huron, a very good coach, very good technically, but [he was] a very negative coach, which back in those days was more the norm. So a lot of things went on there, good and bad, which really formed my attitude in the way that I like to teach. I’m a very positive coach myself, because I feel like this is a hard enough sport that you don’t need to beat down people. And it should be fun. I think that most people that see our skaters at competitions say that these skaters are having fun, and that’s the way it should be.

On other skaters he admires: John Misha Petkevich was an idol of mine growing up, and he was a man’s man in figure skating, and to me, obviously with my younger son being a hockey player I tend to put things more in hockey terms, but he was the Bobby Hull of figure skating. He was a glamorous guy, his charisma was off the charts. To this day I think the he and Janet Lynn are the two people I have the ultimate respect for, and if I were to be in a room or at a cocktail party those would be the two people I would gravitate toward just because of what they meant not only to skating, but also to my personal skating.

On why he likes the music from Rocky so much: When the movie came out [in 1977] I didn’t watch it that much originally. I was at a competition in Milwaukee and seven or eight skaters went to watch it and I just went along. And at that point I had just had kind of battles with my own self-confidence. I just had never given myself credit for having the talent and stuff that I should have. And the light went on because the message of the first movie was that you don’t have to be first place to be a champion. He didn’t win the fight but he was a winner. And he was the underdog and he came from very humble beginnings to achieve greatness. I just really latched on to that. It was something that at that point in my skating career I needed something to really hang on it, and I found it. I find it very difficult to watch the movies, because it is very emotional for me.

Why he retired from competitive skating in 1982, in between Olympics: I was 24, and I’d had seven years on the world team, and seven years of being under the spotlight, under the microscope all the time. And I think after a while there’s only so much you can handle, and then it’s time to go on. It was not a done deal as far as being able to stay on past 1981. Even in 1980 the opportunity was there with me being fourth at Olympics and the top three all retired, so then it was, let’s try to win a world championship. And then in 1981 to be second and to be so close, to take one more year, it was worth it. But there was not much left in the tank emotionally. I had given so much in 1981 and 1980 both to achieve whatever goals I could achieve, to be the best skater I could be. But there just wasn’t much. It wasn’t like I didn’t train, but the intensity and the passion and stuff that had been there just wasn’t there. There’s no way I could have done two more years.

On being in John Curry’s skating company: It was a tremendous experience that I think I fell into. In 1981 Kenneth Feld [ice show producer] called me up, and he pretty much said, take it or leave it, this is the offer. Ice Capades, same thing. And I made the same decision in both situations. I didn’t feel like 50 weeks a year, different city each week. And I may have made the mistake of youth of saying I didn’t want to dress up in a Mickey Mouse costume [laughs]. In 1982, the John Curry company came about, and I remember thinking this isn’t something I would normally do. And as it turned out it was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me, because it really taught me such a different side of skating. At the beginning I don’t think [John] knew what to make of me. I’m pretty sure that when they hired me, they hired me because of my name – I certainly didn’t fit into a dance company on ice with my style being Rocky on ice. So at the beginning I wasn’t really involved too much in group numbers. I was always just kind of standing around on the outside and did a couple of things but not too much. And we were supposed to do an exhibition and a couple of skaters came up sick. And John says, oh, we’re going to have to teach you the numbers. And I said, “I know them.” And he said, “What do you mean, you know them?” And I said,” I’ve been watching them the whole time. Put the music on.” And they put the music on and I did the number, and ever since then, we got on great. He always used to joke that I was like the batteries of the show, because I would come out and do these fast aggressive numbers like the Russian sailors dance, and then everybody else could be beautiful and graceful and all that [laughs].

On working as a TV commentator in the 1980s: At one point it was enjoyable, but it’s probably a little over my head, as cutthroat a business as it is. And I’m probably a little bit too sensitive for it. My biggest mistake was reading USA Today and listening to comments instead of just saying, do your job. That was the biggest problem I had. My knowledge was there [but] in a lot of cases, like the Calgary Olympics, I was put in as an interviewer, which was certainly not where my expertise is. I would be more like an analyst, but they had Dick Button, so they put me as an interviewer and that was really not my thing. But other times I did pro competitions as a commentator and that was much more successful.

On being appreciative: I look back at a lot of things like the highs and lows of my own competitive career, and I think it really gave me a very humble look at what I was able to do, [and] yet I really appreciate a lot of things. I think one thing I’m really good at is I don’t ever take things for granted. I just feel that you gotta just keep plugging away, and if you do the right thing, you earn what you get. I’ve had a lot of good things happen, and some not so good things, but I certainly wouldn’t have changed it. I wouldn’t change anything I did as an amateur except maybe believe in myself a little bit more.

On being a technical specialist: That has been a very fulfilling job. When they came to a lot of us former skaters and asked us, because they wanted to put some credibility into this new system, I just felt like I wanted to be part of this new wave. I love the technical side of skating. And just to hear and to be around a whole different atmosphere, now you’re on the judging side and you hear what the judges are thinking and what they do, and I have a greater appreciation for the judges and for what they offer. And it’s a lot of fun, it really is. It’s fun to be in the hot seat. I’m a competitor so I get up for these things just as much as when I skated.

NOVEMBER 2007
An interview with Shannon Peterson: coach of The Crystallettes, a synchronized skating team out of Dearborn, Michigan. 33 minutes, 40 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On her most embarrassing skating moment: Brand-new coach, directing an ice show.  They introduced me at the end, I came out to do a spin, had not had my skates sharpened in probably a year, and slipped off the edge.  I didn’t fall but it wasn’t pretty [laughs].

On why she likes synchronized skating: I love the team aspect. You don’t get that as an individual skater. In all my days as an individual skater, I had my friends, but we often ended up competing against each other. With synchro, you’re working with 16 to 20 skaters to produce something. And you go through all of the aches and pains of building a team, and especially with mostly girls – this year it’s all girls for me – they have their little quirks, their little arguments, and that sort of thing. But it’s the working together to create something special.

It takes a really special skater, especially now. For my international team, they have to have their senior Moves in the Field and be tested in dance. At least the silver level is what we look for. If they’re not and they can pull off the performance, then they still have to get those dance tests. And now with the moves in isolation, we look for accomplished freeskaters as well. But your great individual skater tends to struggle with skating with 15 other people. You have to match everything. An individual skater, you can go out there, and if you forget your program, it doesn’t matter.  You forget a step in synchro and it can be disastrous for the rest of them.

On the size of the program she runs: We have six on-ice coaches, we have two aerobics instructors, one ballet instructor, and two off-ice instructors. And then we have 80 to 100 skaters in any given year.

On accidents in synchro skating:  I never stop the music in practice unless it’s serious. So our skaters learn to manoeuvre around each other. But they’re skating at such great speed that it can be very very dangerous. And it can also be very dangerous to get back in. If you don’t get back in quickly, if you don’t learn that thinking on your feet to get back into your position fast, and you let one or two manoeuvres go by, then you can really tank on your scores. Many years ago, you know, we had travelling wheels, and the synchro skater has to be very conscious of what’s going on around them. And I remember being at an ice show dress rehearsal, and a girl falling. And  when she went to get back in she didn’t take into account that the wheel was travelling, and she clipped blades with another young lady and they both went up into the air, feet in the air. And when the girl came down she got sliced in the arm and severed her artery. It was quick thinking on the part of the stagehand to control the bleeding quite quickly. But you don’t recognize how dangerous it is to put 16 people on the ice, no hockey gear, no pads [laughs], and 16 pairs of very sharp blades.

On the enthusiasm of synchro skating fans: We were just at a competition in Kalamazoo, and we’ve got new parents coming up. And I looked at my sister [who coaches with her] and said, “We’ve got to tone that one down”[laughs]. The difference is, when I grew up in skating, you didn’t look at the judges, you didn’t question the judges, you were seen and not heard as a skater, that whole mentality. And I still at times struggle with the mentality of having the conversation with a judge or a technical controller on what does my team need to do. Because I grew up in a time when you didn’t  – you couldn’t ask that question. And behavior was so huge when you were at the hotel and such. So that’s how my skaters know they have to behave. Reeling in some of the parents, that can be difficult [laughs]. We always remind them that their behavior is a reflection of the whole program, but that can be very difficult, to try to influence everyone.

On making synchro skaters look alike: I have some fake [hair] buns on girls. Because I want them to look the same. Team Surprise, which is the number one team, they have a girl with short hair. And I always notice her. She’s slicked it back, but she doesn’t have a bun, and I’m drawn to her because of it. Having a hair in a bun, all in the same place, all slicked back – back to the days of the Robert Palmer video [laughs] –  it just uniforms the look. That is why we used to put the men in tan pants. So when the program got moving, you didn’t focus on my male skaters. And fans either love them or hate them. It wasn’t that I was trying to make them look feminine, the shirts were always a little different, but once the program got moving, I didn’t want you looking at just my male skaters. The ISU a few years ago said they had to be in a coloured pant that matched the costume, but originally that was why we did it. I wanted you looking at the whole performance, not just one or three skaters.

OCTOBER 2007
An interview with Diana Ronayne: coach of Ryan Jahnke, Dan Hollander, and others, and now Director of Figure Skating at Shattuck St. Marys’ School in Minnesota. 39 minutes, 42 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On her most embarrassing skating moment:  When I was a little kid, I was just starting to skate, and the coach wasn’t there. So a very famous person and I were having fun and fooling around, and pretending that we were coming on the ice for a big grand opening.  And we came on the ice for our big grand opening, and I tripped and fell on my knees and sat right on the end of my blade.  I got the blade in my butt. It required stitches. And that was even more interesting, trying to explain it to somebody else [laughs].

On training with coach Slavka Kohout: She was a taskmaster. We had a fear of her because she expected a lot of us, and she expected us to toe the mark. And the parents all supported it, and that was our routine. We skated a lot of hours. Some of us were there before school. Janet Lynn and I, a lot of times we would have to climb in through the ticket booth because the rink wasn’t open. Slavka never got there right on time [laughs]. So we’d crawl in there and then skate, just the two of us, from about six to eight in the morning, and then go to school, and then come back in the afternoon and skate until about seven at night. We did homework in the car, and homework in between. And on Saturday morning, Slavka started getting a big group of kids that she was taking to regionals and nationals, and we started having our famous Saturday morning patch. It was a three-hour patch. Three solid hours of going around and around in circles. And the whole ice would be just be a patchwork of circles by the time we were done. In the bitter winter, when it was very cold, she would give us a break after an hour and a half, a time to get off, and the Zamboni would go over the ice, and we would go back on for another hour and a half.

On coaching Dan Hollander:  [At first] he was very very shy and almost reclusive. He loved to skateboard, was almost a fanatic at skateboarding, and when his parents came to me to ask me to teach him, he had almost quit skating. He had decided he really didn’t like it, didn’t like figures, and didn’t like performing. I then found out after the fact that the first time when he went out to compete as a little boy, he was petrified, and it took his father going in to the locker room and basically bribing him to get out of the locker room to perform. So I met with the parents and Dan and basically got a bit of background on him and how he hated performing. And at the time he was a junior man and had a double axel, but he didn’t have any clean triples. And he had a great deal of difficulty spinning. And so it became obvious that we had to come up with some creative stuff. And one of the things we came up with was for an ice show, the director and I came up with the idea that he could be a French mime, like Marcel Marceau. So we used that. Dan and I took mime lessons, and we learned the miming, and we got the full costume and all of that. And I also encouraged him to do weightlifting, because that would make him be buff, and that was kind of cool for a guy that age to be buff [laughs] and not just, you know, a figure skater.  So he got into weightlifting, and doing the mime, and then he also got excited about wanting to do the backflip. So we got working on that, and we had the help of Michael Weiss’ father at one point, who helped him get it. So we ended up incorporating all of that and it became a great hit – the idea of a mime in a show, who hid behind a mask, and the idea of things like tripping over a rope, it gave him an out. If he missed a [jump] he could always treat it like he tripped over a rope or something. It offered him the opportunity to try not being afraid of things and falling. So that helped to start bring him out, and I think that started his creative juices of looking for characters and things to do, to be a character when he was skating.

On coaching Ryan Jahnke: He was a joy in all of my life. I started with him when he was eight years old. I was teaching at St. Clair Shores [in Michigan], I came in the morning, and at this point I was bringing my three children because I was a single mother. So the three children would do their homework or eat breakfast in the lobby. And I started noticing this mother bringing this young boy in, and one morning he had the scribe [for tracing figures] and he didn’t know how to use it. And his coach wasn’t there, I never saw him with a coach, so he asked me if I could show him how to use it. So I showed him, and showed him how to go around using it, and a couple of days later, I guess, his coach had decided she wasn’t going to come in the morning, so the mother asked me if I would teach him. So I checked him out, and that was the case, and I started working with him. And that was when he was eight years old, right from the beginning of his skating career. From the very first learning of the basic jumps and the basic figures.

He was a highly intelligent, highly driven young man. He liked all sorts of things. His parents had him involved with a very good soccer player, and he played the flute, and he sang in the choir – he had a fabulous voice. He had an older brother, and the older brother was very much into acting and singing, and I think he played lacrosse and was an athlete in other sports too.

On turning down the first offer of her current job [director of figure skating at Shattuck-St. Mary’s school and skating program] to continue working with Ryan Jahnke through the 2006 Olympics: He stayed committed to me, and I stayed committed to him. I could not leave. We had made game plans every year, and game plans of how to reach those goals. I owed that to him, and I wanted to. And so we did.

On trying different teaching styles for the skaters at Shattuck-St. Mary’s: W e tried with the skaters being self-motivated, and we tried going around as a team and working with each skater individually. But not a lot of skaters in the skating world have experienced that, so that’s a little tougher environment to create and for them to understand or live by. So we’ve ended up devising a schedule where they get lessons every day. They get a private time and then we’ve also built into the program two or three days a week of power skating, on ice, after school.  And they take ballet as a course during the day, and then after school three days a week they have a strength trainer for their strength and conditioning. And two days a week we do more sport-specific training off-ice.

SEPTEMBER 2007
An interview with Phillip Mills, former ballet dancer turned skating choreographer to elite athletes in the sport. 39 minutes, 54 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On his most embarrassing skating moment:  When I was living in Milano, Italy, with Carlo and Christa Fassi,  [there was] a huge arena opening in Rome, and the Italian skating federation wanted to present a big spectacular event. So Gilberto Viadini, the Italian champion, he was kind of a big industrial-type guy, liked the chicks, was real rough and tumble and not real classical. And Carlo came to me and said, “The federation wants you to do a classical piece for this big show”.  So I said OK, and got this music together, and went into the rink the morning we were to start. And there was this Elvis Presley music raging in the building, and Gilberto was warming up with the moves, going crazy. And I put on my leather jacket and went out on the ice, and we started working on these classical moves. And he was so much like a duck out of water. I think I spent about 30 or 40 minutes trying to get him to do the first three or five seconds. Finally, I said, “Gilberto! Put the music on that you had when we were warming up! The Elvis Presley music! We’re not going to do this crap!” So I took off my leather jacket and I said, “Here, put this jacket on!” And he put on the jacket and it was great, we were hot, we were rolling. And we’re maybe an hour into the rehearsal and I see Carlo walk in the side door. And…I skated up to the barrier and he said, “I told you we were supposed to do the classical program!”  And I said, “He can’t do the classical program! Look at this guy!” [laughs]  And so we started going back and forth, yelling louder and louder, half in English, half in Italian. And finally I said, “Fine! We’ll do the classical program!” And he said, “No! Do the rock and roll program!” And I said, “No! We’ll do the classical program!”  And he said, “No! Do the rock and roll program!” And I said, “OKAY!” And he stopped, so dumbfounded in his tracks that I got my way, and he just stormed up to his office. And by that time I realized that everybody in the building had stopped. And I looked up and I was just mortified. Everybody in the building had heard me yelling at Carlo Fassi. And this young coach skates up to me and says [quietly], “Mr. Mills, you can’t speak like that to Carlo Fassi.” And I said, “OH YES I CAN! Because he RESPECTS me!”

So needless to say it was a huge success. {Gilberto] was the only one in a 20,000-seat arena who got a standing ovation. And Carlo Fassi, big man that he is, came to me afterwards and said, “I apologize. You were right. It was a great call and the federation was really happy.”

On developing as a choreographer:  I always try to find something I can do better than I did the year before.  For example, if one year I look back at my programs and I’m not real happy with the footwork, then that’s my focus next year. If I’m not real happy with the layout or the patterns, I try to do that better the next year. So I try to improve the quality of what I do, so I keep gaining some momentum.

Phillip Mills

On learning to skate at age 35 after a career as a professional ballet dancer: After the [1988] Olympics, Joe Druar [ice dancer] gave me his skates. And I thought, what am I going to do with these smelly old things? Bronze them? Put them on my mantelpiece? So I threw them in the closet. But then when I started interviewing [for choreography jobs] all over the country, I remember the interview at the Broadmoor with Carlo, he said, “I hope if you teach tennis, you have a racket”.  And I thought, “Hmm. Well, maybe if I wore skates, the choreography would be faster”.  I didn’t even know then what a rocker or a counter were, but I did spend a lot of time [watching] figure lessons, patch lessons, to learn how the blade moves through the ice, how it turns and checks, the bend of the knee and the ankle. So I took these skates and went into the rink very early in the morning for a long time, and I took some nasty falls. The worst thing was that for back crossovers my legs would not turn in. My legs were so turned out from being a ballet dancer that every time I’d step in my leg would be turned out. I couldn’t get that whole parallel thing. So finally one day I walked out to the ice, and all the ice dancers were there, and they just freaked out. They just couldn’t believe it, and that was the kind of the start of it. And I just threw myself right in there.

On the creative process of choreographing a program: Because I choreograph all over the country, I don’t always [get to know the skater beforehand].  For all of my higher-level skaters, we do have a dialogue about the music, but I do steer them in a direction where I think they’re going to grow artistically, but not so far left of center as where they are in their performance quality and how their body is built. Because then they look bad.  For some of the younger skaters, or a new coach, they’re better at picking the music for that season than I am because I don’t really know them yet. But what I do every time I go to a new student, the first thing I ask them is what their favorite color is. And I don’t ask them that for a costume, because the color tells me an amazing amount about what kind of personality they have.

I’m an organic choreographer, because of my ballet training. I choreograph from the inside out. So unless  you’re doing a classic that’s been around for two or three hundred years, you go from a straight base coming from inside out. I go onto the lesson with a skater, sometimes they’re crabby, sometimes they’re excited, sometimes they’re introverted, sometimes they’re extroverted. And I try to pull on their energy. So I turn the music on, and I don’t know how this happens because I have no control over it, but my body just starts to move.  I don’t know why or how, I don’t think about it, my body just does it.

On overused music: I have choreographed 58 Sing Sing Sings. I keep track.

On his reaction to changes to a program he has completed:  This does happen a lot, and you do know that there’s going to be a little bit of, say, shifting the jumps around. And you hope they’re going to try to keep the choreographer involved to keep the integrity of the piece. But many times – the frustrating part is only when they have shifted so much of the program and changed so much, and then it’s a mess. And then they want you to come back and fix it. But – obviously you know that the kids are going to water down the choreography. That’s going to happen, that’s natural. But if it’s actually so bad, I tell them, you take my name off as choreographer. That is not my piece any more. I’d say that happens 10% of the time. And that’s usually the last time I will work with them.

On his hardest client to work with: Sasha Cohen is the hardest. Because she is so incredibly talented, and movement is extremely natural to her. Last year, when I was doing her programs for Marshall’s Skate, I had to keep reeling her in, because she gets so excited and so distracted. You’re working on one part and suddenly she’s talking about another part. So it wasn’t hard choreographing on her, because anything you do, she looks amazing. It’s her energy that is hard to harness. It’s like having a wild thoroughbred: “Sasha! Whoa! Come back here now. We’re working on this section now, not that. We’ll get to that, okay?”

I would say Michelle Kwan is the easiest because of her talent and her ability to be an amazing student. She is the most quintessential amazing, focused, intelligent student that I have ever worked with. Everything you do, she tries, and even if she doesn’t like it or feel comfortable, she tries anyway. And when I choreograph, I want the movement to look like them. I don’t want the movement to look like me. My biggest fear is if somebody says, “Oh, that’s a Phillip Mills program”. That’s like the kiss of death! They’re all individuals, they all get 200% of me, and they all deserve to look like themselves, not like a pre-packaged target or something.

AUGUST 2007
An interview with Amy Hughes, mother of Olympic Gold Medalist Sarah Hughes and Olympian Emily Hughes. 50 minutes, 27 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On her most embarrassing skating moment:  I was going through chemotherapy for breast cancer, so I didn’t have any hair, but I had a really terrific wig. And we went to Eastern Sectionals, which were in Simsbury that year, and I wanted to look really good for the competition. So I let this beauty parlor take my wig and do it, you know, make it look good, and they somehow turned it upside down. And it was – you had to see it. And I didn’t have anything else to put on my head. Nobody knew who I was, it was sticking straight out. And we were – I actually thought I’d better go find Sarah, because if she looks and she’s going to see me in the middle of her number, she’s going to start laughing and say “What happened to you?!?” So we had to go find her – I think I was with my mother at that point – and she laughed so hard I didn’t think she was ever going to settle down before she was going to skate. We talked about that wig forever.  I said, I’m going to save this, because this just goes to show that there really is other things going on besides skating…I think I still do [have the wig]. It’s in my closet somewhere. It’s a reminder of things we go through in life.

On raising six very accomplished children:  Having a big family, I think just makes it better, because nobody’s ever the focus of anything. You’re just part of a whole team, and everybody helps out everybody else, and we all try to support everyone. And I’ll tell you, Emily supported Sarah at the ’02 Olympics, and Sarah supported Emily at the ’06 Olympics. We have these great pictures of each of them holding up signs when the other one skated at the Olympics, which I think just says it all.

On knowing what she was getting into as a parent of skaters:  You know the word ‘clueless’? [laughs] I was very naïve. I really was. I had no idea. I don’t know if that’s good or bad [laughs], but I really didn’t know. I thought it was just normal, what they were doing. And I guess…a lot of parents have said, “What did you do, how did you do it?” And you know, I say, every child is different, you never know. If they want to do it, they’re going to do it, whether it’s ice skating, tennis, playing a musical instrument, studying and becoming a math wizard or a chess wizard. Everybody’s different, and if they want to do it, my job is just to give them the opportunity, and get them to the lessons or make it available to them – but not to go overboard, and have them try to do other things as well, which I thought was really important. They all were in public school, and you had to do your homework and you had to meet with your teachers if you were going to be away, to get the work if you were going to have to go somewhere for a competition. They were very responsible.

On skating as fun: I always said, if you have fun, you keep doing it. And sometimes – I’ve watched a lot over the years, and seen a lot of things…and I’ve seen so many times when it’s not fun. But I think that’s true across the board of any endeavor. Sometimes families go overboard on anything. I always tried to back off.  And I have so many diversions in my life that it’s not hard, you know, sometimes I’ll say, “I can’t get you there so you’re not going”.  And I think that’s why the kids have really had fun with it. Like Emily would have to get up and be dressed and get everything together because I couldn’t get everything together. They do a lot on their own, they plan a lot on their own, they make their own appointments a lot of the time.

On choosing coaches: I always say that you should find a good coach for your child, because you know what? It’s possible for a coach to be good for one kid, and not for another. You know, like anything else? And you just want to find something that just seems to click. I mean, can you imagine, 13 years with the same coach? And it’s okay. The best thing is, all my children like Bonni  [Retzkin, Emily’s coach]. And that’s a hard thing, when you have six children and they all like the same coach. But it’s because she’s a good person, and I think that’s what’s really been important.

On watching her children compete:  Oh, I’m a nervous wreck [laughs]. No question. And he [her husband John] never sits still. If I sit with him, he’d kill me from squeezing. I couldn’t [watch Sarah’s long program at the Olympics]. I stood right outside the door, and I gave somebody my ticket…I’ll tell you why I couldn’t watch it. I had gone to all her practices, and her practices were fabulous, and I thought “Wow”. And she just seemed so happy. And I thought, “Everybody’s going to be watching her, my husband’s watching her, I know she can do it, and if she doesn’t do it, I’m going to have a heart attack” [laughs]. Not for me, but for her. She can do it. If she was not doing so well, I would say, oh, well, whatever, but I was so nervous I couldn’t believe it. And I did the same thing with Emily. Emily was having good practices, and I said, “I don’t think I can watch this”. And I watched them practice all those years, I took them to the rinky-dink places, dropped them off and watched them walk in, and when it came to that, I couldn’t watch. And people said, “How can you not watch?” And I said, “I’ll watch it after. They don’t know. I’m not right on top of them. Enough people are watching.” At the other competitions I’ve gone to, if nobody is around or nobody’s there, I have to watch because I have to tell my husband what happened.  But when he’s there I don’t have that responsibility [laughs].

About working with charities: I think another nice thing about skating is the charity events that my children have had the opportunity to be involved with. Both Sarah and Emily, they’ve visited a lot of children in hospital, they can relate because of [my illness], and nothing really bothers them, they’ve seen so much stuff.  And they’re wonderful about it. It makes the kids feel good, and the parents. We were at St. Jude’s in Memphis, and this little girl Hannah had a port on her chest, and she had a doll that had a port. She said, “See, my doll has the port because I have one.”  And my daughter said, “Oh, that’s nothing. My mother had two of them.” And the little girl said, “Your mother had two?” [laughs] And I said, “Yeah, I had two.” And Hannah’s mother came over to me and said, “Did you really have two?” And I said, “I did! I had two and everybody saw them” [laughs]. And you know what? That mother, she wrote me a note, and sent a picture, we have a picture, and said, “Hannah couldn’t get over it”, and suddenly Hannah wasn’t so sick because I had it worse. And those are the kind of things that put everything in perspective. And the kids, I said to them, “You made this family feel  good”…and it’s all from the skating.

JULY 2007
An interview with Susie Wynne. Former US Ice Dance Champion, 1988 Olympian, member of the Torvill & Dean Face the Music tour, commentator for ESPN and ABC, coach, and choreographer. 55 minutes, 47 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On her most embarrassing skating moment: It was during one of the Champions on Ice tours and I had just worn fishnet stockings for the first time, and I wasn’t used to things getting stuck in them, like, you know, the hook of your skate. I had my engagement ring on – it was a month before I was to be married – and Joe Druar and I were doing those goofy disco spins on our backs. And my engagement ring got stuck in my fishnet stocking. And it was at the beginning of the show, when all the skaters were coming out doing that skating montage thing, and there I am on my back with my engagement ring stuck on the other side of my body. And I think Joe had to carry me off in a fetal position before Brian Boitano came out and did his beautiful death drop [laughs].

On her early days in skating: I failed a lot in the beginning. I remember failing my first figure test – I was pulled. In those days it was – “excuse me, ma’am, you’ll have to leave the ice, because your figures are atrocious” [laughs].  I was pulled from the test, and I told my mom, I don’t want to fail like that again. I would go to the rink at five o’clock in the morning – I think my mom gave the Zamboni driver a bottle of Jack Daniels every week [laughs] – and I did patch from five to seven before anybody got there. And I did that for my first, second and third figure. I’m not like that now – I’m the laziest person you’ll ever meet now – but then there was just a force. “How will I do that? I’ve got to find out what this is about. “

On moving and changing coaches: We [she and Joe Druar] were in Philadelphia and had been stuck in sort of the fourth place, fifth place position in senior nationals. And Richard [Callaghan] said, you know, I think you guys have probably lived out your life here in ice dancing [laughs], I’ve talked to some Ice Capades people, do you want to turn professional? And it was 1986, and Joe and I, we just felt that we wanted to try to make the Olympic team, although chances didn’t look good.

Around that time, it was funny, I just kept running into people outside of skating who were helping change my thoughts about skating. I had a friend named Pam Lloyd who used to take my aerobics class, I used to teach aerobics, and she said, “Well, why aren’t you going to try to push for the Olympics? It’s just two years out.” And I said, “Aw, our coach kind of thinks it’s done, and I kind of agree with him.” And she said, “No! Look to the coaches that are developing the skaters with the style and the technique that you want to copy, and go to them. And go now! Don’t wait around! Try to make it. You’re young! “ And I thought, “Wow. I hadn’t even thought of that!” So it’s interesting how God put her in my life at that very tender time…so I took my friend’s advice, Joe and I felt that we weren’t finished, and two years later we made the Olympic team.

Susie Wynne and Joe Druar

On quitting before the 1992 Olympics: We had done the Goodwill Games in 1991 in Tacoma, and we had skated the program of our lives there, and beat Evgeny Platov and Oksana Grishuk. But we skated so well and had a standing ovation, and we both thought, we won’t be able to keep this up. I just felt that there were too many people coming up, and I just didn’t have the heart to overcome our physical….let’s put it this way, I thought that Joe and I were very talented performers and very solid skaters, but we didn’t have the artistry or the flexibility or the line that the Russians behind us, Grishuk and Platov, had. And it’s just…I don’t know, I didn’t have the drive. I could feel it. I thought, I’m getting lazier, and I had met Tyler Barth, who’s now my husband, and life just seemed like it was going to be changing.

On touring with Torvill and Dean’s Face the Music tour: 260-something Boleros [laughs]. It was exciting. On my list of things that I wanted to accomplish in skating was to be an Olympian, to go to the world championships, to skate with the best competitively and in shows, and to do every show that there is to do, and to work with Chris and Jayne. So my list is checked off. But working with them, you realize that they’re not only talented, but they work so much harder than any skater I’ve ever met. And they’re smart and they’re funny and they’re humble. So that was quite an experience. For a year and a half, being away again from my husband, trying to get out of debt [laughs], and being able to skate with the best ice dancers of our time, it was a pretty amazing experience.

I’m not a touring-type person, I’m not a vagabond…but I saw the world. We lived in England for close to a year and then in Australia. I met about 80 relatives in Dublin – I had more cheers that night in Dublin than Torvill and Dean did, which was pretty cool [laughs]. And the people that I met, the experiences and laughter…but it’s a grind, touring is. It can beat you down. I remember coming home from that tour and going into the grocery store, and walking in with the cart, and Bolero was playing. Honest to goodness, it was two or three days out from coming home, I just put the cart back and walked out of the store [laughs]. I‘m like, “No more Bolero!!”

On developing as a TV commentator: I kept thinking [when she started] I’ll be good at this, I love to talk, I love people, this is a no-brainer. And then as soon as that little red light came on, I was so stiff. I was terrible. I can’t believe that I kept working, because I was really so nervous. Now, I have to watch my stuff a month after. I have to sit down and make myself watch it, like “Ooh, I gotta get better, oh, I could have said this, why did I say this.” I don’t usually look at the stand-ups because it’s like a minute, it’s fluffy, you’re usually just talking about the skaters in a fluid quick way. I look at that and I’m like “oh, my hair, that was crazy”, but it’s just a quick visual. I love to listen to the conversation between me and Terry Gannon or Paul Wylie or Peter Carruthers and it’s “Oh, why did I say that? Or why did I say that?”

On working with Dick Button: This is when I knew we were going to get along and I think he knew we would have a good time. We were somewhere…and he looked at me, and it was just the two of us, and he looked at me and said, “Susie. What do you know? Tell me about your education” [laughs]. And I’m thinking, you know, I cannot, you know, [he has a] Harvard law degree, and I’m going to go, “Well, I went to Drexel University for a semester” – it’s tough, I didn’t last long [laughs] – “and, uh, I took a couple of courses at UCCS”? I can’t measure up to this man’s expectations. So I go, “Dick, you know what? I’m pretty much dumb as a box of rocks, but the thing I’m good at, my husband told me that I’m very smart because I know what I’m good at. And that’s pretty much it. I like to have a good time, I like to eat and have fun, and that’s about all I know.” And he looked at me, and he just started laughing. And after that – you know, you’re just yourself and you don’t try to be bigger than you are, because he can see through that. He’s just funny.

Susie and me

On being a coach and choreographer: I love it. I love working with the young people because they’re just so smart and they work so hard…I see kids that are smart, that are passionate, that love what they do and can’t even get into any trouble because they’re working so hard at fulfilling their dream and their passion. And that’s exciting, to be a part of that and to help encourage them and to help guide them. I just sort of think of myself as…I want to encourage them and to give them hope to do whatever it is they need to do in their life, and to help guide them. It’s funny, I don’t know, I was in church about five years ago, and the pastor said, “We really are in this life to be in the people-building business, because that’s ultimately what we’re why here to do.”  And I wept. Because I thought, that’s exactly why I love this sport and I love choreographing, because, if you think of it that way, it’s much more than skating. You can help somebody think big in terms of going to college, or becoming a teacher, or help them in their relationships, or get them ready for life.

Me with Joe Druar, around 1982, after he took me through a dance test.

JUNE 2007
An interview with Cindy Watson Caprel, elite coach of Deanna Stellato among others, and also a technical specialist. 37 minutes, 51 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On her most embarrassing skating moment:  I actually have two. The first one was probably my last Nationals which was in Buffalo in 1971. I skated a clean long program, and I was getting to the end of my program and I was very very excited, and I went to go into my flying camel and I missed my toepick.  And fell flat on my stomach.  I broke a nail, I was bleeding by the time I got off the ice, and I was so embarrassed I thought I wanted to die. Because I was so excited that I had done this clean program, and then marred it with a stupid spin.

The other was the Nationals before that, during the figures competition. I remember doing a paragraph double three, forward, and getting a standing ovation. It was the most amazing thing – I stepped off my figure and everybody started clapping.  And it wasn’t – it looked like a good figure from the outside, and then they posted the results, as they did after every figure, and I got eighth.  And I remember Carlo, Carlo Fassi, being just furious. I mean, he was furious!  “I do not understand what is wrong with these judges!!! “  And so at the end of the competition we went to the Nationals party, and I happened to run into him just as I was coming in the door. And there was a group of judges standing over in the corner. And he grabbed my hand and dragged me over there, and I think I had ended up fifth or sixth at that competition, and he dragged me over to the judges and just – he pointed at me, and he said “Do you not take this girl seriously?!? What is the matter with you?!?”  And he started yelling at the judges, and I, as a young skater, thought I would die [laughs].

Cindy in the local paper as a young girl

On becoming a coach: After I finished my last Nationals – I didn’t know it was my last Nationals, but my family was pretty financially strapped at that point, and I really didn’t have a choice about competing. I wanted to go for the Olympics, but back then, we were totally and completely responsible, the family was completely responsible for the finances. We got no financial help unless you could find a private sponsor, which was very difficult back then.  So I didn’t really have a choice of not competing. It was a matter of, okay, do I go into a show? Do I coach? Or do I go back to school? Those were my three choices. And I did look into participating in a show, but back then they weren’t paying very much money at all, and although I was a national competitor and sectional champion and had some titles, I wasn’t a national medalist. So it was tough to get into the show, as it still is. But I always loved helping other people. I mean, even sometimes Carlo would come over and ask me to watch someone’s jump, and then say, “Okay, what was wrong with that?” And I would give him my opinion, and he would say “So how would you fix it?” That’s kind of where I started to realize, gee, I really kind of enjoy helping. I enjoy solving the problem. I enjoy teaching. So after the show thing didn’t work out, I just kind of fell into teaching, and when I came back to Chicago from Colorado, I was pretty well known. So I immediately built up a solid base of students.

With Deanna Stellato, reacting to a 6.0

On her goals as a coach: I am so grateful to have had in coaching what I’ve had. I’ve had some of the most talented young skaters that have produced wonderful outcomes in their careers, and I’ve been very lucky with that. Obviously I have not been to a senior world championship, which I would love to do, or to the Olympics, which I would love to do, but I think a lot of that is being lucky to get the right kid, and having all the circumstances stay in place long enough to take them there. It’s kind of been fun that I’ve had kids right from the beginning all the way through to the end of their career, building that skater all the way up.  One of the easiest things to do is to get a great skater who’s already trained and make them better. To me, that’s easy coaching. But to produce a good skater from grassroots is very rewarding, and I’ve been very lucky to do that.

And one of my goals when I teach is I want them to be wonderful people too. Not just great skaters, but I think as coaches we have to coach them in life lessons as well. And skating is a wonderful medium for that.  It teaches you success and failure very quickly [laughs] and you learn how to deal.

On teaching students today as compared to teaching students when she started coaching: I’ll start by saying that they’re very stretched. It’s soccer, and basketball, and skating, and with all the things you have to do just to be a great skater, that could take up all your time. And the kids today are pretty distracted by everything. So I feel that they don’t focus on one thing any more. It’s a different generation. It’s the entitlement generation. I was happy to hear other coaches use that word. They feel like they’re just entitled to something and they don’t really have to work hard to get it. I teach in an area that is pretty affluent, and the kids here – I forget what coach it was, but they said the kids will come to the barrier and kind of lay on it, and talk to you, and they’re just sort of laying on the barrier. Whereas I remember skating up with my hands behind my back, and my posture up, and my eyes open, and waiting for my next order. And the kids today, they’ll just come and lay that arm, and put their hand and their head – it’s just a totally different generation. But society is different today too.

But it’s always taken what I call “the x factor” to make a champion. I don’t know whether it’s inborn, I kind of think it is, but the kids today – they can be very good skaters, but can they be that awesome skater, that great skater? That Michelle Kwan or that Kristi Yamaguchi who were so focused? I don’t know, it’s a different type of teaching. It’s a more patient type of teaching. You can get your idea across but it’s a lot more work [laughs].

On being appointed a national-level technical caller: [When the new judging system came in] I was just like everybody else, rolling my eyes and going, oh, I don’t get this. And then two years ago I just decided, you know what, this is here to stay and if I’m truly going to understand it I’m going to have to be part of it. So I took several technical schools, and it took me a while to really get it, because it’s a whole different way to think about figure skating. I had to really practice a lot. It’s just like skating. If you don’t practice, you get slow at calling, and now we have a whole new set of levels, and they’ve changed some of the bullets, so we’ve had to relearn that. It’s a constant learning process. And I’m very glad that I did it. I enjoy going to a competition and being part of the judging team. And I think it’s good that the technical specialists are coaches who have been in skating for a really long time. But it’s work. I still have to constantly check the sheet, and check the bullets. But it’s fun.

MAY 2007
An interview with Oleg Vasiliev, 1984 Olympic Champion in Pairs, 1988 Olympic Silver Medalist, and coach of 2006 Olympic Champions Totmianina & Marinin. 42 minutes, 24 seconds.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On why he became a pair skater after being a successful singles skater: At that time in Soviet Union it was very tough generation of skaters, especially singles skaters.  I was the best in junior competition and won a couple of times at junior nationals. When I turned to senior level and competed at nationals in senior, I got tenth place. I skated good and I skated the same good as I did in junior competition, but it was nine skaters in front of me who were much better than me. So next year I got ninth place. So…in singles if I move up one place each year, it will take some time. So at that time Tamara Moskvina, who was a famous pair skating coach already, she invited me to skate in pairs. And as a proud singles skater I said “No. I am a good singles skater, why should I skate with someone else if I can do this on my own?” But she invited me back, and after the third attempt, I said, okay, let’s try it.

Pair skating was interesting, it was much more interesting than I expected. There were so many new elements and moves that it was necessary to learn to be good in pair skating. So it took a lot of my time and I really fell in love with the pair skating.

On the strengths of his partnership with Elena Valova:  Probably the beauty of concentrating mentally for competition. Not so much elements, because more or less pairs skaters did the same elements, the same jumps, the same throw jumps, lifts and twists, it was more or less the same. But not many skaters were able to concentrate in the right moment and produce the best they could in competition. So I learn with my partner how to do this. I remember right now one of our first competitions in 1980, it was Russian nationals, and we skated right after [Irina] Rodnina and {Alexander] Zaitsev.  So Rodnina and Zaitsev skated perfectly fine, and they had already been two-time Olympic champions and ten-time world champions, so many achievements. So we skated right after them. We came onto middle of ice, and I realized that I am shaking like, [laughs] I don’t know, like grass on the wind. And we did all elements, but all of them were extremely bad quality. It wasn’t like bad skating because we didn’t do big mistakes, but it was bad quality. And that was probably the point when I realized it’s not so much what you do, but it’s important how you do it. And that was again this ability of concentrating for competition, for your program. It was probably the biggest achievement in all of my skating years.

On why he and Valova stayed in competition for the 1988 Olympics after winning at the 1984 Olympics:  The time was different. There was not so much professional skating, and our country was different, it was a closed country. It was not so possible to go to the United States or Europe to work or skate somewhere. For us, there was two ways out: you could skate, for as long as you physically or mentally can skate, or you could just turn professional and be a coach, and give your education to someone else. So at that moment we thought there was enough energy in the two of us, and we didn’t show our best yet probably. It had been a very short period of time, in 1983, 1984, everything happened in those years. So we decided to stay.

On why he decided to move to Chicago: It’s interesting because you probably need to start a little back. I started working as a coach when Elena, my partner and ex-wife, got married and got pregnant. So she took a break from skating, and instead of trying something I did not know how to do, I decided to coach. So I begin to coach in France, for a little bit, and then in Latvia, one of the former Soviet republics. And I coach a pair – maybe it was a good pair for Latvia but not a very good pair, not top pairs in the world. And at that time it was necessary for me to learn something, to learn how to work with skaters. It was my beginning of work as a coach. And over there I met an American coach based in Chicago, Maria Jezak, and she started inviting me to work in her ice rink for a year. And she called me regularly and she sent me mails – not like emails at that time [laughs], it was like regular mail. And it was for a full year, 12 months, that she sent me postcards, mail, and called me like every other day.

And when I started skating with Elena after she came back, after her pregnancy, we started skating professionally in some shows, and at some point Elena’s husband decided it’s too difficult for family to have Mum skating somewhere and the rest of the family at home. So it was a family decision for them. I was actually a little bit upset, let’s say this, because it was easy at the time for us to make money – the best time for figure skating in the United States because it was after the story with Nancy and Tonya, when they battled a little bit and the interest in figure skating was enormous. You could skate three or four hours a day seven days a week and make good money. So Elena’s family made a family decision, and I was – I was  a little upset, and on that same evening I got another phone call from Maria, and I said “okay, expect me in a couple of days in Chicago”.  So I got my visa and my tickets, and in two days I was in Chicago.

On teaching adult skaters: It’s very different. It’s actually completely different, it’s not comparable. With adults, what’s interesting about this, people really love what they do. When they step on the ice, they have smile on their face, they are happy to learn small things and they really appreciate it. And they are looking forward to the next time they will be on the ice and skating again and again. With the competitive skaters, I have to push them so hard that sometimes they hate tomorrow because they know what they will come back to, and they have to work very hard next day. And it’s not only going to be one day, it’s going to be one month or one year or year after year if they want to achieve this Olympic dream. They have to work extremely hard on a daily basis and they have to get over feelings like I’m tired, I don’t want. So this is full-time job for skaters who are trying to go to Olympics, and this is pleasure for adults. That’s the biggest difference, and that’s really, really different.

On the differences between the 6.0 judging system and the newer systems: System is system, but we, coaches, skaters, we still do the skating. We coaches help skaters to do something interesting. [The newer systems] are kind of manipulating skaters and coaches to find something new, new elements, new spins, new footworks, new spirals. With the old 6.0 system, I just took a look, not too long time ago, at some competitions which happened a few years ago with the 6.0 system. The footworks was boring, the spirals were simple, and the spirals were short in pairs skating. So it was interesting programs, yes, it was good skating in general, yes, but easy elements were boring. So right now, you can look at programs and see everything, good footwork, spins, spirals, death spirals are interesting. Maybe sometimes we can see some awkward positions and movements, but at least skaters and coaches are trying to do something new. They are trying to push figure skating forward and make it more interesting, more skatable, you know, better looking for the spectators.

It’s difficult to understand system because it’s not like it used to be. It used to be simple. Good – 5.8, 5.9. Bad, I don’t know, 5.1. And that’s understandable. Spectators were involved in this kind of judging because everyone knew 5.3, it’s not good, 5.8, it’s pretty good. Right now, what is this 200, is it good or not? It will take time to understand this, and maybe it will be the same understandable and the same clear like it is right now for the very small numbers of officials who are involved with it. I hope it will be understandable for everyone because right now we have a problem with the empty seats at competitions, it’s not good. And part of this I would say is this new judging system.

APRIL 2007
An interview with Rhea Schwartz, the force behind the adult figure skating movement in the USA and beyond. 41 minutes, 51 seconds long.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On how she started skating at age 30: I was a new bride, and one of the couples that [my husband] had been friendly with all the years that he was single, the woman was a skater as a child, and was a coach in our area, Washington DC.  And she kept bothering me about being a good dancer – I had been a ballet dancer as a child. “Oh, you’ve been a dancer, you’d be a good skater, you should take skating lessons.” And I just ignored her for a while [laughs].  And then finally one day she accosted me at a cocktail party, and said “I signed you up! For skating lessons! You start next Tuesday! And I paid for you!”

So I was really embarrassed. Now what am I going to do? So I went, and started taking this group lesson. And I loved it. And from the group lessons, I started taking semi-private lessons, and then private lessons. And I just got hooked.

On skating coaches and adult skater students: The coaching world has had to adjust as well, and frankly the smart coaches realize that this is a good way to earn a living. In the Washington area we have several wonderful coaches whose bread and butter is adult skaters. They have a stable of adult skaters to complement and supplement their kids who in relatively short order will be leaving for college. And the adults are there in lieu of it. We’re there for much, much longer than the kids are. And so I think the coaches are happier now to deal with adults.

But it’s more challenging in many ways, both physically and mentally. Adults address skating in a different physical and psychological manner.  We question everything, and we think about it. We think about it too much. You see this all the time on the rink. Some little kid is out there, and the coach says “put your left foot out first, and then take off”.  Well, it’s going to take me a week to figure out how to put my left foot out first and then jump.  You can’t just say to an adult “just do this” because it’s just not going to happen. But eventually we’ll get there! And usually there are lots of laughs in between, so that’s great.

Rhea with me at the 2007 Adult Figure Skating Championships

On how US Adult Nationals got started: I really was a thorn in the side of the USFSA. I kept going to the annual meeting and raising my hand, going “New business – to talk about adult skating”. And I think ultimately they just wanted me to go away.  I wasn’t alone – there were some other people in the USFSA establishment, most noticeably Phyllis Howard [USFSA executive member], who got it. And ultimately just to get rid of me they created a developmental project for adult skating. Really, the way I think it was done, it was like “Okay, little girl, you go try this, and hopefully you’ll fall on your face and go away. But we will sanction a developmental competition, and let’s see what happens.”But it took five years of really hard hitting and just being relentless to get to that point.

And then we engaged some good comrades, people who were willing to work on this for Phyllis and for adult skating. And as you know, the first Adult Nationals was in Delaware, and we thought we’d get 200 people if we were lucky. And we ended up with more than 400 people, and maybe twice that many starts, because so many people skated in different disciplines.

On how the International Skating Union [ISU] adult competition got started: It was in many ways a repeat of the pattern with US figure skating. I became a thorn in Ottavio Cinquanta’s side, in a way. I would see him at world championships or other events and I would talk to him, manage to talk to him about adult skating. By that time I had already become chairman of the adult skating committee for US figure skating, so I had an entrée. And I was named one of the 25 most influential people in figure skating by International Figure Skating magazine, and Cinquanta of course was also one of the 25 named. So we were together at an event honoring the 25. Shortly thereafter Phyllis was president of the USFSA, so she had a further connection with Cinquanta. So that enabled us to begin a dialogue, which went on for several years.

And then finally Cinquanta was willing to give it a try, I suspect that because he realized it was another market for the ISU. He was willing to think about skating as more than the elite competitors. And adults were ready, willing and able to be another constituency for him and the ISU. So persistence paid off [laughs]. And three years ago we had the first ISU-sanctioned adult competition which was held in Obertsdorf. And to his credit, Cinquanta was there from start to finish. He handed out every single medal, and spoke at the competitors’ final banquet. He couldn’t have been more gracious. And he realized, I believe, that this could be a very viable component of ISU skating.

MARCH 2007
This is the premiere episode, featuring an interview with World Champion skater Kurt Browning. 37 minutes, 40 seconds long.

Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:

On touring: When you’re a young guy without a wife and family at home, then it’s exciting. But I’ve seen most of the cities [on the Stars on Ice tour] seven or eight times, and I know that there’s a three-year-old changing every day at home. …To be honest, I’m quite over the travel.  I’ve done it for over a decade, hard, eight months a year.  It’s worth it because if you’re skating well and the show’s going well, that sort of is worth it. But if you’re not skating well, if you’re injured or something, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth it, I should be home.

When I first started Stars on Ice, we had extra energy, we didn’t travel every night on the bus, we would come home from the show and, you know, sit some place and have a drink, told exciting stories, and it was great.  But I’m a little over it now. I do it for the skating and I’m just not ready to give up that yet. But I’m completely ready to give up the travel. If Star Trek could become a reality and I could just zip back home every night after the show, that would be perfect.  I think everyone would like that.

Kurt speaks with me backstage at 2007 Stars on Ice

On warming up off the ice: We’ve been doing this for a long time, and everyone sort of knows their own way of doing it. Before the show for the last couple of years,  the guys all get together and play soccer…we play really hard soccer.  We’re sweating before the show starts.  We’ve been playing so hard that the first half [of the show] is good, the second half is like, “oh”. It’s almost like that at intermission we need to play more soccer. The girls, they put makeup on. I don’t know how the girls do it, they’re very quiet, they stretch and jog around a little bit.  And during the show, the skaters are on and off the ice so often that they do stay warm.

On fan websites: Do [the webmasters] really realize that they’re actually sort of molding every interview that I do? [Iinterviewers] all hit these websites and form their questions because of them.  I don’t really research these websites – in fact, it’s been four or five years since I even looked at one of them.  [The webmasters of his official site] I trust them, they’re nice people, and if they have any questions they call me. Tina and Debbie, they’re the sweetest girls and they’re very smart, and so I just help them whenever I can – they helped set this up, and Tina helped set this interview up, and every once in a while she’ll phone me and say, can you just tell me what’s coming up? But she knows that I don’t even go to her website and doesn’t take it personally. For me, I would rather just skate, and the more information that gets in your skull while you’re out there, the less you act like yourself.  And so I just don’t worry about it.

Little-known facts: [On delivering a calf with a rope and a hockey stick when he was 13} I had help [laughs]. There was another kid who was 13.

[On hanging a friend upside down by his heels so the friend could spray-paint a water tower] Yeah, it was more by his belt.  I don’t think I would have got him back up if it was by his heels.  The trouble was, at the top of a water tower at 4 in the morning it’s frosty, and it’s pretty wet and slippery.  That’s definitely among the top three stupidest things I’ve done in my life.

[On what the other two stupid things were] Just as stupid, and we’ll leave them forgotten [laughs].

Most embarrassing skating moment: Reality check, it’s being in the Olympic Games and falling. The world’s watching and you have this opportunity to sort of live out some sort of a dream. You don’t even – I mean, Brian Boitano had everything figured out in his head for, like, months and months before it happened.  He knew exactly what he was going to do, what he was going to feel like, what he was going to think. And I think in Albertville, when my back was bad, I shouldn’t have even been in that competition actually.  But when I fell, I remember thinking that my friends were at home in a crowded living room in some small apartment, watching a 14-inch-screen-TV, screaming “go for it”, and then, you know, I could just hear that room go “Ahhhhwww!” and, you know, the disappointment there as they saw me fall. And I’m still sitting on one of those five-ring circles on my butt, and I haven’t even gotten up yet, and my mind was back home with my friends, thinking about the sound that just happened in that room. And I was embarrassed. You know, you’re a young cocky kid, and I felt frustrated., because I couldn’t – it wasn’t even really my fault I fell, and yet who’s going to know that?

I felt so vulnerable at that time. Like, I remember going to the Olympics and feeling like I was going into a gunfight with a plastic knife. For months and months before then I hardly slept  and I was always worried and sick, and I was, you know, driving to physiotherapy with my right foot pushing the clutch of the truck down because my left foot wouldn’t do it. And I’m supposed to go win the Olympics? So when I fell, all those months just…ohh. It’s amazing I didn’t puke out there.

That’s my most embarrassing moment. There’s lots of embarrassing moments where you slide off, you know, into the banners, your blade falls off, your costume rips. But those things you look back at as fond memories because they’re good fodder for stories afterwards.  But when I look back at the Olympics, I think, gosh… that was a real hard moment. And, you know, it helped form who I am, and I think how lucky I think I am now… I mean, when you think about all the bad things in the world that could happen to you, falling down in a competition is nothing. But still it formed a little bit of who I was, or I am.

On landing the first certified quad: I think we were in….what country in Europe? We were in an outdoor rink and we went to watch Brian Boitano practice, I don’t know why he was there…but I saw Brian practice and he did a quad. And I think seeing him that day do that quad while I was on tour in Europe was kind of like, “Hmm, this is pretty cool”. So I think that was ’87, and I went home and started trying it when no one else was at the rink, because I didn’t want anyone to see me try a quad and not do it. It would be too embarrassing. I didn’t tell my coach, I didn’t tell anybody. There was one girl that I used to drive home from the rink, so she was there if I ever smacked my head on the ice and couldn’t get up, so she could call somebody.  And that was it, I just started trying them on my own. And then when I started two-footing them and standing up, which was really only days later, I started showing it to my coach.  And at that time my triple axel wasn’t that great, so he said, let’s just forget the axel and just work on this, because it was better.

I think it happens to a lot of people, whether they admit it or not – the new generation of skaters doesn’t always give credit to the one before them – but I think it was just watching Brian that day that put the seed in my head. Which is ironic because he wanted to be the first one to land the quad.

On the demise of figures: They kind of had to go, I guess. When you’re trying so hard to sell your sport- I always felt that it was difficult for people to turn on the TV and go, hey, the German’s in front, but he can’t skate! That’s really weird, why is he in first place? Well, he’s in first place because he can do these amazing circles on the ice.  But why didn’t we see that? Well, because it’s really boring and it takes 24 hours to get the competition over with, it’s crazy. So it didn’t make sense for television, it really didn’t. And ice time is expensive. So there was a multitude of reasons why they went away. And it’s a little bit of a shame, but it’s a part of the history of our sport and I don’t think you’ll ever see it back.

Some people say the skaters are jumping more because they have more time, but I spent – not always, but in the last year I spent three to three and a half hours a day doing figures. But that also meant three or four fifteen minute resurfacings of the ice, and it also meant waiting around while the little kids did their freeskates so you could join in their patch session afterwards. It took all day, is my point. And now they have more time to do freeskate and off-ice. I think for some reason or another we do have more injuries, but I don’t necessarily think it’s the new system. I think some of the new skaters overtrain.

On his off-ice training: I played shinny hockey, we played baseball, we played outside, I rode my bike. For three or four summers in a row, and for some winters, I rode my bike 8.2 miles and back to the rink every day, and then that was after skating all day. I sort of did off-ice training, I just didn’t know it.

On being helped at age 17 by Tracy Wainman with his figures: She was literally an artist, like, crazy.  When you think about what a figure should look like, like if you push and try to make a circle in the middle of nowhere, and come back to the same place, and try to match one on the other side, but turning backwards on one foot…crazy stuff.  But she could do 85% or 90% of the figure, which is 35 or 50 feet long if there’s three circles, and all three tracings would be as wide as your index figure. It was amazing. And then her loops, which are only about 10 feet long with both circles included, and there’s a teardrop at the end of it..she could trace most of it, 60-70% of it, in one rut. And it was art, it was absolute art. So…even when she was doing a layout, most of us would just stop and watch. She was so far ahead of the game, it was crazy.

Being able to move your body over a blade on a spot, it’s really neat. I didn’t really begin to enjoy figures until the end. And my coach, Michael Jiranek, he always loved figures, and he very slowly gave me the bug.  I remember in the last year he said that everyone else is going to think that the figures are not important because they’re going out, their priorities are going to be different, so we’re going to do the opposite. And I think he almost did it for himself because he wanted to say goodbye to them. He said we’re going to increase the amount of figures you’re doing every day and decrease the freeskate. And his ploy worked, I came second at the world championship that last year in figures. And it did help.

On working as a TV commentator: Terry (Gannon) just blows me away. He jumps from one sport to another, he knows more about each sport than most people he works with, he’s amazing.  And how he can comfortably just adjust timings and  memorize things and so seamlessly understand how the television system works and get that information out to you..but what amazes me is that he literally knows so much about skating, and then moves to basketball, and then moves to golf – it’s incredible.  And he’s a great guy too. And then Dick (Button) is history, right? Being able to go back in time and talk to him, and he’s so funny.

You talk too much one time, and then you think you get it right the next time, and commentating is one of those jobs where the less you hear about what you did, probably the better job you did. It’s kind of selfish, but you get to be part of everyone’s program, not just your own. You have to wait and you have to do your opening and then you have your little moment, but when you’re commentating, you’re a part – you get to share in everyone’s glory or pain or whatever. It’s pretty cool.

…But you do sometimes get so excited with what’s happening out there that you do talk too much.  And they will come in your ear and say “shut up”, or they’ll yell at you. Oh, they yell [laughs]. “Let the moment play! Shut up! Shut up!” So it’s very exciting.  You feel sort of responsible, first and foremost, for the skater on the ice, and if I do take a shot at a skater I do really try to make sure that they deserve it.  My job is to see, and to say what I see. And it’s the producer’s job to curtail me when I get too far.

And sometimes I’ll say something and Dick will say something which is usually a soliloquy about the skater, and he always has this ability to sum up what’s really happening in the moment. And then after he talks, a quad is coming up, and it’s the make or break moment for this skater, and then I have to kick in and say something about the quad, and…unfortunately we just had a string of 50 or 60 seconds in a row when we’re talking. So I’ll try to keep my comment on the quad short. But sometimes it’s just bad luck between us, or bad timing, and we do end up chatting it up too much.

On doing choreography: Basically, choreographers just want to work with skaters with great versatility. There’s some skaters you want to work with because you have a idea for them that you think might really work.  I had an idea for Sasha Cohen two nights ago and I told her about it casually, and I think she kind of laughed at me. So there you go. I don’t think she’s going to be calling me any time soon.  But I was just watching her skate and I just had a fun exhibition idea for her.  If you see a skater and they inspire an idea for you like Sasha did, then you probably want to work with them.

On whether his son will go into skating: Been there, done that. It’s not like a family business, it’s not like Smith and Sons Moving, it’s figure skating.  It’s not like I can give him the business to take over.  It would be kind of interesting if he did want to be a figure skater, but I don’t really see that that’s going to happen, because he’s only three and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to skate. It’s not like he’s going to be eight years old and be at the rink going “I want to be like Dad”. It’s probably not going to last that long. But I want him to know how to skate, just because it’s such a joy for me. I want him to be able to play hockey or go to the lake and skate or…maybe understand what his old man did, a little bit.