Mental Meanderings

Skating

I was just writing about skating in my DWC entry tonight and yet I feel like I have so much more to say. I'm onto a topic I really love but I'm going to wander out of memory lane for a moment to share some of the wonderful clips I've watched on youtube.com tonight.

It's truly amazing to watch the professional skaters at Olympic standards. My favorite is the pairs skating because they have the most stunning moves, lifts, spins, jumps, twists. It's truly breath-taking.

Tonight I watched a few from the 2006 Olympics. I'd not had the opportunity to watch it on TV when they were happening. For some reason ice skating doesn't get much air time when there are so many more popular sports happening. Some of the skaters captivated me and I went on the hunt for other programs they'd performed.

While watching there were two particularly nasty falls. At that level falls are dramatic and heart stopping. To begin with these skaters are so professional, so practices, and so procise with every move they make that a fall shouldn't happen. But they still do happen be it a bad ice, or just a human error. The most amazing thing is that these skaters got up and did it again.

The first one I watched she fell and I swear either pulled or tore a muscle in her thigh. Her partner helped her to the edge where she spoke to her coach, cried in pain and worked the leg a little. Minutes later they're going back out on the ice and they move back into their routine going on to complete the rest of it flawlessly. She's in pain and they're subdued but they complete and they get decent scores considering the detraction. Later you see her leg strapped and iced and she's crying in pain again.

It's amazing what these atheletes put themselves through and I wish I could know what she was telling herself, and what her coach and partner were telling her that made her push through what must have been agony to skate on that night when it must have been an easy and completely understandable choice for her to have stepped off.

I suspect a lot of it would have focused on the time and the trials they would have had to go through to get there that night. Olympic athletes train and compete for years in preparation for a single night at the Olympics and if she hadn't gone on to finish that program all that effort, for both of them, would have been for nothing. In the end I believe they went home with the silver.

Later I watched another. In it he falters at the beginning slightly, enough to notice he's not on his game and he's wary. She's flawless and stunning, every move smooth, practiced, perfect, and beautiful. they're cruising on the ice, he lifts her into the air, above his head, turns his foot, and loses it, drops her and himself. I can't imagine the horror that must have gone through his mind as it happened. He couldn't save her from hitting the ground and in attempting to do so possibly made her land harder then it might have been.

The impact on the ice seems like it should have been bone crunching. She lays there, stunned for minutes after. They bring out the medics and bind her up before taking her off the ice. The fall could have been fatal. from the look of it as it happened it probably should have been but later that night the doctors report her outlook is good, they'll keep her overnight for observation but she'll be out the next day. Later that same year she's competing again with the same partner and they perform a perfect program.

It's the sort of thing that makes me want to go behind the scenes. I'd love to know the story behind the training and emotions that lead up to that night. I'd love to know more about how they both felt as it happened and after as she's hurt and then recovering. Then what it took to find the courage and the faith to keep striving. So many people might have considered that lucky escape a warning. Others would have struck out in anger and fear at the partner. What did it take for them to get back on the rink? What did it take for him to have the courage to lift her again, and her the faith that he wouldn't repeat a fall like that?

It would make an incredible book. I wonder if they've thought to write about it, or have someone write a biography for them. I can imagine it being dramatized and turned into an incredible movie too.

There are stories like that throughout life too I'm sure. Many athletes certainly but also in other careers and just in general. Accidents happen. Fall off the horse and get back on again. It's the sort of saying we hear a lot in our society but a lot of the time we don't pause to consider what it really takes to get back on that horse.

I still skate and I've been injured myself. I suffer early-onset arthritis most noticable in my knees and my wrists which I feel was possibly agrevated by so much of my youth spent skating. I do know that sometimes after spending a couple of hours on the rink I couldn't move. But I loved skating, so it never stopped me. I've fallen, like a did a few weeks back, and landed badly. It's never been something serious but for me the love of skating brings me back to my skates.

Is it love, passion, for something that is the driving factor for getting back out there for anyone who's experienced challenges as they reach for their dreams? *ponders* It's all something that can truely give you some heavy and inspiring thoughts.