Rochette and Kim Create Tears, Magic, History
Filed under: Asia, Figure Skating, Canada, Korea
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The wait was longer than usual, almost suspiciously so, as the judges took their time deciding if the American teenager had skated well enough to thwart The Story The Whole World Wanted. When the scores finally were announced Thursday evening in a hushed arena, Mirai Nagasu had fallen just short of the bronze medal. A joyful gasp shot through the stands, and I’ll admit this much: If ever there was a moment to ignore any hint of a controversy, that maybe she’d performed well enough to finish third and not fourth in Olympic figure skating, this was it, my friends.
For it meant that Joannie Rochette, the Canadian whose mother died of a massive heart attack only four days before, had won the bronze medal. And it meant she could skate into a spotlight on her homeland ice, to warm and thundering cheers in Pacific Coliseum and all over the planet, and lead the silhouette over to the medals podium, where she accepted her prize, looked down at it with tears in her eyes and shook her head in disbelief. Up in the stands, her father, Normand, was doing the same, smiling through his own tears and then shaking his head.
Too much of this Winter Olympiad has been about darkness and death, crashes and consternation, glitches and grief. What Rochette did was bring life and light to the stage and give Vancouver its most triumphant memory. To even lace up skates and compete, in the face of an intense tragedy, is courageous enough. To perform twice in three nights and do so with only a few mistakes — well, be still my beating heart. With so much quarreling around here in recent days, whether it was Canadians booing Americans or Sven Kramer blaming his coach for an infamous speedskating gaffe or Julia Mancuso taking a jealous shot at U.S. ski teammate Lindsey Vonn, it was therapeutic to see Rochette melt the most hardened souls and remind one and all about the human spirit. Yes, cynics, it still can thrive at the Olympic Games amid 21st-century madness.
“I’m really glad I did this. I didn’t really feel like skating; my mind was not really here,” Rochette said in a riveting news conference after breaking down several times in the media mixed zone. “Ten years from now, when the pain has gone away a little bit, I would have wished I’d have skated here if I hadn’t. And I know that’s what my mom would have wanted me to do.
The original article and other great content can be found at this URL: http://olympics.fanhouse.com/2010/02/26/rochette-and-kim-create-tears-magic-history/
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