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“I don’t know what their parents feed these kids….” –

February 23rd, 2006 · 1 Comment

Quote of the day from David Pelletier, speaking about Emily Hughes’ performance in the Ladies Free Skate at Turino as a commentator on NBCOlympics.com , (also partner of Jamie Salle, co-champion gold medalists in pairs figure skating at the 2002 Games. )

I don’t know what their parents feed these kids, because Sarah was one of the gutsiest performances I’ve ever seen, and when I look at Emily, I see the same thing — guts, raw power, she never gave up during the whole performance. She’d do one mistake and then — bang — come back with a strong jump.

Part of the reason I am a fan of the Hughes family is that I admire what they’ve done with their kids – and how many they had! I don’t know how they did it. Managing a family of three children is intense enough, nevermind six kids, two of them Olympic-level athletes. I think at one point the mom of the Hughes family fought breast cancer. Yes, I do wonder what they feed their kids! Something economical like oatmeal…or was it Wheaties?! Whatever it is, I want those kind of gutsy kids too!

Today Ted was at PyCon so I was able to satisfy my curiousity by continually hitting the “refresh” button on the browser, seeing the skating results appear in almost-real-time. It’s a bummer to miss seeing the Games on tv, but still fun to experience the suspense. And we incorporated the competition into our homeschool today: I made up lists of program components for certain skaters and pretend point values and let the girls practice their multiplication and addition skills to figure out who would win. We also sampled some skating music and in honor of Sasha played Tschaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” (I guess it didn’t help her though.)

I don’t know why the media is calling Shizuka Arakawa’s win a “surprise”. If you’ve seen her skate, you know she has outstanding beauty and skill. She didn’t do well at 2005 Worlds but she was the 2004 World Champion.

And if the gold medal is seen as a representation or validation of a nation’s talent, then Japan deserves the honor. As one news site pointed out, Japan had the best “B” team of skaters. The skaters who stayed home in Japan probably could have done as well as the ones who came. Japan has depth and skill – and at least one quad – on their team. They were the ones to watch and may be the ones with victory again in Vancouver.

Although I’m not a Sasha Cohen fan, I was sorry to see her fall. I did hope that she had changed, and grown, and I hope she can go forward from this. Okay, I didn’t see her fall, but there are pictures of her falling posted all over the news sites. Embarrassing pictures too of her landing on her hind side, awkward. She’s been quoted as saying it was four minutes of her life, and so it was. It’s good to put it in perspective. I only hope the media can give her some dignity and not turn four minutes into forever.

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Lucy // Feb 24, 2006 at 4:42 am

    I thought of you last night during a commercial for … Skating With The Stars! Or maybe its the Next Skating Star! Or maybe … Ok, so I forgot the title of the show but its got a panel of judges who are professional skaters who judge a group of skater-wannabe-professionals kinda like AmericanIdol does for music. Or is it StarSearch? Anyway … I know it involves skaters!

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