When I was young, I used to tell people I was going to go to the Olympics one day. It embarrassed my mom, and she would tell me not to do it, but something in me just knew that this was going to happen for me.I’m also the type of person who knows what I have to do to get what I want—and I’ll do whatever it takes to get there.I had a lot of hardships to get to where I am today. I was a late bloomer in getting here, but I never gave up, because I had this belief inside of me. I failed to make the Olympics twice, but I knew I was eventually going to get there and I knew I was going to get a medal. I never questioned it. And then it happened in Sochi. And then again four years later in PyeongChang. Advertisem*nt
Sports
Winners and Losers from the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics
Dave Lozo
My mom recorded my first words in my baby book. They were: mom, dad, I want it, and skate. It makes it sound like my life journey was preordained, but it wasn’t that simple.My mom and dad registered me in the CanSkate program, which teaches young kids the basics of ice skating, when I was 3 years old. They were big on sports and we lived in a really small town—Lively, Ontario, with a population of about 5,600—so the thing to do was register for a bunch of different sports: gymnastics, soccer, swimming, skating, baseball. You name it, I did.Each September, my mom would ask me if I wanted to be registered for skating lessons again, and every year I’d say yes.
Pure joy. Meagan Duhamel and partner Eric Radford. Photo by Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports
My older sister, Heather, also took skating lessons, and as I watched her progress to a higher level, I wanted to follow her and do what she was doing. She took lessons in the summer, which I wasn’t allowed to do. My mom didn’t think it was necessary for both of us to have a private coach. I was two years younger, so I’d bring all my Barbies and toys to the rink and just sit there and watch her skate all day long, and say to my mom, "Please, please, I want to skate.” I was determined. Advertisem*nt
Sports
We're Madly in Love with Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir
Kyle Cantlon
Two years later—after a lot of begging—I moved away from home to train at the Mariposa School of Skating in Barrie, Ontario. The first year was really hard. I remember calling my parents one night crying and my dad drove through the night at midnight to see me. When I woke up in the morning he had breakfast with me and then drove back home to go to work. But leaving home was something I believed I needed to do if I wanted to achieve my goals. It's where my journey truly began.It was fun. As I got older, it became a lot about performing. I always liked drama classes and dance classes where I got to go on a stage and perform. And jumping. I loved jumping and trying to do things that only the older kids or guys could do. Advertisem*nt
Sports
Denny Morrison on Cheating Death Twice to Make It Back to the Olympics
Denny Morrison
It’s funny how fate intervenes sometimes. Craig Bunton actually made the call for me. He was a former Olympian, he was looking for a partner, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I jumped on the chance, packing my bags, getting a part-time job to support my training and competition expenses, and I moved to Montreal in June 2007. Advertisem*nt
Eric and I both had unfulfilled dreams of representing Canada at the Olympics and we thought we’d give it one last chance together. We quickly gelled and became a highly ranked team internationally in our first season competing together.Every year we set personal goals and every year we surpassed our own expectations. Finally, in 2014, we found ourselves at the Olympics. It was a surreal moment. I remember skating over the Olympic rings that were painted on the ice and just getting chills. It was truly a dream come true. And then to stand on the podium and receive the team silver medal with all my friends, it was such a special experience.In the individual pairs competition, however, we didn’t skate our best and finished in seventh place. It was particularly discouraging because when I got off the ice, I felt regret and disappointment. I wasn’t proud of myself or my efforts, and there's no worse feeling than that. That feeling is one of the reasons why we continued to compete after Sochi. Advertisem*nt
Photo by Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports
I feel that a big part of why Eric and I have been successful is because we've realized that you learn the most from your worst experiences. When we skate a perfect program in a competition, it’s like, wow that was amazing, let’s try to repeat that. But we don’t really learn anything from it. With failures, we learn. This process is part of what it takes to be Olympic—and it applies outside of figure skating, too.When we looked back on the Olympic season, which we considered a failure, we discovered so much about ourselves—about our training habits, about our attitude, about our mindset, about our goal-setting—and we were able to turn that all into a positive and turn our careers around.We talked about how we’d achieved everything we’d ever dreamed of in this sport. We’d won a world medal, we’d been to the Olympics, we'd even won an Olympic medal in the team event. We’d won nationals. We’d really done it all. So what was next? We wanted to be happy. We wanted to skate our best. We didn’t want to feel stressed out about competitions.
We realized we’d been training with a weight on our shoulders the entire season, and we knew we had to stop thinking so much, almost stop caring in a way. We wanted to be happy, that’s it. When the music ends, and we hit that ending position, we just want to be happy.We stopped trying to win, we stopped trying to do what everybody wanted us to do. Everybody has an opinion about what you should do in your career and you have to pick and choose who you’re going to listen to and what critiques you take and build on. We just wanted to be us. I wasn't going to force myself to be like him or him like me, or us to do what the judges want or somebody on the internet was writing about us. It became ridiculous, so we really just let it all go. We’d already achieved everything we ever wanted to achieve. Advertisem*nt
If this makes the whole process sound easy, it wasn't.Life isn’t always fair. You can work really hard, you can work really smart, you can make all the choices that you believe are right, but at the end of the day things don’t always work out as you hope.In figure skating, you’re on the ice for four and a half minutes, and the ice is slippery, the blade is thin, and anything can happen in that moment, no matter how many right decisions you’ve made and how hard you’ve worked. Your fate is also in other people’s hands, in the judges’ hands. I learned that early on with skating and it’s a lesson we relearn all the time.That lesson can be applied to other parts of life, too. It’s not easy to let things go when they don’t work out—in relationships or at work—and focus instead on what you can control. It’s not easy to think about all the things that can go right, instead of what might go wrong. I know that as well as anyone.I’m very stubborn, very intense, and I think a lot. I’m an over-thinker. And sometimes that hurts me in competitions because when my mind starts going it can take away from the natural passion I have for skating. I really wish I could turn off my brain when I’m skating. Advertisem*nt
Photo by Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports
What was the point of shavasana, I’d wonder. I just wanted to get up and continue on the with the day. Lying here doing nothing was wasting my time. This was kind of how I approached my life. Any moment that I was “doing nothing” seemed like a waste of time. I wanted to be productive. I’m a doer.To be honest, I still struggle with shavasana, but I find it very helpful.A lot of what helps us along our journeys, as we push for excellence, is finding things that work for us. For me, it’s been yoga and meditation. I also run once a week. And in 2008, I became a vegan. Advertisem*nt
Speaking of retirement, this was my final Olympic Games.We knew the race for a medal in PyeongChang would be pretty tight in pairs skating. There were about four teams that could win on any given day, if everybody skated their absolute best. At the end of the day it comes down to who performs well under pressure in the moment. And there's only one moment in skating. We don't get a do-over, we don't get a second chance.Being wiser and having matured after competing for so long, I knew there were more important things than winning a gold medal. While we didn’t win gold in pairs, we did capture it in the team event, which set the tone for a performance we are so proud of. I got to finish my last Olympic Games by securing two more medals, including a bronze with Eric in the pairs competition. We obviously wanted a medal, but it wasn’t going to dictate our feelings or sense of accomplishment after knowing all the hard work we put in to get here. It certainly makes the experience that much more memorable, though.
Photo by David Jackson/courtesy Canadian Olympic Committee
I love to work hard, and we’ve worked very hard. I love to push myself, and we’ve pushed ourselves. For me, that’s the best part of being an athlete: seeing how far I can push myself and how much I can improve as a skater or how much Eric and I can improve as a team. We believe we accomplished what we came here to do.Being Olympic is about that moment when you hit your ending position and you feel so proud of what you did, when you know you did your best and you can give that fist pump or that big smile. That moment now at this point in my life is worth more than the scores the judges give or the medals we’ve won, because I know exactly what it took to get here.Getting to compete in the Olympics is everything I’ve ever wanted. And being able to do that twice and achieve my dreams with Eric is the perfect way to go out.