S.D. humorist Dorothy Rosby explains why she never took home the gold in Olympics figure skating.

[TexasTowelie]

With the Winter Olympic Games underway in Beijing, I find myself reminiscing about my own experience as an Olympic figure skater. Or rather as a child with an overactive imagination and easy access to ice.

Every winter, my father flooded the vacant lot across from our Buffalo home for the town’s children to skate on. One of the benefits of living so close to the skating pond was that I could put on my skates in our warm house instead of in the skating shack. Then I’d walk across the gravel parking lot and through the weeds surrounding the pond wearing them. And no, I didn’t have blade guards. Nor was there a Zamboni to clear away the gravel and weeds I no doubt carried with me. In fact, up until I attended my first hockey game a few years ago, I thought Zamboni was some kind of fancy pasta.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time on the ice back then, some of it upright. And the winter Olympics always inspired me to skate more than usual. I’d watch the figure skaters, then head out to do my own triple axels and toe loops. I’m kidding. I never learned to do an axel or a toe loop, triple or otherwise. But I’m proud to say I did learn to skate backwards and not just when it was windy on the ice either.

I was convinced that skating backwards was an important step on the road to figure skating stardom and one day, listening to a TV interview with an Olympic figure skater, I learned another one. She said she practiced skating for four hours every day. Aha, I thought. That’s the ticket. More practice.

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