Olympic skating dreams ended when I was young

My brothers and I were born to a winter sports mother — unusual for this area, but she had grown up in Cleveland, where winter occupied a hefty portion of the year. 

When she married our dad and moved to New Mexico in 1957, her tiny stash of possessions included a pair of ice skates. 

On the rare occasions when we had several continuous days of sub-freezing weather — enough to build a few inches of ice in the metal tank that we swam in each summer — my brothers and I fought to be first into those skates. 

We required several pairs of socks to secure our small feet into our mom’s adult-sized skates, and a chunk of time to tighten the laces through those endless pairs of eyelets.  

Truth be told, it took longer for each of us to put on the skates than it took to make a few lurching steps and experience a painful turn-ending fall, which generally resulted in a whoop of joy from the next person in line. 

Blissfully ignoring reality and with dreams of Olympic glory, I begged for and received my very own ice skates one Christmas when I was 10 or 11 years old.  

My parents were probably simply relieved that I had finally asked for something besides a palomino stallion and a live dolphin. Ice skates were almost equally as impractical, but they were available by mail from Sears. 

The winter of 1972/73 had a good cold spell, judging by a box of Kodachrome slides I found last weekend. I’m smiling in one, perched daintily on the edge of the old metal tank as I lace on my snow-white skates. 

The ice surface in front of me is a wasteland of deep ruts, clearly worthless for skating. 

My younger brother tells me that I only smiled for that photo because our mother asked me to. 

He remembers that I was seething over the ice conditions — conditions created the day before when the top layer had melted just enough to make a slushy playground for him and our older brother.  

The two of them, he recalled, had spent an afternoon gleefully cavorting in the slush, leaving a chewed-up mess that froze solid during the night. 

The day of the photo — one of about five days in my entire childhood where the ice was thick enough to use those sparkling skates — my brother remembers that my siblings’ icy antics from the previous day had spared a patch of unmarred surface about the size of a potholder. 

Hence the clenched teeth behind my “say cheese” smile. 

 That is why — I am certain of this — only four years later in Innsbruck, Austria, it was Dorothy Hamill, and not me, who won the gold medal in figure skating at the 1976 Olympics. 

 That, and the fact that when I asked for a Zamboni the next Christmas, my parents simply laughed. 

Betty Williamson was close enough to gold that she could almost hear the National Anthem. Reach her at:

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