很感人的Interview，也许以前已经有人发过了。但我觉得还是需要再发一遍的
Jim Virtue is trying to talk but he can't. He's just been asked what his favourite moment of the last 12 hours has been, since his daughter Tessa Virtue and her ice-dance partner, Scott Moir, won gold in a performance for the ages.
"I think ... " he begins. That's as far as he gets. His eyes well up. He puts his hand to his face. He says in a whisper, "Being here with everyone." Now his wife, Kate, sitting beside him, is also tearing up. And across the table in a waterfront restaurant in Vancouver on Tuesday, Scott's mother, Alma Moir, is wiping tears from her cheeks. The only one who isn't crying is her husband, Joe.
"For me, it was seeing them on the podium," Kate Virtue says weakly.
"They were holding hands," adds Alma. （Alma是Scott的妈妈）
"I loved it when they started singing O Canada," Joe pipes in. "That was just the best."
For the last half-hour, the Virtues and the Moirs - who live in London, Ont., and the nearby town of Ilderton, respectively - have been talking about sacrifice. That would be the enormous sacrifice the skaters made on the way to becoming Olympic champions, but also the sacrifices their parents and brothers and sisters made. You don't become an Olympian period without the support, commitment and love of those around you.
Scott Moir had said earlier in the day that in the moments before he and Tessa took to the ice for their gold-medal performance, he was alone with his thoughts. He said he spent a lot of that time thinking about his parents and everything they had done to get him to this point.
"Almost every family vacation we took in the last 10 years was to a figure-skating competition," he said. "I thought of my parents driving us to Waterloo at 4:30 in the morning to practise. It goes on and on."
The two families almost seemed uncomfortable talking about all that they had done in the name of their remarkable ice dancers. It wasn't about them, they insisted. What their children gave up to achieve their dreams was even greater, they wanted everyone to know. Maybe. But figure skating isn't cheap. In fact, as sports go, only horseback riding may be more expensive.
Parents of figure skaters fork out money for competitions, coaches, equipment, training, travel. Almost every time Tessa and Scott skated while growing up, a member of their families went along. So there was airfare and accommodations. They would have to pay for the accommodations of coaches, too. Tessa's costumes are $2,000 or more apiece. She goes through eight a year.Five years ago, the pair decided to switch coaches and train in Michigan. So the Virtues bought a home there and Kate moved down to watch over her then-15-year-old daughter. She had to quit her job with the Law Society of Upper Canada to do it. At that point, the Virtues' three older children were mostly grown up and off to university. Jim, a lawyer, stayed behind in London to make the money to help finance everything.
The Moirs, meantime, were forced to remortgage their home in Ilderton to help cover the bills that began piling up 13 years ago when Scott and Tessa were brought together by Scott's aunt Carol. Alma is a figure-skating instructor and Joe works for a drug company. Alma says they are an average family who make an average income. So the skating did put a tremendous strain on the family finances.
"The skating life is like a moving house," says Jim Virtue. "Except you already own a house at home. But with the moving house, you pay for all the accoutrements on top of it."
"It's never a good idea to add up the bills each year," adds Kate. "Any time Jim would ask me, I'd say, 'You don't want to know.'"
"You can easily hit six figures a year," Jim interjects.
And it will surprise exactly no one to hear they'd do it all over again, and not just because it paid off big-time, with their children now Olympic champions and likely on the road to riches. They'd do it again because they love their children.
Now, there were times along that journey when the two families would get the kids together and ask them the most important question there is: Do you still want to do this? Because it wasn't always bright lights and top finishes. There were enough falls in practice and competition to make even the most iron-willed person waver, let alone teenagers who were giving up so much.
Anyway, the answer was always yes, we love what we're doing. And that was good enough for their folks.
"I'd say the only time I really questioned it all is when Tessa got chronic exertion compression syndrome - an injury suffered through overtraining," says Kate.
The doctors told Tessa she had two choices: quit skating or endure an operation that would leave her leg permanently scarred in four places.
"She thought about it for about two seconds," Kate recalls. "And then said, 'What time can we do it?' She was 18 and a half at the time and I remember it really bothering me because she had already sacrificed so much by then.
"I said to her, 'You don't have to do this, Tessa.' And she said: 'I do if I want to get to the Olympics.'" Alma and Joe and Kate and Jim have become as close as two couples can, bonded by endless hours in cold rinks and the shared emotions that flow from having two children who compete as one. So when Jim Virtue said his favourite moment was enjoying time with Kate, Alma and Joe, and basking in the glow of their children's achievements together, it was completely understandable.
They had been through so much together. The highs and the lows - because there are always more lows than highs along the way to something as great as Olympic gold. They all still seemed to be in a bit of shock over it all.
"What are the odds of all the planets aligning at the moment they needed to peak in their sport at such a young age, in front of a Canadian crowd, at their first Olympics, and they nail it?" says Jim. "They just nail it.
"That is a dream. I have dreamed that dream and it came true." |
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好东西很多 抱走 那个视频我下载了 看不了呀
怎么回事
显身卡
tina，那个英文版的论坛是不是这几天都没更新啊~
