What I Learned From Olympic Figure Skating: Stuffing 40 Million South Koreans in My Motivational Back-Pack

My Sista From Another Mista and I

By: Michael James Greenwald

Good morning, friends, readers…country-people?

This morning, Friday morning (though this T.G.I.F.F. paradigm appears to have little meaning in my life–I work harder on the weekend), I awoke with thoughts of figure skating on my mind.

(I heard my father’s scream, all the way from Arizona: “I KNEW IT!!!!“)

If it helps at all, dad, it was woman’s figure skating.

(Dad: “Sexy girls?  Short skirts?  That’s my boy!!!!)

Sigh.

To be fair, I’m not a big fan of figure skating.  But my mother is.  And, though I would have much rather been mowing through Ron Carlson’s latest fare–The Signal–what can I say?  I love my mum.

Everyone: AWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!

But there are things to be learned, even from the personally most uninteresting of sports.

Kim Yu-na of South Korea

On the left I’ve posted a picture of Kim Yu-na, the willowy figure skater from South Korea.  19 years old.  Sweet.  Pretty.  Loves wind surfing and shopping, and of course…boys.

Yu-na skated last night in the long program as the perennial favorite to take home the 2010 Winter Olympics gold medal.  But as I listened to commentators build-up of the spectacle and comment before, during and after her performance, I became aware of deeper, much more sinister (and compelling), stakes than whether or not this teenager could put together a performance to win a gold medal.

Evidently, she was skating for the hopes and dreams of her entire country.

Athletes, in our time are elevated to statuses of near-Gods.  Above politicians (granted, that is high mark to eclipse), writers (slight bias there), saints and religious deities…

Society catapults athletes and other celebrities (movie stars, musicians, TMZ darlings) above deserved role models, such as parents, teachers, fire fighters, community service veterans…

Now, I realize this is old hat.  Less deserving people have been idolized more than more deserving people probably from the start of humanity, when Ug and Fud and Ik stood up on two legs and the rest of the human clan followed, Ik captivating the entire tribe’s attention with the cool way he can shake his two feet, while Ug and Fud go unnoticed as they pile rocks to create a shanty, as a hurricane approaches.

I want to focus in on the pressure aspect.  According to multiple sources, including the evenings skating commentators hammering this point home, Kim Yu-na had much more than her coach’s, parent’s, her own expectations piled on her back as she set to execute her first quad (like that figure skating lingo, everyone?), she had the morale of more than 40 million people stuffed in a backpack, slung over her shoulders.

“Her loss or her winning will be perceived as a national loss or a national winning,” said Kyung-ae Park, a political scientist who holds the Korea Foundation Chair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

A national loss or a national winning?

Wowzer.

For me, clocking in at work, has the potential to affect, at the most, ten people.  Can you even imagine that level of pressure?

Yu-na even admitted to feeling the pressure in a book of short essays published last month.  “If my performance falters, not only people around me but the whole nation might turn their back on me,” she wrote.  She talked about the disappointment her countrymen expressed after her second-place finish in a 2008 event: “I got a flurry of text messages, but I felt sad and disappointed after checking them,” she writes. “Not a single message congratulated me.”

Well, last night Yu-na nailed it.  Not only did she win over South Korea’s nemesis Japan (South Korea harbors deep resentment toward Japanese for Japan’s colonization of their country), but she set the competitive figure skating scoring record with a eye-popping (not my eyes, but evidently everyone else’s) 228.56, finishing 23 points ahead of the silver medalist, Japan’s Mao Asada.

Her commanding win, and just as importantly, the ridiculous amount of pressure placed on her, caused me to examine my own life.  I live pretty comfortably.  I have a job.  I have a home.  My parent’s are proud of me.  My siblings and friends believe I’m a success story.

But I don’t feel that.

I have aspirations that exceed all those expectations.  I desire to win the gold medal in writing, to build a writing career that will sustain my family and myself for the rest of our lives, and just as important, to me, is to become a successful author amongst my peers.

But do I have the drive to do so?

I’m willing to bet wons to banchan that whenever Yu-na felt to tired to practice on a particular day she could focus on the expectations 40 million people had on her back, and strap on those skates and fine-tune her sit-spin.

So, how do we, as wanna-be writers, actors, musicians, carpenters, athletes, politicians, teachers…whatever your dream station in life consists of.

How do we create the pressure of 40 million South Koreans’ expectations stuffed into a backpack slung over our shoulders?

How do we motivate ourselves every single day to forgo watching “Is It a Dude or Lady” on Maury Povich to get-down to the daily training necessary to achieve our dream?

How do you do it?

Thanks for reading.

–MJG

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