SHAWNEE, KS — When parents put their kids in most sports, like basketball or gymnastics, people don't normally ask if the Olympics are in their future.
But when kids start figure skating, that question gets asked, especially during the Games. Kansas City-area skaters say the hours they spend on the ice are about loving the sport, not training for Olympic glory.
Mia Savoy, 15, has been skating since she was 2 years old. She explained what “getting serious” about skating meant to her.
"I skate more, and I train more, and I enjoy it much more than I did when I was younger," Savoy said.
The Olympics aren't in her future. And she's fine with that.
"Now you have to be really young to be in the Olympics if you want to win," Savoy said. “But I know that I like it, and I'm just going to try as hard as I can to get to the level I want to be at."
That level might be different for every skater. Lexi Newsom, 16, isn’t focused on competitions on the other side of the world because she's trying to win the ones she's in right now.
"I think it gives you something to work towards,” Newsom said. “Even if it's not, ‘I want to be on TV, or want people to be watching me,' it's, ‘I want to prepare as best I can for this.’"
But even more than that, Newsom described her feeling on skates the way anyone describes a sport they love to play.
"This is the time when I put everything else aside, and just focus on this, and focus on how far I can go, and I'll deal with the rest of it once I'm off the ice,” Newsom said. “There's something to be said for that."
Newsom and Savoy both train at the Kansas City Ice Center in Shawnee. One of the coaches there, Marina Eltsova, competed for Russia in the 1998 Nagano Olympics. She tells KSHB 41 that the magic of the Olympic Games isn’t possible without skaters who simply love the sport.
"Some kids, they just want to skate because they do love skating. They like the freedom," Eltsova said. “They're here because that's what they want to learn. And the questions about the Olympics comes way later. This is when they start advancing, this is when they start thinking, ‘How far do I want to take it, how far do I want to go?’"
Both of the young skaters who spoke to KSHB 41 talked about their years to come on skates.
“I think I'll always be skating,” Savoy said. “As long as you like it, keep doing you."
Newsom said that although her coaches, fellow skaters and rinks change, "the sport itself has never changed."
But another skater's love story with the ice is more about rekindling an old flame.
Marty Yadrick is 65 and returned to skating in 2020 for the first time in 40 years.
“You have to love the sport,” Yadrick said. "I never really wanted to give it up, and I'm kind of wondering why I wasted all those years not doing it."
Yadrick just passed his first test last month and he's already working on the next one. He just uses a little more equipment than his slightly younger fellow skaters.
"When I skate, I do wear wrist guards and I wear knee pads, just to keep these older bones intact," Yadrick said.
He told KSHB 41 he's actually broken his left wrist twice since returning to skating, but that hasn't deterred him.
"If I can just learn one simple jump before I die, I'll be happy," Yadrick said.
