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Dorothy Hamill
Olympic Hall of Fame
Dorothy Hamill: My mother got up at 4:00 in the morning. I give her so much more credit today. You know, at the time I was just a kid. Well, that's what, you know, mom is doing. She got up and she'd make breakfast for me and bring it up to me in bed and wake me up and lay my clothes out and help me put them on. And then she'd go warm up the car. You know, in the wintertime it was freezing outside. She'd go down, start the car so I'd get into a warm car. I mean, she treated me like a little princess. And it was what I wanted to do. I didn't really -- a couple of the kids asked me today, you know, "Do you feel as though you missed out on anything in childhood because of your sacrifices?" Absolutely not. I loved it. Skating was the perfect excuse not to have to go to a friend's house, you know, for a sleep over. Not that I didn't have friends or didn't like my friends. I had a couple of very close friends. And I was always being invited to sleep overs and things. I just didn't want to go. So it was the perfect excuse. And you know, I think a lot of that was the shyness. But my mom sacrificed; I didn't sacrifice anything. I just was passionate, you know, it's all that passion.
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Scott Hamilton
Olympic Hall of Fame
I didn't really think that I was gifted or I didn't really think that I was super talented. I was just lucky to have a body that was the right proportion to pick up skating because I was pretty agile. And, the fact that I liked to show off and be the center of attention really lends itself to figure skating very well. But, I never really thought that I would be extraordinarily successful at skating. It's just something that happened, you know. And you get to a level of expertise or you get to a level competitively and you just try to be as good as you can be. I started winning competitions and I started improving in spurts that were really pretty fortunate because I was at a technical level that was higher than the rest of the guys that were my age, which happened kind of all at once. They were way ahead of me, then I caught up all at once.
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Scott Hamilton
Olympic Hall of Fame
I started skating and I kind of liked it because I could run circles around the guys that wouldn't pick me to play baseball. "We don't want him. He's too short. He can't hit the ball over second base." But I could skate circles around them. And I ended up playing hockey just out of peer pressure. I didn't want to be the sissy figure skater, you know. So I played hockey for three years and I did quite well. It's just a big man's sport, you know, and I really was undersized. So, figure skating was a great vehicle for me to kind of be competitive at something without having to be big.
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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
Sir Edmund Hillary: Not really. I had a number of friends who were interested in tramping and trekking around our local hills, but as I got older, I discovered that I tended to be rather more energetic and stronger walkers than they were and so I always seemed to be pushing young ladies up steep hills and clamoring up trees to find out where we were. And I sort of quickly became pretty active in that sort of way. I still wasn't doing anything of great consequence, but I was loving the out-of-doors and loving forcing myself to travel quickly around the countryside and do very long treks and I enjoyed it very much.
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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
I had a grandmother who was an Irish grandmother who came out to New Zealand and she was a wonderful old lady. She lived up to 96 years old and, even in her 90s, she had great vitality and great enthusiasm and a tremendous sense of fun. I know that for a while I was quite influenced by her spirit she showed during the latter days of her life. But, I really have no idea why I wanted to keep dashing on in these ways because I realized that it wasn't the normal attitude of the majority of young people. Most young people were more interested in going to the movies or going to the beach or something or other. I really wasn't all that great on that sort of stuff. I just wanted to get out in the hills.
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