1992 Albertville Winter Olympics

 

There are always a few stories that you can nominate before each

Olympics that are likely to become the focus for U.S. readers and thus

shape a reporter's coverage plans. At the Winter Olympics, that most

often means women’s figure skating.

 

When you write for the hometown paper of the figure skater at the

center of the story the country is most interested in – Kristi Yamaguchi –

you can't get beaten by any reporter on any development. Not a sniffle,

not a sneeze can go unreported.

 

Leading up to the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, that meant a year

of getting to know the Yamaguchi family and her coach, Christy

Kjarsgaard-Ness (the first part of her surname is pronounced KAZ-gard),

them getting to know me and getting comfortable with me being

around. I had to accurately reflect the person in my coverage that so

many people wanted to know.

 

But that did not mean, in my view, that we should all be close personal

friends.

 

My job was to report on the athlete who likely would be – for

Americans, and certainly those in the San Francisco Bay Area – the star

of those Olympics. To have the most complete, accurate and

interesting news about her and to have it before anyone else.

 

Yet even though I would be around an increasing amount, it had to be

understood by everyone that writing about her was why I was around,

and that as much as I wanted our conversations to be free and open,

that what they shared with me they were potentially sharing with the

world.

 

It would be one thing for Kristi or anyone in her camp to say, “I’m going

to share something with you so you can better understand something,

but I don’t want this printed.” But it would not be OK to share

something and then, upon reflection, to try to keep it out of a story. I

could not be in position where the people I was covering were also my

editors.

 

For me, and likely for them, this added a degree of tension in the

private times I was with the Yamaguchis – at her coach’s home in

Edmonton, Alberta, for example, where she lived during her two years

of pre-Olympic training, or at the apartment the Yamaguchis rented in

France during the Olympics.

 

Therefore, the stories at right that I wrote about Kristi and her family –

I didn’t include event coverage in the list – need to be understood in

this context: As open and honest as we all endeavored to be in a

relationship that lasted a couple of years, there was always self-

restraint being exercised by the Yamaguchis to ensure that what was

shared with me was something that they were comfortable sharing

publicly.

 

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in science – the mere act of

observing something affects the something you are observing – also

applies in the confines of journalist-subject/source relationships.

Nevertheless, I believe my coverage was an accurate reflection of an

extraordinary athlete and family that I knew during a time of intense

public scrutiny. They were the incredibly generous and warm folks to

me and in the relationships I observed as I portrayed them to be

in my coverage.

 

The day of the women’s long program in Albertville, which would decide

the competition, I volunteered to take Kristi’s sister, Lori, skiing along

with a British figure skater who lived at the Yamaguchi home in

Fremont, California while he trained in the Bay Area. Carole Yamaguchi,

Kristi’s mother, wanted the apartment to be a quiet and peaceful place

during the hours before Kristi would leave for what would prove to be

her gold medal performance.

 

The three of us had a great day on sun-splashed slopes at Meribel

talking about skiing and snow and nothing about skating and ice.

 

The final story in the list on this page was reported and written the

following morning, after Kristi had won, and I was hanging out with the

family for the day-after story. It illustrates how our relationship evolved

under the constraints I’ve described. In it, Kristi mentions a boyfriend in

Edmonton. But I didn't know – and perhaps her family didn’t, either, at

that point – that she had met a Minnesota hockey player in the Olympic

village, which was in the nearby town of Brides-les-Bains.

 

Bret Hedican, who was playing in his second Olympics in 1992, and  Kristi married eight years later. For six of Hedican’s 17 seasons in the National Hockey League, he was a defenseman for the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh, North Carolina, and his name was engraved on the Stanley Cup in 2006 when the Hurricanes won the NHL championship. He later played for the San Jose Sharks.

 

There was only one time during my coverage that I was aware of a strain in my relationship with the Yamaguchis. That was when Carole accidentally blurted out to me in a phone call that Kristi had decided to retire from competitive figure skating and not go to the 1994 Lillehammer Games. I immediately told her on the call that I would have to write that story even though she wanted me to wait for a press conference in a few days.

 

Whatever upset there may have been at that point must have been minor. In 1997 during the months leading up to the Nagano Winter Olympics, Kristi asked if I would collaborate on a book she had a contract to write. Figure Skating for Dummies was timed for pre-Olympic release. After agreeing with the editors at the Mercury News that I would no longer write Yamaguchi stories, I was given time off to complete the book.