Dorothy Hamill Quotes

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Dorothy Hamill

Profession : Athlete

Birth : July 26, 1956

If you don't know a lot about figure skating, it's easy to fall in love with ice dancing because it's so romantic and so theatrical.

Dorothy Hamill

I always had short hair, and I hated my short hair. I was always mistaken for a boy, but my mom wouldn't let me change my hair because she was always chasing me around with a hairbrush, and it was always tangled, so she just would cut it off, and she's right: short hair did suit me.

Dorothy Hamill

At times, I feel overwhelmed and my depression leads me into darkness.

Dorothy Hamill

Everybody has to deal with tough times. A gold medal doesn't make you immune to that. A skater is used to falling down and getting up again.

Dorothy Hamill

I didn't study dance. I had some ballet lessons because I needed it for posture and for my arms, mostly. My skating coach said I really needed it, from the belly button up, as opposed to the footwork. In skating, the shoes don't move.

Dorothy Hamill

I'm really very glad that I had skating to be my love and my escape. I think that it always gave me something that made me feel good, and it was music, and it was peaceful, and not a lot of the other stresses of life.

Dorothy Hamill

In my teen years leading up to the Olympics, I loved having the excuse to skip out on parties because of skating. Partying wasn't my thing anyway. Mostly I hung out with other skaters. We were all buddies, so it's not like I missed out on socializing. I was really enjoying myself.

Dorothy Hamill

I wouldn't say that there's ever been an Olympic champion that didn't deserve to win an Olympic Gold Medal.

Dorothy Hamill

Every time you go out on the ice, there are slight flaws. You can always think of something you should have done better. These are the things you must work on.

Dorothy Hamill

I wanted to learn how to skate backwards and they wouldn't help me and they went off and left me on my own.

Dorothy Hamill

It was very much like Norman Rockwell: small town America. We walked to school or rode our bikes, stopped at the penny candy store on the way home from school, skated on the pond.

Dorothy Hamill

I was a bratty little sister. I was the youngest of three, and I often felt as though I didn't fit in.

Dorothy Hamill

My parents didn't have a lot of money, but we never knew that. They really did the best they could.

Dorothy Hamill

My mother stopped working when she had my brother. She was a full time mom until I started getting heavily into ice skating lessons, and it got to the point where they really needed my mom to earn an income.

Dorothy Hamill

I hated to read. My mother could not get me to read. I'm going through the same thing with my daughter now. I love to read now, but I don't remember reading.

Dorothy Hamill

I was passionate. I found something that I loved. I could be all alone in a big old skating rink and nobody could get near me and I didn't have to talk to anybody because of my shyness. It was great. I was in my fantasy world.

Dorothy Hamill

I don't really think they saw anything in me, except the fact that I was interested in it. Some of the kids would miss a week here and miss a week there, I think they could see that I really enjoyed it.

Dorothy Hamill

In group lesson number six I think we learned how to turn backwards and then just kind of wiggle. That wasn't really skating backward, but I guess I was going in the right direction.

Dorothy Hamill

There were no competitions on television. The first skating competition I ever remember seeing on television was the 1968 Olympics when Peggy Fleming won.

Dorothy Hamill

I was just ice skating. I had no concept of that. In those days you couldn't see the judges. I was this little person on the ice and they were just people that would stand around the boards.

Dorothy Hamill