Some advice for Emily Hughes: hail and farewell
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The news: Emily Hughes joins Kimmie Meissner in withdrawing today from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships with an injury. Hughes’ problem is with her ankle. As with Meissner, Hughes intends to resume training and competition when the ankle heals.
My opinion: I repeat what I said on Jan. 18, 2008, in the Chicago Tribune, after Hughes withdrew from the then-upcoming nationals with a hip injury -- and it goes double after a current season in which she finished ninth of 10th with a stunningly poor performance (four falls) in her lone international competition.
Ave atque vale: As a Harvard student, Emily Hughes should know that means ‘Hail and farewell.’ And Hughes should take the hip injury that forced her to withdraw from next week’s U.S. championships as a sign that this is a good time for her to say farewell to figure skating and fully enjoy her four years in Cambridge. Hughes has had a rewarding career -- skated in the Olympics, twice made worlds and finished second at nationals -- and can take pride in having wrung every possible ounce of accomplishment from her ability. She also has remained the rare elite athlete who doesn’t think the world revolves around her.
I will remember one thing most about Emily, whom I first met eight years ago at the family’s Long Island home, when I was doing a story on her eventual Olympic champion sister, Sarah.
At the 2007 nationals in Spokane, Wash., just after she finished the press conference that followed her losing the title by a whisker, we passed in a hallway. She undoubtedly was very, very disappointed at the result. But her first words to me were, ‘How is your son doing in college?’
(A similar anecdote is my most enduring memory of what makes Olympic heptathlon champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee a special person. As she was laying on a stretcher after hurting herself at the 1991 world championships in Tokyo, with the U.S. media gathered around, Jackie began the interview by asking, ‘How is your son?’’)
It can’t have been easy for Emily to follow Sarah, who entered Yale after she finished competitive skating.
Maybe that’s why she went to Harvard instead of Yale.
There is no other explanation for such a college choice.
(You expected an old Yalie -- with the emphasis on old -- to think otherwise?)
-- Philip Hersh
