Titles & Medals Do Not Define a Career

How did you stay active and what did you do during the COVID-19 lockdown in California?

It was a busy time for me, which was funny because there was no skating and no tours. When the quarantine first started, I took two weeks to just do nothing. I had been so busy with tours basically since I retired that I had not really stopped in almost two years. It felt like I was just going from one city to another and I was not home for more than two weeks at a time — and that was maybe like three times a year. So I was going at a pace that was difficult to handle but also extremely satisfying because of the jobs and the tours that I have had the opportunity to do.

So when this all started, I felt like I had to decompress and let my body heal along with my mind and my emotions, and it was a much needed break that I had not had in a long time.

My fiancée, Michelle Dawley, and I have a company called Skate Global and we do seminars across Canada and in Europe. After the break one of the things we wanted to do was figure out how to keep skaters engaged and inspired during that lockdown. And we also wanted to find a way to give back because it was such a difficult time for many people emotionally, psychologically and financially.

As part of our seminars, we offer movement and performance based classes, so we decided to see if we could do that over Zoom. It was pretty crazy. We did it once a week and it was donation based. Every week we chose a charity that we wanted to support and sent the links to everyone who wanted to join the Zoom class to donate if they could. It was extremely successful. We started in mid-April and the first week we had about 50 to 75 skaters. It kept growing and for our last class in June we had 302 skaters. So we were on a Zoom class,