It benefits tremendously in all areas. It's not just so much with figure skating but all sport. I feel, as an athlete, what sport brought to me is the understanding of reaching for goals and not giving up on things so quickly, and the journey to achievement and success. I think that's imbedded at a very young age. When you get involved in a sport, you become involved in a team spirit situation. So, you get the social part of it and you get the “off the couch” factor, so-called, but you also can bring that through as an adult.
As I look at my life since being a skater, I may not have the master's degree from university, but what the sport has taught me about life and what it has given me to have a successful lifestyle as an adult has been amazing. It's given me confidence. It's given me a heck of a lot of ups and downs and how to deal with that. That's really important in our youth today, to be able to enforce that there are going to be a lot of ups and downs, even as you get older. If you can learn from the bumps and bruises as a youngster and realize “just get back up and it's going to be okay”, you can bring that into your adult life, into the business world, into whatever you may achieve.
I have a tendency to work more with the grassroots in our sport. I am one of those Olympians who loves the little ones, the little ones running around in the hockey helmets and the snow suits, because they're so impressionable at that age and I want them to understand that, as Dan was saying, sport can be for life and it can be a passion. Skating can be a passion and there's so much more to it. I want them to smile and remember me as that first teacher. That's the passion I try to bring into the sport. I think a lot of our professional coaches, with this new strategic planning that we're doing in our sport, are trying to gain that passion out of the kids, so they will stay in sport and there will be a healthier future for our government.