Last night as I watched the Ice Dancing Olympic finals, I felt the collective heartbreak that everyone else watching felt. As Madison Chock and Evan Bates came into a spin that they have probably practiced a million times, a move that looked nowhere near as complicated as any of their lifts, the unthinkable happened. They clipped their skates, lost their balance, and fell. There was no hiding the misstep, no playing it off. It was an obvious fall. They looked exposed; and if their shocked faces didn’t give it away, the unanimous held-breath gasp of the crowd did.
My heart immediately hurt for them. What do you do when you fall like that? Would they continue? And if they did would they be able to recover? And in the split second it took me to wonder how’d they’d handle it – they were up.
And, guys, I couldn’t help but think that they are all of us.
We spend our lives dedicated to make things look flawless and easy. The hours of practice and prep we put into excellence. We wake up and put hours into perfecting our routine. Sometimes we’re tired but we push through. We keep going; we move forward. We have one shot at this and we do the best we can.
Because we are human. Imperfect, flawed humans and stumbling is inevitable.
We screw up things we’ve done a million times and no matter how perfectly practiced your twizzle (my new favorite word. Thank you, Ice Dancing), sometimes, we will fall out of balance. And all we could do then is face it and choose how to continue. Will we walk away in tears or skate your stinking ass off?
Madison and Evan chose not just to skate but to S K A T E. They left their mistake right there on the ice and blazed through the rest of their program impeccably, like badasses. To be clear, I am certain they were torn apart by that mistake, but they refused to be broken by it. And therein lies a powerful message. In their courage to keep going even when they knew all hopes of a medal were gone, they taught us this:
It’s never about the fall — it’s about the rise.
How you handle yourself when you fall, speaks volumes and says more about character than waltzing through anything without struggle. Anyone could hold their head high when they’ve done something well but it takes a fighter to stumble publicly, decide to continue, and, ultimately, rise.
Stumbling plays an important part in our life story. It shows us how to handle defeat but also that we can. It doesn’t define us but it does help us define ourselves. Am I bigger than this one moment? Am I stronger? More resilient?
I won’t remember Madison and Evan’s routine as a moment two people fell and failed, I’ll remember it as a moment they rose from the ice and became something stronger than they were before.
