Even after all these years and so many Winter Olympic Games, I am still astounded by the hurtling down mountains over moguls, the zipping down face first at 75 miles an hour in the skeleton and how, in the pairs skating, Maxim Trankov could toss Tatiana Volosozhar out into the air and she could spin and spin and spin and land perfectly on that thin blade - on ice - at once gracefully and strong, and they could finish a program together that seemed to me a kind of synchronized poetry on ice.
But it's what came next that will linger. As soon as they finished the long program, he slid across the ice on his knees, pumped his fists in the air, and she stood there as the crowd roared and began to cry. He skated over to her and took her face in his hands. They had left all of themselves there on that ice.
How lucky to be invited into such a moment, when the pressure they'd felt as the favorites faded and this palpable, exuberant joy took its place. That they won gold was almost secondary.
It crystallized those times, epic or small, when we put all of what we have, all of ourselves, into something and what we wish for and work toward actually happens.
The moment had that much heft
and that much beauty.
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From The New York Times
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