Michelle Kwan

Hillary

In the fall of 1992, Michelle Kwan’s figure skating coach went out of town. When he came back a week later, he got some surprising news. While he was gone, his quiet, rule-following twelve-year-old student had taken the test to move up to the senior competition level—without his permission. Frank Carroll had wanted Michelle to wait, to spend the year winning at the junior level instead of moving up to compete against older, more experienced skaters.

“I was supposed to stay in juniors,” she admitted with a smile to a Los Angeles Times reporter a few months later. “But I had a little urge to go into seniors.” Michelle had taken matters into her own hands, and even her coach couldn’t help but admire her guts. “It shows a little bit that she has strength inside,” he conceded.

At that year’s U.S. National Figure Skating Championships, Michelle became the youngest senior competitor in two decades. She would go on to become the most decorated figure skater in U.S. history, winning five World Championships, nine U.S. National Championships, and two Olympic medals. She dominated her sport for over a decade, landing one triple jump after another and captivating audiences with her moving performances. On the ice and off, Michelle Kwan has come to embody grace and grit.

“My parents didn’t have the means to provide brand-new skates, flashy costumes, or ice time. They were barely juggling multiple jobs, providing a roof over our heads, feeding us, working at the restaurant… and then they gave me this crazy opportunity to ice skate! It seemed foolish at the time, but it was my dream to compete at the Olympic Games.”

—MICHELLE KWAN

Michelle was born in Los Angeles, the daughter of immigrants from China who came to the U.S. in the 1970s. Her father, Danny, worked for the phone company, and her mother, Estella, ran the Chinese restaurant that her family owned in a California suburb. When Michelle was just five years old, she and her sister, Karen, started taking skating lessons at a local ice rink. Both girls were talented and determined; before long, their lessons had gone from weekly to daily.

Figure skating is an expensive sport. There are the costumes, the skates, the ice time, the coaching. The Kwans sold their house in Rancho Palos Verdes and moved into one that Danny’s parents owned in Torrance to support their daughters’ skating. When Michelle and Karen earned scholarships to train at an elite rink a hundred miles away from home, Danny moved with them. Estella stayed back with their brother, Ron.

“I made it to the national championships in used skates that were custom-made for another girl,” Michelle said later. “I still have those skates. Underneath the arch, there was a name crossed out and my dad had ‘Michelle Kwan’ written in.… But I didn’t feel disadvantaged. I felt empowered because I had these opportunities. I was going to try to make the most of it.”

At sixteen, Michelle won her first U.S. National Championship and World Championship titles with programs that were both technically difficult and artistically beautiful. The next year, she didn’t fare as well, coming in second to an up-and-coming skater named Tara Lipinski. The year after that, despite months of struggling with injuries, a growth spurt, and her own self-confidence, Michelle, competing with a stress fracture in her foot, became the first woman in history to receive a perfect score for her short program at nationals.

Heading into the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, Michelle was the clear favorite to win. Comparing her to fifteen-year-old Lipinski, her biggest rival, reporters wrote and talked about Michelle as a mature, seasoned veteran—never mind the fact that she was just eighteen years old herself, incredibly young to carry the burden of such immense pressure. The unique expectations of the sport made it even harder: Figure skaters are expected to be beautiful, polite, and poised. Commentators loved that Lipinski broke into a delighted smile each time she landed a jump; Michelle skated with a more serious expression.

When it was her turn on the ice in Nagano, Michelle managed to shut it all out. She skated beautifully. But Lipinski also skated flawlessly and earned higher marks for the technical difficulty of her program. That night, the world saw two skaters, both at the top of their game, compete on the Olympic stage. When the results came in after the final competition, Michelle didn’t win gold, as so many people had predicted; she finished second to Lipinski.

Despite what must have been profound disappointment, Michelle rose to the occasion yet again. She was gracious as she congratulated her rival. As she said, “I didn’t lose the gold. I won the silver.” And then, true to form, Michelle got back to work. She kept pushing herself, kept training, and won a second gold medal at the World Championships a few months later. In 2002, she again made the Olympics, where she won the bronze medal.

After she retired from competitive skating, Michelle didn’t lose her focus; she simply shifted it. She went to college, then graduate school, earning a master’s degree in international relations. Then she put her degrees to good use, serving as a U.S. public envoy pursuing diplomacy through sports, and on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition under President Obama. She came to work as a senior adviser at the State Department when I was secretary of state, and I was impressed by her bright mind, incredible work ethic, and unfailingly cheerful personality. I was delighted when, a few years later, she came to work on my 2016 presidential campaign.

Today Michelle serves on the board of Special Olympics International, where she travels the world, talking about the difference this important organization, founded by Eunice Shriver, has made in bringing hope to so many people with intellectual disabilities and their families. To the delight of her Instagram followers, she has even gotten back on the ice. She is still involved in politics, having recently gone to work on her second presidential campaign.

Michelle is a role model not simply because of her talent, or her grace under pressure, or her composure after losing an important competition on the international stage. Her significance comes from something even more extraordinary: In a world where women, especially those in the public eye, are pigeonholed into being just one thing, Michelle has embraced complexity and seeming contradiction. She is proof that you can be more than one thing: powerful and graceful, fiercely competitive and a good sport, a student and an athlete, an Olympian and a public servant, pragmatic and an optimist.

“When I look back, I wouldn’t have changed anything,” she said when asked how it felt to not have won Olympic gold. “I couldn’t have worked harder. There was the dedication to the sport. The amazing family and team that I had. The mind-set, the drive, the motivation, the grit, it was all there. There was just that one thing. You can’t always be perfect.” Too true!