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Dorothy Hamill
Olympic Hall of Fame
I really would get violently ill. So I never ate very much before I competed because I couldn't keep it down. I often thought it was really like going to your own execution. You know, from the time I got up in the morning I'd be counting, looking at the clock and saying, "Okay, I've only got 12 hours until I'll be finished," and "Nine hours until I'm finished," and "Five minutes from now I'll be finished." It was just -- I couldn't wait 'til it was over. But once I got onto the ice, and once the music started -- after about :30 seconds -- I was okay. But it's just that first :30 seconds, which is why I would always do, you know, one of those easy jumps that kind of -- you didn't really have to worry about maybe missing it, and then the next couple of jumps were always the tough ones, because you're still full of energy before you get exhausted at the end of the program.
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Dorothy Hamill
Olympic Hall of Fame
I just got so darn nervous when it was competition time, I completely flipped out. I mean, you're trying to trace these perfect circles, which are gone now today. They don't do those anymore. You get nervous and you hyperventilate and you see your life flashing in front of you and you start shaking. You know, you can't trace those circles. Also I was blind. Nobody knew I couldn't see. So the year before the Olympics I got glasses, so that helped a lot. There were all of these factors I think that contributed to part of my not feeling confident and being shy.
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Dorothy Hamill
Olympic Hall of Fame
I ended up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer after six months in the ice show. I was skating 13 shows a week. I was getting up at six o'clock to do AM Podunk, wherever we were, and the reporters saying, "We're not going to cover the ice show unless we can have Dorothy to interview." And here I am: shy! What am I going to say? I have nothing to say. I'm just a dumb ice skater. If you want to ask me about ice skating, I can tell you about skating, but don't ask me about anything else because I don't know anything else. You know, for all the hours I trained, all the double Axels I did, I didn't go to school, I didn't read, I didn't learn about anything else. And it was very difficult. I was completely unhappy.
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Scott Hamilton
Olympic Hall of Fame
If you can fall, get up and do the next triple jump, you've got guts. You've got real good intestinal fortitude. And, it's amazing. It's the same with anything that you do. If you go into a test and you just choke, I mean you look at the paper and the words are just jumbled and you can't figure out -- I know I studied for this, I know I know this stuff. If you can get past that and you can just calm down and slowly, you're feeling the same thing everybody else has felt. You know, if you fall, sometimes it hurts. Sometimes you twist something and you can't really get up right away. Sometimes you get stitches. Sometimes you fall and your pants rip and you're humiliated in front of a large group of people. I mean, anything can happen. You just have to accept that you cannot succeed unless you're willing to fail. And, you fail a lot.
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Scott Hamilton
Olympic Hall of Fame
So of all the things that I'm proud of as far as my illness, it wasn't getting past the illness, it was getting through the day to day life of being away from a normal situation and healthy children. There was a lot of other kids like me who were sick and whose parents were very scared. And it's kind of an odd way to grow up. And so, getting past the illness and dealing with a lot of the hardship around it I think was something that gave me great strength. It wasn't so much that I faced the physical ailment or disability and won, it was: I accepted it and it slowly went away. But, everything that it brought was a little bit challenging.
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John Hennessy
President of Stanford University
It was a risk, and I think leaving the university for the 18 months or so that I left was a big risk. We could have published our papers. They would have been completely accepted and this technology may have just sat on the shelf for years. But I think because we were willing to take that risk, not only did we have a much larger impact much sooner than we would have otherwise had, but I think actually the understanding of the technology and our understanding of what the problems were -- we gained a tremendous amount in that period of commercializing the technology, of filling the glass the rest of the way, and that was a wonderful learning experience for me as well.
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John Hennessy
President of Stanford University
John Hennessy: Certainly fear of failure at some points, which is why I would try and do this while you're young. When failures aren't -- when you know that it's a time you can afford to take risks in your career. Much harder to do it when you're older. Much harder to do it when you're older. You're already established in a field. You're well thought of. Branching out to a new field and doing something that's highly risky is harder when you reach a certain point in your career. Certainly some self-doubts. A few times my wife probably thought I was crazy. And lots of hard work, and you're wondering, "Are we going to be able to carry this through?" And of course, when you decide to commercialize it, lots of other issues besides the importance of the technology come into the picture. Can you build the team? Can you manage it? Can you finance it? Can you sell the technology to people? And those turned out to be some of the major challenges. In fact, the technology challenges were probably the easy ones in that part of the process.
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John Hennessy
President of Stanford University
And, I think, being willing to take risks. This not only is the technology industry, and much of what has happened in technology about being willing to take risks, but I view risk taking and being pioneers as really something that is in the culture of America. And when I look at an institution like Stanford, it is something that's really made it unique. It has grown up in the West. It has thought of itself as a pioneering institution, and it has been willing to take risks. Not all those risks will be successful, but the ones that are successful have such impact and make such a difference in the world. I think that's probably the thing I've been willing to do, is take a number of risks that people have been doubtful about the wisdom, but the ones that have been successful have really had that kind of impact. And the ones that haven't, by and large, have been small investments of time and energy that didn't work out, and that's okay. You can have those as well, and I think that's a lesson that I've really learned over the years.
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