FLEX TIME 8 5 T H A N N UA L FAT H E R – S O N D I N N E R
Olympic Icon Forged from Dad’s Tough Love By Mike Kennedy ’99
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WO DAYS after finishing dead last in the 1998 U.S. Olympic Trials — a year following his national cham-
pionship victory — short track speed-skating legend Apolo Anton Ohno was ready to quit. He’d had enough and wanted nothing more than to go home to Seattle — far away from the monumental expectations that followed his every move at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. But his father, Yuki, a Japanese immigrant who came to the United States when he was 18 years old, didn’t let him off that easy.
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He drove Ohno to the family’s secluded cabin on Moclips Beach, 140 miles southwest of Seattle, leaving his 15-year-old son there to contemplate the future. And, Yuki said, Ohno wasn’t coming home until he had figured
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out what he wanted to do with his 01 Apolo Ohno is not only an Olympic athlete — he completed an Ironman in 2014.
life. “He wasn’t upset that I had lost
02 Varsity basketball player Angus Binnie ’17 is an attentive observer.
— he was most upset by the lack of effort he saw in me,” Ohno recalled.
03 Heidi Vorwerk P ’13, ’15 and Joan Beth Brown P ’11, ’13, ’15 dish out Herberth’s famous chicken parmesan.
“Whatever I was going to do going forward — whether it was
04 Austin Sammons ’18 and his father, David, gather for a photo with Jack ’18 and Michael Altman.
speed skating or not, he told me — I was going to put everything into
05 Ryan Kahn ’18 and Caleb Osemobor ’18 look on during the festivities.
it. It was now or never.” After spending a week in isolation — immersed in self-dialogue
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06 Jack Powers ’17, Henry Harris ’16, and Henry’s dad, Carter, enjoy the speeches.
OF BRUNSWICK • SPRING 2015
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