Twenty years ago, the Paralympic games weren't a big budget item. So after competing as a skier, Bonnie St. John felt she had to return home and finish school. A week after winning a gold she was back in classes. At first she tried to keep up her practice regiment by fitting all of her classes into three days a week, but soon found that she was doing poorly at both. Realizing she had to choose, she decided to stay in school and "get a life ". Looking back in retrospect, during the games she was ranked third and had no expectations of winning - instead her goal was to simply compete for her country. So even if she hadn't won a gold medal, she still would have felt that she had completed her goal and would have made the same decision not to return.
Midway through his Olympic season, Jim Herberich left his Olympic bobsled team. The decision wasn't as voluntary as it might seem. For the last year he had been suffering from an undiagnosed injury that was affecting his performance. At the same time, he was sick of living out of a bag for 15 years and of having to rely on his not-so-reliable teammates. When all the circumstances came to bare, he found that he didn't have much of a choice and left even though he had "loved what [he] was doing and couldn't imagine anything that was better ".
For Samantha Harvey, training for the Olympics was a way of life. She would often say that to compete for the Olympics you need "to have the single mindedness of a monk, the passion of a poet, and the discipline of a soldier " on top of a love for your sport. Even so, she found that training for the games was easy compared with working out the finances for it. As to whether or not she's going to compete at the next games, she thinks about it everyday and the "jury's still out ".
If he hadn't been a professional, Mark Fusco might have tried to play along with his brother for the US Hockey team in the 1988 games. But when he retired from the NHL after a series of bad injuries, he decided he had enough and was ready to do something different. Even if he wanted to go back he's not sure he could have; unlike many other sports, he can't think of a single hockey player that quit and then came back the same as before. In retrospect, he doesn't think he would have made it.
Even though the ultimate choice of whether or not he would get to compete at the Olympics wasn't his choice, Ted Donato never found it difficult because there was never a real "black or white chance of making it ". It was tough not having a definite moment or decision made about whether you made it. After chasing the Stanley Cup for 14 years, he still feels that the Olympics are the pinnacle of all athletics, not just in hockey. It was the one time when he felt that everyone was on the same team. In the NHL, he felt more like a professional player and less of a passion to win.
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