Skating her way through grief and love, Rochette wins hearts

Fighting off tears as she got set to start her short program at the Vancouver Olympics on Tuesday, Rochette gathered herself before La Cumparsita began to play and laid down perhaps the most exquisite performance of her career.

Joannie Rochette skated in the Olympic Games just two days after her mother, Therese, died of a heart attack.

How awful. And yet how affirming.

To bear witness to Rochette’s skate Tuesday night was to be reminded of what matters: Love is a bond stronger than death.

That was love Rochette skated with–for her mother, and her father, and for everything they had done to put her out Tuesday night onto the ice.

Where she belonged.

Hitting all of her elements, Rochette set a new personal best with 71.36 points, well ahead of Japan’s Miki Ando (64.76) for third place heading into the free skate on Thursday.

But merely delving into numbers and technique doesn’t do Rochette’s skate justice. Her performance was about will and love, more than anything else.

Rochette grew up in a small town–all of 600 people–in French-speaking Quebec, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River.

The town is called Ile-Dupas. It is known–such as it is known–for duck-hunting and for an annual tractor-pulling contest.

“This place is who I am,” Rochette said in one of those up-close profiles on CTV, the Canadian broadcasting outfit. She added a moment later, “For me, this is real life.”

Rochette is an only child. Her father, Normand, who works for a metals company, taught her to skate when she was 4. When it became clear she had promise on skates, he pulled extra shifts.

Theirs, Rochette said, was a “very average income family,” and she the farthest thing from spoiled: “I was a maid at the hotel. I just learned the hard way. It’s good values to give to a kid.”

When Rochette was 16, her coach, Manon Perron, moved to Montreal. Rochette followed, moving in with another family.

“It was difficult to leave home,” she said. “Every time my mom would drive me to my boarding family, the Sunday night, I would just cry a little bit. To come from such a small place … sometimes people were looking at me weird. I wanted to get out there. But when I got out there, I felt a little bit scared.”

Two days after the death of her mother, Joannie Rochette sits in third after a very emotional short program.

At 19, Rochette won her first Canadian title.

At 20, she was already in the Olympics–in 2006, in Torino. She finished fifth, moving up from ninth with a lovely long program.

Her music choice for the long program at those 2006 Games is particularly revealing. She skated to a classical version of “L’Hymne a l’amour,” or “Hymn to love,” written by Edith Piaf.

Why this song?

Because, as Rochette would later tell the story, when Therese was herself in her early 20s, she was engaged to be married. But two weeks before the wedding, her fiance was killed in an accident.

At some point later, Therese met Normand, and they fell in love. Their first baby died shortly after being born. The parents persevered. Their next child–their only child–would be Rochette.

“Through all my life, my parents gave me so much support to help me keep going further,” Rochette would write in the journal she posts on her website. “They both gave me all the love they could ”

She would add, “As a tribute to what my mother went through, to the love my parents have both for each other and for me, for all they’ve done to allow me to achieve my dreams and with the meaning the Olympics have for me, I feel that I have to skate on this.”