The Medals Are in a Drawer Somewhere

People ask me about the medals all the time. Where do you keep them? Can I hold one? What did it feel like when they put it around your neck?

I keep them in a drawer. I think. Honestly I'm not 100% sure which drawer, & that's probably the most honest thing I can say about what Olympic medals mean to me 16 yrs after the last one.

They're beautiful objects. I'm proud of every one. But they're not what the Olympic path gave me, and the gap between what people think the medals represent & what the experience was like is so wide I've spent most of my post-competitive life trying to articulate it.

From the outside an Olympic career looks like a highlight reel. Podium moments, national anthem, flag draped over your shoulders, a country cheering your name.

Those moments are real — I'm not going to pretend they weren't incredible, bc they were. Standing on the podium in Salt Lake City in 2002 at 19 yrs old, hearing the crowd in my home country... that's as good as it gets in sport.

But those moments lasted maybe 15 min total across three Olympics spanning eight yrs. 15 min of visible glory on top of roughly 15,000 hours of work nobody saw or will ever ask about.

The math is brutal. And the math is the point.

My dad Yuki didn't know anything about speed skating when I started. He was a hairdresser in Federal Way, Washington — a single father who'd raised me on his own since I was an infant. He drove me to practices he didn't understand, paid for equipment & travel he couldn't afford, sat in arenas watching a sport he was learning alongside me.

He never once told me I had to be an Olympian. He told me if I was going to do something, I should do it all the way, & the commitment itself was the thing that mattered.

I didn't understand that at 14. I understand it now.

The Olympic path gave me a relationship w/ my father I don't think we would've built any other way. Not bc skating was special — bc the sacrifice was shared. He gave up his evenings, his weekends, his financial security. I gave up a normal adolescence. Neither of us knew if any of it would pay off. We did it anyway, together, & that mutual commitment is worth more to me now than any medal in any drawer.

What did the losses teach that winning couldn't?

From age 14 to 27 my days started before dawn. Ice time was limited & shared, so serious training happened in hours nobody else wanted. I was on the ice by 5am most mornings, sometimes earlier, in a building where I could see my breath & hear nothing but the scrape of my blades & the hum of the refrigeration system.

I hated it sometimes. I want to be clear about that. There were mornings I sat in my car in the parking lot & considered driving home and going back to bed. Mornings where the alarm felt like punishment & the cold felt personal & the whole pursuit seemed absurd.

I went in anyway. Not every time — I'm not going to lie & claim perfect discipline. But most times.

And that repetition — showing up when I didn't want to, thousands of mornings across 13 yrs — built something in me I've relied on every day since. Not toughness exactly. Something more subtle. A kind of proof that I could do hard things even when every part of me wanted to quit. Evidence, collected over yrs, that I was somebody who followed through.

That evidence is what the Olympic path gave me. Not the medals. The receipts.

I won eight medals across three Olympics. I also lost races I was supposed to win, got disqualified in events I'd trained yrs for, crashed in finals, got boxed in by competitors who skated smarter. I watched from the stands while teammates competed in events I'd been cut from.

Salt Lake City 2002 — I was the favorite in the 1000m. Finished w/ silver after a chaotic final that included a crash & a disqualification.

Vancouver 2010 — I was 27 & my body was starting to tell me things I didn't want to hear. Silver in the 1000m, bronze in the relay. No gold.

The losses live in me differently than the wins. Sharper edges, more detail. I can replay a lost race from 2006 w/ more clarity than the one I won gold in, bc losses forced me to examine what went wrong at a granular level — my preparation, my positioning, my decisions in the final laps — in a way winning never demanded.

Every founder & executive I work w/ has a version of this. The deal that fell apart, the launch that flopped, the hire that didn't work out. Those losses, when you're honest enough to examine them, teach you things success never will bc success lets you off the hook. Success says "whatever you did worked, keep doing it." Loss says "look closer."

If I'm being fully honest about what the Olympic path taught me, it comes down to something that sounds like it should be on a poster but isn't — the process & the person it turns you into along the way is the entire point. Medals, records, external validation — those are byproducts. Nice ones, ones I'm grateful for, but byproducts.

My dad was right. The commitment itself was the thing that mattered.

The medals are in a drawer. The person the path built is still here, still showing up... still figuring it out.

Subscribe to Hard Pivot

I wrote about this in Zero Regrets — the cost of what competition demands & what it gives back.

--AAO