KIRKLAND — Twenty-five years ago, Rosalynn Sumners was America’s queen of the ice.
In a skating career that began at Highland Ice Arena in north Seattle and at Lynnwood’s Sno-King Ice Arena, she would go on to win three consecutive United States championships and the 1983 world championship as a prelude to the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.
Sumners ended up with the silver medal in Sarajevo, coming in second to East German Katarina Witt by a narrow margin. Although the outcome grieved her for a time, Sumners went on to a successful career in professional skating that lasted until just a few years ago.
Today she is 44, retired from skating, a bride of nearly five years and the owner of two upscale stores in downtown Kirkland. She can look back with barely a regret and into the future with enthusiasm and contentment.
“Life,” she said the other day, “is very good.”
Sumners, who was raised in Edmonds and began skating when she was 7, remains one of Snohomish County’s most successful amateur and professional athletes. Certainly she had one of the longest careers at the highest levels of a major international sport. She was a world junior champion at 15, a U.S. champion at 17, a world champion at 18 and an Olympic medalist at 19.
She later toured with skating shows for 15 years, and even after that she was coaxed into occasional performances. Her last event was a televised benefit for breast cancer awareness in October of 2007.
“How many people, when they choose to do something at 7, are still doing it and making money and pretty much loving every second of it until they’re almost 40?” Sumners said. “I look back and think, ‘Oh, my gosh, how lucky was I?’ “
She was born in Palo Alto, Calif., but her father’s job transfer brought the family to the Seattle area when she was 5. They lived first in Richmond Beach, and one afternoon she tried skating at the nearby Highland rink.
At the outset, Sumners was like any other beginner on skates — wobbly and tentative. But she soon graduated from recreational skating to group lessons and then to private individual coaching. Her talent showed at an early age, but even more obvious was an extraordinary passion to excel.
“The minute I chose skating at 7, it was the most important thing in my life,” she said. “I was always pushing to be the best.” She remembers leaving notes to her coach, Lorraine Borman, urging her “to be meaner, to be harder on me.”
To get ice time for training, Sumners had to schedule early morning workouts, which meant being in bed by 8 p.m. and up at 4 the next morning. It also meant pulling out of Meadowdale Junior High School after her eighth-grade year and enrolling in a Shoreline-area alternative school, where she met once a week with teachers.
“I wasn’t a normal kid, and I wasn’t a normal teenager,” she said. “I wanted to be special. I wanted to do something different. I was driven, driven, driven.”
Sumners would get her diploma with the Meadowdale High School class of 1982, but by then she resided in the world of international figure skating. She was following in the steps of American greats including Carol Heiss, Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill, and her own coronation into that regal sorority seemed likely to occur in Sarajevo.
Second-best
The competition started well for Sumners, who was the defending world champion and the pre-Olympic favorite. During the opening compulsories, in which skaters executed precise figure-eight patterns — hence the name figure skating — Sumners jumped to an early lead. The 18-year-old Witt, who was not expected to be a top contender, was back in sixth.
But in the short program two nights later, Sumners had a flawed landing and dropped to second overall behind Witt. Still, the scores were very close and the outcome would be decided in the free skate final.
That night, Witt skated before Sumners and did well. Sumners followed with a good skate of her own — a judge from Italy, in fact, gave her a perfect 6.0 score for artistic impression — but she also left out some crucial elements. At one point in her routine, for example, Sumners was to execute a triple toe loop. Instead, she only did a double.
When it was over, it took several minutes and a computer to determine the winner. Four judges gave first-place marks to Sumners — the United States, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium — but the other five judges — East Germany, West Germany, Russia, Yugoslavia and Canada — favored Witt.
By a margin of a mere tenth of a point, Witt finished first and Sumners second.
It was, for Sumners, a rare moment of something other than victory. And the initial disappointment — film clips show her skating out to receive her silver medal with an expression of dazed disbelief — gave way to more lingering feelings of discouragement and despair.
“It took a long time to get over not winning,” she said. “I think it was quite a few years before I could say, ‘I did win the silver, I didn’t lose the gold.’ “
There was negativity from outside, too. She remembers some Seattle-area newspapers being hard on her, as if a silver medal was equivalent to failure. That kind of thing “definitely played with my psyche big-time,” she said.
Finding solace
Relief came from several places. First, there was simply the passing of time. Another lift came in 1988, when Witt repeated as Olympic champion.
“Watching Katarina win again, that helped,” Sumners said. “Because it showed she was pretty good. For me, that was cathartic a little bit.”
By then Sumners was skating professionally. She spent two unhappy years with Disney on Ice — appearing with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck can be fun for a while, but not night after night after night — and she considered giving up skating altogether. “I was still going through that whole post-Olympic thing,” she said, “and I was miserable.”
But then she got a call from Scott Hamilton, her friend and the 1984 men’s Olympic champion, asking her to join his new venture, Stars on Ice. Though initially reluctant, Sumners later agreed and stayed with the show for 13 years.
“Getting on the ice again with Scott and everybody, I started to regain something,” she said. “That tour saved my skating. Sometimes I’d be tired or homesick, but basically the minute those lights went on you’d look around and think, ‘This is my family.’ I was on the ice every night with Scott and Kristi (Yamaguchi) and Katya (Gordeeva), and I’d think, ‘How lucky am I?’ We really and truly were a family. And we’re all still very, very close.”
And, she said, “we made some nice money.”
These days, Sumners balances her dual vocations as wife and businesswoman. She is married to Bob Kain, a longtime professional sports agency executive. And she recently opened two adjoining stores in downtown Kirkland — Bella Tesori, which specializes in home decor and custom furniture, and Bella Bambina, which offers clothing and other items for infants and small children.
“I took it on to have some fun and to be challenged and to learn something new,” she said. “And it’s exciting.”
Since her skating retirement, “I’ve never looked back,” said Sumners, who was elected to the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2001. “There was nothing more I could’ve done. I’d toured, I’d competed and I’d done everything there is to do. So I knew I was done. And I don’t miss it.
“People sometimes say, ‘Don’t you skate for fun?’ Well, no. It’s actually not fun anymore because I go out expecting it to be the same and it’s not. And everything hurts.”
Yet although her love for skating has waned, the joy of her many remarkable memories has not.
“It was pretty much my whole life from 7 to 40 and I treasure every single moment,” she said. “Every sore muscle, every 4 a.m. (alarm clock). I wouldn’t change any of that. I don’t have one regret about anything at all. Not one.
“It is,” she said, “amazing how blessed I was with my career.”
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