NEWARK, Del. - Team USA creates lifelong camaraderie amongst athletes with some of them becoming like family, but some competitors actually are family. Natalie Seybold-Catron says she and her brother Wayne spent their entire lives working to make it to the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.
"For us it wasn't really about winning a medal," Seybold-Catron says. "It was just about realizing a lifetime dream that had come true."Â
The Seybold's grew up training their pairs figure skating routines in Indiana. Natalie, or Kim as a lot of people call her, says they moved to Delaware after she graduated high school. Here they would double the amount of time they spent in a rink for the four years leading up to their Olympic moment.
"We had a four-and-a-half minute long program and probably about the last 30 seconds it was great because we had the audience behind us and they were cheering so loud," Seybold-Catron says. "We got a standing ovation."
That's something skaters at the 2022 Olympics don't get to experience due to COVID restrictions.
"Our whole career we're always taught don't perform for the judges, perform for the fans," Seybold-Catron says.
The judging system has changed since she competed. Today's competitors are ranked by how difficult an element is and how well they execute it under the International Judging System (IJS).
"A person might do a triple jump that's worth so many points and then somebody might do a quad jump which is worth a lot more points and then they might do a spin that looks really, really good to the average person, but maybe it's not worth as many points as a spin that somebody else does," Seybold-Catron says. "Kind of like gymnastics, everything is point based."
Whether it's skating for the fans, the judges, your partner or yourself, execution is key, but like her journey into coaching, so is evolving with the sport, especially if you have golden aspirations.
Seybold-Catron says it's if the audience wants to know why one skater placed higher than another, they can look compare the technical score awarded for the elements in each competitors program.
The pairs teams in Beijing skate Friday in the short program and Saturday in the free skate.
