Call of the Ice

Most people assume that parents are the engines driving their daughters' desire to perform, powered by the big financial payoffs that young athletes can reap. But skating captivates young girls for many reasons besides their parents' wishes. In the case of Vida and Olive, their mothers, while supportive, are frankly a little baffled by their daughters' dedication to the sport. Each girl practices an hour and a half six mornings a week with the help of Halasa and two other coaches. Their mothers, meanwhile, find themselves secretly wishing their kids weren't so keen on getting up every morning at 4:30.

Young athletes—in fact children in general—are less concerned than adults with the ramifications of their actions. Kids are built to blindly leap in and fall down, and only gradually become aware of the concept of consequences. They also have a more acute sense of fun than adults. All of which may account for their willingness to pour time into an activity such as figure skating—repeatedly putting themselves on the line in competitions in a way that would leave most adults drained. Psychologists who study achievement have focused on two broad motivating forces: mastery, the drive to improve at an activity for its own sake, and performance, a desire for the rewards and applause that come with success. But along with these two basic drives, each child also brings her own quirks, passions and learning style to the sport. The ice can be a place to bask in the spotlight, a channel for expressing a feisty spirit or even a springboard that catapults a girl above her circumstances.

Many things can inspire a child to take up skating: a casual outing to the local rink, an older sister who's taking lessons, a glossy photo spread of the world's reigning ice queen. Halasa took up the sport three decades ago when she was 10—elderly by skating standards—after watching Dorothy Hamill on TV. Within a week, she was skating every day. She loved the beauty, theatricality and difficulty of the moves, the camaraderie of the rink's clan of regulars, the music, the costumes.

Olive got a much earlier jump on the sport. When she was 5, she announced she wanted to take up ice hockey. Her mother, Susan Numeroff, informed her that she'd have to first tackle the basics of figure skating. After her debut performance, a feisty disco-on-ice routine that Halasa choreographed to Rose Royce's "Car Wash," Olive forgot all about pucks and sticks.

And while Olive's mastery of the sport continues to impress her coaches, her path has been bumpy. "We've had a lot of failures this year," Susan explains a few weeks before the competition at the cavernous French restaurant she and her husband own. She was only 8 when she "got her axel"—a rite of passage that means she learned how to do one-and-a-half revolutions. But skaters commonly "lose" the axel temporarily, which she did. And in a noncompetitive showcase at the Sky Rink the previous week, Olive chickened out on trying the jump at all. This frustrated her mother, who knew exactly how hard she had been working. "Progress in skating is fast at first, and then it plateaus," explains Halasa. But over the spring, Olive showed the most improvement of Halasa's 40 students.

Olive insists that while she is excited about the competition, she would prefer not to win, because if she does she will be pitted against the winners of six other small groups for a runoff. She raises her eyebrows in panic at the possibility. "I don't want to skate against older kids," she says.

Off the ice, Olive is sprightly, delighted to chat about her talking parrots or the potter's wheel in her apartment. But during practices she rarely smiles, and between exercises she holds herself very still. Wary of commands, she sometimes resists Halasa's suggestions. But it's not out of plain defiance. "She wants to be prepared before she tries something," Halasa says. "She doesn't want to fall."