Kristi Yamaguchi: Olympic Gold Medalist and World Champion Figure Skater, Author, and Philanthropist.

Guy Kawasaki: I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode’s remarkable guest is Kristi Yamaguchi. I'm on a Yamaguchi streak right now. To my knowledge, she is not related to Roy Yamaguchi, the chef, and recent Remarkable People guest. She may not have won a James Beard Award, but she did win the Olympic Figure Skating Championship in 1992, as well as the world championship in 1991 and 1992. She hasn't done bad in pairs too. With Rudy Galindo, she won the 1988 World Junior Championship and the Pairs National Championship in 1989 and 1990.
Since then, she's raised two daughters with her husband, professional hockey player, Bret Hedican. Oh, and she won the 2008 Dancing with the Stars competition and started a foundation to help young people. You'd think that her daughters, with the DNA of an Olympic gold medalist, and an NHL All-Star Stanley Cup winner, would both gravitate, if not rock, figure skating and hockey, but you'll never guess what sport her oldest daughter has embraced. Keep listening to find out.
Yamaguchi was born in Hayward, California. Her grandparents were interned during World War II, like 120,000 other Japanese and Japanese Americans. She is Sansei, third-generation Japanese American. In a moment of weakness, she once agreed to teach me how to do a triple Lutz to celebrate scoring goals in pick up hockey. That never happened. I mean, she didn't teach me the triple Lutz, not that I never scored in pick up hockey. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People, and now, here is Kristi Yamaguchi.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
When I was born, my feet were very turned in, almost like, my mom said my legs were crossed. So immediately about a few weeks after I was born, I was putting casts on both legs and every couple of weeks, the cast had to be replaced because you're growing so fast at that age. The object was to try to straighten the joints and the bottom parts of my legs out. So I think that went on for about eighteen months. After that, I wore these shoes and a bar connected the shoes, so that turned out my legs and all the joints in my feet so to further keep correcting them. So I do remember that. I remember crawling as a baby, like an army crawl because my legs had to just drag behind me and trying to sleep with the bar between my feet and my legs being sore.
But I think I was just lucky that early on my parents were just really proactive to get those corrections done. Eventually, I asked to skate and the doctor's like, "Yeah, that should be fine. It actually would probably be good for her just to have some strengthening and coordination and all of that." So yeah, I don't really remember it and it probably wasn't as severe as club feet, but more of just a birth deformity.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that if you didn't have club feet, you might not have become the Kristi Yamaguchi you've become?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Hard to say. I think by the time I started skating, the corrections were done and it was just a matter of trying the sport because I had just really wanted to try it and then eventually developed a passion for it really, really early on. But I do say, I've always been bow-legged and probably be remanence from all of that, but in skating, it's almost a good thing. A lot of the good jumpers in our sport are slightly bow-legged. So I say, "Well, I think in the end it worked to my advantage."
Guy Kawasaki:
So now if all these Asian moms are going to listen to this and say to their daughters, "Oh, you have to have bowlegs, so we need..."
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Hopefully not, I don't want to encourage. If you don't have it, then you'll be fine without it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, okay. I read this story that you finished eleventh out of twelfth in your first competition. So, A, tell me about that story, and then that's not sort of the kind of story you hear that someone was instantly born with it and just instant success.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
There's pretty much no such thing as instant success, right? I mean, you really have to work for it and you have to put the time and the effort into it. So yeah, I was probably about seven years old at my first skating competition, and it's your first one. You don't really know what to expect and I competed, and the results came out and I was eleventh out of twelfth, and it's funny because my mom always reminded me of that as I was coming up as a skater. But at the same time, I was like, "Hey, why do those girls get medals and I don't?" Seven years old, you see they would wear their medals and kind of run around the rink and watch everyone else. I was, "I want one of those." So next time I think it made me determine like, "Hey, okay, next time I want to improve. I want to be better than eleventh, and hopefully the top three so I can get one of those medals."
Guy Kawasaki:
I think you have adequately filled the medal box, right? By the way, where does one keep a gold medal?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
So the actual Olympic gold medal is in Colorado Springs. It's at the U.S. Figure Skating Museum and Hall of Fame. So they have a really nice museum like Brian Boitano to Dorothy Hamill, to Sonja Henie. They have a lot of memorabilia and costumes. So they have my Olympic costume, the black and gold one, and also the gold medal. So that way it's on display, people can see it and see what it looks like, touch it. Maybe sometimes they let it out. But yeah, I do have a couple of bowls of little medals throughout the years that have accumulated.
Guy Kawasaki:
A couple bowls?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
At the U.S. Championships, if you win, you get a silver bowl. So I have one of those and a lot of my local medals, like regional championships and then sectional championships, the medals are in those bowls.
Guy Kawasaki:
I thought you meant they're in a Tupperware bowl in the closet or something.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Well, you ask a lot of Olympians and they're like, "I think it's in my sock drawer." Or, "I think it's somewhere in my bed stand table." It's funny how...I mean, some are, "It's in a bank. It's in a safety deposit box or it's on display somewhere," but a lot of them will be like, "Huh. Where is that thing?" Just surprising because it's a symbol and obviously it represents something you really worked hard for. But in the end, I think the actual athlete, it's all in their mind and their memories of that experience.
Guy Kawasaki:
What do you believe separated you from the thousands of other girls and boys in figure skating? At the top of the funnel and at the bottom there's Kristi Yamaguchi.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
I loved it and I think I was always very competitive, even off the ice. It was like that competitive nature was just in me. Even though I was a very quiet and very introverted, shy kid growing up, I think maybe that brought out the competitiveness in me because...I don't know. I don't know why. For some reason, skating gave me the confidence to really go out there and work hard and try to do as much or more than some of the other skaters that I was practicing with. That kind of fueled me. Every day in practice, we pushed each other and a lot of them are my closest friends even to this day, but it was just putting the music on for your program and trying to get through the program with as little mistakes as you can, and working on new jumps and things like that.
So I think it was just the competitive nature in me, but then also, I had an incredible coach, not only my very first coach when I was young, but my latter coach when I was nine years old through the Olympics. Cristy Ness is her name, and she just instilled that really good, solid work ethic. She would always tell us, "There's no secret to success. It's plain simple, hard work," and she'd always tell us if we weren't working hard enough, "Don't be afraid to work hard," a little push out there while we were practicing. Yeah. So I mean, I think it was just knowing that in order to achieve what you wanted to, and to make those improvements in your skating and learn something new, you had to just work at it.
Guy Kawasaki:
If you could, can you assign sort of either priority or percentage to this hard work perseverance versus talent versus luck?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Ooh that's hard and it's probably different in every life situation, right? But really in athletics, when you get to the cream of the crop, everyone has a certain amount of talent, I think, but it's those who've really dedicated themselves and who have had a certain amount of persistence because everyone's going to face challenges and tough situations and disappointments along the way. It's those who kind of pick themselves up and keep pushing forward, whether it's an injury, or it's a bad performance at a competition, or just something else, bad luck, you’ve got to pick yourself up and keep going and keep believing. So I don't know. I always felt like it was...because I never felt like I had the natural talent, that talent may be, I don't know, twenty, thirty percent? But if you don't have that passion and that love and put the work in it, you're not going to make it.
So there is some luck, I would say a little bit, a small percentage, probably maybe five to ten percent because it's luck of not getting injured and luck of not being sick or something the day of competition. But then if the work is there, if the foundation is there, that's way over fifty percent. It's close to that seventy to eighty percent.
Guy Kawasaki:
To get more tactical about your persistence and perseverance, what was your schedule like training before you turned pro? I mean, or as a kid, what was your schedule like?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
It was a little crazy. As a mom now, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know how my mom did this," but I was on the ice by 5:00 AM. I mean, pretty much from fifth, sixth, seventh grade through high school, 5:00 a.m. until 9:00, and then as I got older, until about 10:00 or 11:00. It was four to five to six hours on the ice a day. Then going to school, getting the schoolwork done. Obviously with that schedule, I did have an adjusted schedule at school, but yeah, it was very early mornings because that's when the ice was available.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did you go to public school?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
I did go to public school and back then, I don't even want to say, like thirty, forty years ago, schools were a little more flexible. So I did do half independent study. So about six classes at home. Not six classes, sorry. Three classes at home and then three classes on campus. So I was able to experience a little bit of school life. Then by arriving late, I just had to do those last three classes through independent study after school.
Guy Kawasaki:
I obviously know this, but you're married to an ex-NHL player, Stanley Cup winner, All-Star, all the good stuff. Was his youth any different than that? Was he practicing hockey five hours a day? Is that just what it takes to achieve the pinnacle in sports?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
It's hard to say. I mean, every sport is different and I always say, "Oh, I know I wasn't normal," because at six years old I knew my path. I think it's hard to find that, although I tried to do other activities as well, but Bret, I would say...he grew up in Minnesota, so whether you liked it or not, you were going to play hockey, at least recreationally or something. But he'll tell stories about every neighborhood had the one outdoor rink on the block that someone prepared. So he would just go there and that would be his playtime really. His mom would drive by, throw his lunch on the snowbank, and go back home and say, "Be home by dark." So for him it was their playtime and they just loved it. Then eventually in high school he started...he was playing multiple sports still in high school, like football and golf and hockey, but then as junior and senior year, I think that's when he started to focus more on hockey because there was a chance of a possible scholarship. So it was probably a little bit different for him.
Guy Kawasaki:
It sounds like you made more of a sacrifice than him. He didn't get up at 5:00 a.m. to go practice hockey.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Well, but you know, you play hockey. So you know on the weekends for tournaments or whatever, you got to get up and travel or whatever. So they definitely did all of that, but he probably had more of a normal schedule from high school and social life and all of that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So while we're on the subject of hockey, so this can be the last hockey question. Yes, I play hockey and I know that there's, let's say, a contentious relationship between hockey players and figure skaters over ice time and hockey moms just abhorring hockey players around their daughters and stuff like that. So was there any kind of Michelle Kwan freaking out that, "Oh my God, Kristi is dating a hockey player?" I mean, did you get any of that?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
I don't know if I really got much of that. I think it was...I mean, some of my friends, like my skating friends, were laughing and at the time Bret and I started dating was literally when that movie, The Cutting Edge, was out. That was about the figure skater and the hockey player who turned to be a figure skater because his hockey career was over from an injury or something. So it was kind of funny. People just made fun of us in a way, that way. But at the same time we explained, or it was pretty obvious, that we had similar lifestyle, focused on our professional careers, living on the road, traveling a lot. But knowing we had just a short window for that professional side of our sport, and then hopefully seeing what's beyond that later on. But yeah, some people were probably like, "What? Hockey player?" But when you look at it, it's really similar lifestyles.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is my last question that involves Bret at all. Okay?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
I don't mind. It's fine.
Guy Kawasaki:
It seems to me that your daughters have the best DNA in the world to be either figure skaters or hockey players. Right? If you said, "Okay, so you have the combination of Kristi Yamaguchi's DNA and someone who was the fastest skater in the NHL and played on a Stanley Cup team," that's the DNA of these two girls. These two girls will be the first girls to play in the NHL. Tell me, do they do anything on the ice? Is there any possibility of seeing them figure skating or hockey?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
It's funny because you would think that, and people are like, "Oh, were they born with skates on?" And it's like, "Yeah, no." I think each person has to find their own individual path. We definitely put both of them on skates early on and we're like, "Okay, you're going to take group lessons and at least learn how to skate forward, skate backwards, at least be competent in that, and then you do what you want. If you want to quit, that's fine." So our older daughter, Keara, after her two months of group lessons and she completed, she's like, "Okay, no more." I'm like, "Fine." She's like, "I don't want to have anything to do with ice." I was like, "Okay, totally fine." She was really clear, she just knew that it wasn't for her. She's actually the very opposite now. She's actually a hula dancer.
Guy Kawasaki:
A hula dancer?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Yeah. That's one of her main passions, has been hula. She's been dancing for almost twelve years now. They even do competitions and a lot of performances.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you're a hula mom? Is that what you're trying to tell me?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Yeah, I am a hula mom. She could probably challenge you on some of her Hawaiian language. She knows quite a bit.
Guy Kawasaki:
Bret is a hula dad driving a minivan?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Yeah. Well, we get lots of costumes and adornments, so leis and everything we have to make for the competition.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my god.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
But then Emma, our younger one, she actually does skate. She's in skating for probably eight years now, eight or nine years, but more for fun and recreational. She enjoys it, but it's not her one path like it was for me.
Guy Kawasaki:
Does she compete?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
She does. Yeah, she competes, and she's made it up to the…she's now going up into the intermediate level. So it's still early stages, but she's hoping to go through her testing, so to go through and advance through the different levels of testing. The highest level is the gold test and she's only a few tests away from that. So that'll be nice if she can accomplish that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you coaching her or do you just drop her off and Starbucks?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
That's what I would like to do.
Guy Kawasaki:
Coach her or go to Starbucks?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
I don't coach her. Actually her coach is Rudy Galindo.
Guy Kawasaki:
Her coach is Rudy Galindo?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
[inaudible 00:20:21] Kristi's daughter.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Yeah. Yeah. So he's been her coach from the very beginning, and it's just better because I'm just Mom to her, and sometimes it's hard to take feedback or instructions from your mom and she just wants my support. So I try to do my best to take a step back and be there for her, but yet, not push her because it's got to be her own thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can you tell me what your pre-competition routine would be? That you wake up in the morning, you're competing in the Olympics, what happens?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
So, yeah, it would kind of be a day of walking on eggshells, it seems like, remembering back at those times. So much of those few minutes in that day, a lot of preparation goes into that. Right? So on that particular day, I would just hopefully have gotten a good night's sleep and rested. A lot of times there would be a warm-up session that you can go get ready and warm your muscles up before the actual competition. So I would go there and have a very pretty set routine of the elements to warm up and what sections of the program to possibly run through. Then I'd go back to the hotel or home or wherever and take a nap. I mean, if there was time, and typically at the higher levels, the competitions back then were live TV.
So we would have the whole afternoon, so I'd go back, have a good meal; usually my pre competition meal was some kind of pasta and orange juice. I know people would be like, "Ooh, how can you have orange juice with your pasta?" But that was it, and then I'd take a two hour nap and then just get up and get ready, be focused, really do a lot of visualization of my performance, and then get to the rink about an hour, hour and a half before competition time to warm up, do a lot of off-ice warmup, like jogging and jumping, jumping rope. Then again walking through the actual routine on the floor. Even in my mind, if I was like, "Oh, I kind of made a mistake," I would have to start all over until it was done exactly how I wanted it to be done and then go out and compete.
Guy Kawasaki:
Then after the competition, do you and your coach sit down and watch every second of what you did?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
No. Interesting enough, she was pretty good at...immediately after is probably too emotional to do much, unless it went really well. It was just like, "Okay, that was great." But if there were mistakes, maybe later that night or the next day or whenever, or even if we waited until we got home and started training again, then she would bring up, "Okay, the salchow," which was usually the jump I missed, "You swung the arms a little bit. Let's work on the technique there so that you're not swinging so much on the jump," or something like that. Usually after, I mean, it was usually pretty obvious if there was a mistake made and kind of what went wrong with it. But once in a while, I mean, I would always usually, if there was a recording of it, go back and watch it and usually on my own because it's hard to have someone else pointing something out when you can clearly see it pretty easily.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did your parents come to competition and afterwards start coaching you or yelling you instructions and all that?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
I wouldn't say yelling, but sometimes my mom will be like, "Oh, I guess that was maybe a little bit slow tonight." She kind of always had that passive aggressive thing going where it's like, "Oh, maybe you didn't jump so high today. Right?" Or something. I'd be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know." I mean, sometimes she wouldn't say anything because she just knew she would have to wait or whatever, but they were always there for support. My dad didn't really know what a spin was versus a jump versus something else in our movement. So he would just be like, "Okay, all right. How are you feeling?" But my mom being the one who was the one that primarily took me in the mornings and would watch and knew the sport sometimes would give feedback, but it was...
Guy Kawasaki:
There was a time when you were competing and in any given competition, you were both in singles and doubles. Is there a difficult transition? So here you are doing your singles routine and then you have to pair up with somebody. Is that a major mental transition during a competition?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
It wasn't so much a mental challenge. I guess one, my pair partner was Rudy Galindo, and we had started our partnerships when we were so young. I was eleven and he was thirteen. So we really were like brother and sister and we had just a really natural connection. So he was a very strong, already a novice national champion by the time we started skating together and I was kind of one level behind him, but we were known as just two really strong single skaters who paired up together and made a fairly strong pair team just because of our strengths as individual skaters.
I think we had unusual training routine only because we did focus so much on our individual training because we were still competing singles. So we would spend maybe two thirds of our time training our singles competition elements, and then we would get together and literally skate an hour a day together, which for that level of competition is almost unheard of. But even though we were skating probably four hours a day, only an hour of that was together as a team. So we were able to do a lot in a little amount of time. So the training wasn't hard, but competitions, it was more difficult because of the schedule of the competition.
At our last couple of years competing together, both of us were competing five days out of the competition in a row, or sometimes competing two events in one day, which is really, really hard. I mean, good thing we were young, but it did start taking its toll as we got to the world level and the stakes were higher, there was more pressure. So unfortunately, it did get to a point where one had to give to the other because to be able to compete at the top world level in both events was...you don't see it ever happen.
Guy Kawasaki:
I interviewed a guy named Shaun Tomson and Shaun Tomson in the seventies and eighties was the best surfer in the world. Maybe to this day, he's the best surfer in the tube, if you know what the tube is, where the…yeah, so this is North Shore and all that, so best surfer in the world. He told me that when he's in the tube, time slows down, he feels like he can control the water, and he's totally in the flow of things. Right? So I want to ask you, when you're doing a triple Lutz, does time slow down? Do you feel like you can control how far you're flying, you can control all these elements? Are you defining physics? Is it a religious experience to do something like that?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Not every time. It's like that, but there's maybe a rare occasion that you have an experience like that in competition. I mean, I've had it maybe a few times where yeah, you're going through your routine and you just feel solid and confident and things do slow down and you feel like, "Okay, I can take my time on making sure every detail is looked after," and you have the energy. In those moments, you finish your routine and it's like, "Oh, that was so easy. I'm not even breathing hard. It just flowed, it felt natural.” I don't know. I mean, I guess it's what they say now where you're so in the moment that the focus is there and I think that's what really carries you through it. But there are other times where it's almost like an out-of-body experience and you're trying to get to that centered, very calming state, but there's almost panic kind of around you.
Actually, one perfect example is actually in the Olympics, I had put my hands down on one of my best jumps and it was a mistake I typically never make. I don't think I've ever missed that particular jump in competition ever, so it kind of threw me off and it was toward the end of my program. Then as I was going into my very last triple jump, it was a triple Lutz jump, I was almost in a panic. Like, "Oh my gosh, I cannot miss this jump." I was thinking all the wrong things. When I tell skaters, I'm like, "Okay. As you're skating and you jump, think only positive things. Like the speed, skate fast, go for it." I was thinking all the wrong things like, "Oh my gosh, I can't miss this. Don't fall," and all the negative things. As I jumped, I was in the air going, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to fall. I took off totally wrong and I'm going to fall."
I'm thinking this in the air and somehow, I landed on my feet and I landed the jump. I look back on the video now and it's like, "Wow. That actually was a decent jump. It wasn't horrible. It wasn't my best, but it didn't look like what it felt like.” In my mind, I totally messed up and it's going to cost me. Yeah. So there are moments in that when you're...it's almost out of body and you feel like you're trying to control your body, but you almost can't.
Guy Kawasaki:
Before you take off for a jump, are you thinking, "Okay, Kristi, keep your hands this way, bend your knee this way. Remember to do..." Are you thinking all that kind of stuff, or you just jump?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
To a degree you're thinking of that, and a lot of times it's because that's how I train. Into each of the jumps in the routine, every single crossover was on the same beat of music and with the music and going into a jump a lot of times I would say the things that would help keep the jump technically sound. So yeah, I would say, "Shoulders down, check the arms, reach back far enough." I mean, just kind of those last minute things that my coach would remind me when I would go into a jump.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can we switch completely to Dancing with the Stars?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Oh, yeah. Sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did you learn anything from that? Tell us about that experience.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Very fun experience. It was one of the hardest things. I mean, obviously the Olympics and all of that is in its own category because there was a lifetime pursuit, right? That was a lifetime dream I was going after, and Dancing with the Stars was ten weeks long, it's reality TV, but it was exhausting. It was definitely a challenge: mentally, physically, and emotionally. I was ready for the physical part because it's dancing and I knew, "Okay, this is going to take a lot out of my body. I got to be ready to work hard, get back into that mode of physically training." But it was the emotional and mental part where that gets hard. I think you see the athletes that go on the show, a lot of them do pretty well. I think that's because they're able to pull those things together when the time counts. Right? When they're called upon, it's like, "Okay, whether you're ready or not, and you got to just pull your act together and do it."
But it was a fun experience. It was tough, but if you have a rapport with your partner, and Mark Ballas was my partner and we got along really well and made it fun, then it's a pretty cool experience.
Guy Kawasaki:
What is emotionally tough about Dancing with the Stars?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Yeah, it's funny because, okay, you're like, "Oh, it's reality TV. Come on. You can't take it too serious," but once you get into it, and once you're kind of invested in the time that you're practicing, and if you make a mistake, or if you feel like you're letting your professional partner down in any way, then emotionally...and you're just so exhausted so that your emotions are just a lot more fragile than I think they normally are.
Then as the weeks go on, by week six, you're learning two full dances and sometimes an additional group dance in a matter of a few days. Again, you're learning something that is completely foreign to you. So the professional dancer is like, "Okay, do this step, this step, this arm and turn around and dip and blah, blah, blah." You're just like... your brain almost is like hit its max, or at least mine did, of taking things in and retaining it. I would do it once and then I couldn't do it again.
He's just like, "You just did it," and I'm like, "I know." I have no idea how I did it. I can't even tell you what steps I'm supposed to do. Your mind has to be back in that learning mode, and when you're learning so much so quickly, it gets tough.
Guy Kawasaki:
I understand everything you said to the extent that I can understand winning Dancing with the Stars, but you didn't just compete. I mean, you won the thing, right? I mean, how many people have a gold medal and that? Is it just the Yamaguchi touch? Is it just perseverance? What is it?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
I think it was like, "Hey, if I'm going on this show..." At first I was like, "Oh, don't worry about it. Just have fun." Bret was like, "Don't even do it unless you're going to have fun because why stress yourself out? If you take it too serious then it's no fun to watch and then no one's going to vote for you." So I was like, "Good point." So I don't know.
Once you get into it and again, I had just such a great partner that he pushed me and I was open to being pushed, into being coached where it's, "All right. You got to do what the judges told you last week." Because after you dance, they always give a criticism and we really took it to heart. So each week we tried to come back addressing what the judges had talked about. That's not always easy, right? It's sometimes easy to more let it get you down on the negative side. But yeah, those competitive juices got going again and it was like, "Okay, well, if I've been here for six weeks, I need to get to the end."
Guy Kawasaki:
So you were basically shooting in Hollywood for six weeks. Did you live there?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Like ten weeks. So, yeah, I mean, my kids, they were two and four at the time. So luckily, they were able to come out and stay with me. A lot of people do have to kind of combine their regular work schedule with that, but I was lucky to be in a position where I was able to just focus on Dancing with the Stars at the time. So we had a revolving door of help that came in, whether it was my mom, or Bret's mom, my sister, and Bret’s sisters. So every week there was someone there to kind of help with the kids.
Guy Kawasaki:
Where was this?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Yeah, it was in Hollywood.
Guy Kawasaki:
What? Did Bret play Mr. Mom at all or...?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Oh, yeah. Well, okay. Sorry. So for the first few weeks he was actually still in season and he was playing with the Carolina Hurricanes at the time. So once the season ended, then he was able to come out and be Mr. Mom. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is this the season that they won the cup?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
It was the year after, so...or actually, two years later because they won the cup in '06 and this was 2008.
Guy Kawasaki:
Completely switching gears, tell me about the Always Dream Foundation. What's your goal there? Why'd you do it?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
After the Olympics, I was twenty years old, and I knew that I was very lucky to have had the support around me, the family, the community that allowed me to chase a dream, really chase the American dream, really. My mom and dad, I think, were a huge influence on me and I remember her asking me, "Okay, well, what are you going to do to give back?" It was just kind of one of those things. They were active in the community and they felt like, "Okay, you owe it now to give something back." I was like, "Oh, okay. That makes sense."
In the tour, I joined Stars on Ice. After the Olympics, the beneficiary of the tour was the Make-A-Wish Foundation and that was my first time really working hands-on with a nonprofit and the actual beneficiaries, the families, and made such an incredible connection with several of the families, but one in particular.
I think that really opened up my eyes of the power of being able to do something positive for a family, or to affect someone in a positive way. So that inspired me to start the Always Dream Foundation. It was really in a sense to hopefully create a legacy that it's great to win an Olympic gold medal, but what other kinds of legacy can you leave behind that really makes a difference in the world in a positive way? So I always wanted to focus on children and that's what we've been doing, focusing on underserved children and underserved communities. Since 2012, we've been focused on early childhood literacy.
Guy Kawasaki:
What does the foundation actually do?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
We have reading programs that target low income kindergarten students and their families. So we really connect the school environment to the home. In school, the kids are getting the support, right? The teachers are there, but we really want to empower the families to have the tools and everything to help their child succeed in school and basically read to them. So we give children tablets that are loaded with an application of access to thousands of books. We curate a library for them and create a curriculum of just setting up a reading routine at home with a lot of parent engagement. So we text message to the parents three times a week with reminders and tips.
We're collecting the data from the tablets of each of the students to see how their adoption rate is of the program, how much they're reading, how many minutes a day they're reading, and have a protocol with our book coach, who is monitoring all of this to reach out to those kids, or the families, who look like they need a little extra support or something.
So it's really providing the tools for them to use at home, but also the family engagement, education and training to really help those that need the support at home. That's the basis of their education and their success.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's great. While we're on the subject of education, this is probably my last question. You did not attend college?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Correct.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you have any thoughts about that looking back?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Always. I mean, I would say when people ask, like, "Do you have any regrets?" I've always tried to live life like no regrets, like in training, you leave it on the table and you might make a mistake, but hey, at least I went forward. I think the one regret I have is not finishing school. I takes a few classes, but not getting my degree is probably one that I always look back on. Right after the Olympics, I joined the skating tour and, again, as an athlete, knowing that window was going to be very short of being able to participate as a professional athlete. So I took it and ran with it and it kept saying, "Oh, school will always be there. I can always go back to school," and here I am almost thirty years later.
So who knows? I'm not dead yet, the door hasn't closed completely. I was inspired by seeing this story on an eighty-six-year-old woman who just got her degree. I was like, "Oh, that's inspiring." So maybe that's one more goal I can have out there in life.
Guy Kawasaki:
Knowing you, Kristi, if you decide to go back to college, you are going to graduate Summa Cum Laude and be the class president. There is no doubt in my mind.
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but hopefully I can at least get there.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would go that far. This has been just delightful. So I've asked everything I want to ask, and I think lots of people are going to listen to this and get the message; it's about perseverance and discipline and hard work and competitiveness. That's kind of the secret to Kristi Yamaguchi's remarkableness, isn't it?
Kristi Yamaguchi:
Oh, we'll see. Still a work in progress, I think. I do have to say thank you because you've been a big mentor and supporter through the years, and I remember meeting you shortly after the Olympics and you've had a lot of good advice through the years. So thank you for that.
Guy Kawasaki:
I just remember going to your dinners and stuff and loving it, but, okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you enjoyed this interview of my friend and erstwhile figure skating instructor, Kristi Yamaguchi. Now you know that if hula becomes an Olympic sport, you may see her oldest daughter bring home another gold. Kristi's story is one of years of sacrifice and hard work. The power of grit is a theme that we've heard over and over on this podcast. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to the gold medal winning pair of Jeff Sieh and Peg Fitzpatrick for helping me complete this and every episode. And Bret, if you're listening to this Scott Hannan and I invite you to go surfing this summer. Be healthy, be safe, wash your hands, maintain a distance of at least six feet, although my theory is someone sneezes or coughs, you hold your breath and get away. Mahalo, and aloha. This is Remarkable People.