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What: “Fred Roggin’s Road to Salt Lake”
Where: Ch. 4, Friday, 6:30 p.m.
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This one-hour special, which serves as a prelude to NBC’s coverage of the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics, profiles 13 Olympic athletes, 11 of whom are from Southern California.
The lead segment is on Michelle Kwan of Torrance. Kwan, who has won four world figure skating championships and six U.S. titles but never an Olympic gold medal, tells Roggin, “For me to be happy in my life, I don’t feel my life will be empty if I don’t win the Olympics, but it also would be a dream come true.”
The piece, which includes such scenes as Kwan playing beach volleyball with her UCLA friends, concludes with her saying, “I’m very honored when people come up and say, ‘You’ve changed my life or inspired me.’ That’s what I want through my skating. If I can inspire them or make them happy for four minutes, that’s good enough for me, that’s better than any medal.”
To spice up the segment on another figure skater, Sasha Cohen, 17, of Laguna Niguel, Roggin goes with her on a shopping trip to a mall.
Derek Parra, a 5-foot-4, 31-year-old speedskater from San Bernardino, was a two-time world champion on-line skater who switched to ice skates in 1996. “It was like Michael Jordan, who went from being the best basketball player to just another baseball player,” Parra says.
Another interesting profile is on Tommy Czeschin, 22, a snowboarder and entrepreneur from Mammoth Lakes. For two years, he owned and operated the local laundromat.
Other athletes profiled are short-track speedskater Rusty Smith, the Mighty Ducks’ Paul Kariya, the Kings’ Adam Deadmarsh and Aaron Miller, figure skater Tim Goebel, hockey player Angela Ruggiero and freestyle aerialist Tracy Evans.
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Larry Stewart