Hamill candidly talks about the sacrifices her family made to enable her to skate at the highest level. She also details openly the ups and downs and the often icy relationship she shared with both parents, especially her mother, who wasn’t in the arena in Innsbruck, Austria, that day in February 1976. Her mother remained back at the hotel, an absence that Dorothy never could understand but took as rejection. After the performance, when she told her mother she had won, Hamill was stunned when her mother responded with a laconic, “That’s nice, Dorothy.”

We’re accustomed to seeing an athlete’s meteoric rise. But what happens after the competitions and medal ceremonies? Without their rigorous and regimented training schedules, how can these seasoned athletes acclimate to real life again? One of the most interesting aspects of this memoir is Hamill’s assessment of just that: “I should have been on top of the world, but I was ill-equipped to handle these new pressures. All I knew how to do was to get up every morning at 4 a.m. to go to the rink and practice. My day had always been planned around structured activity toward a specific goal I cared about. Suddenly, that was gone, and my present life was so hectic and without meaning.”

Apart from her skating career, Hamill also talks about her two difficult marriages. The first was to actor/aviator Dean Paul Martin, son of singer Dean Martin, who would die in a plane crash a few years after their divorce. Her second marriage produced a child, her daughter Alex, but was fraught with deceit, placing her in dire financial straits that ultimately had her declaring bankruptcy. She also talks frankly about her lifelong struggle with depression (a family affliction) and, more recently, osteoarthritis — the bane of every aging athlete’s existence. The love of her child and the desire to make a better home for her enabled Hamill to weather the hard times. Apart from her young daughter, her one abiding love was skating. Whenever she felt down or out, she could always count on a little ice time to relieve whatever pain she was feeling.

Despite all the ups and downs and the years that go by, Hamill still remains the little girl in the red skating dress, with that signature haircut that captured the world’s attention and hearts. The book also serves as a good primer for the life of a young skater, the physical and emotional involvement, and what the family of an ambitious skater can expect. Both the athletic and the personal sides add up to a pleasing and enlightening read.

— Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller

But as famous as Dorothy Hamill is, why are there so few DVDs available of her performances?! The only ones I have found are Mannheim Steamroller – The Christmas Angel: A Story on Ice and an appoximately 6-minute segment of her at the 1976 U.S. Figure Skating Championship on the DVD “Skating Through Time, Volume 3″ (which at the moment is not showing on Amazon). There are others available on VHS tape, such as Dorothy Hamill’s Ice Capades Cinderella, Frozen in Time and Nutcracker: Fantasy on Ice (I have the latter one, and it’s excellent.)

Dorothy candidly describes the numerous difficulties she has faced, including family depression, friction with her parents, two failed marriages, and financial difficulties. Yet at the opposite extreme she also recounts the many triumphs in her life. One such incident was at the 1980 winter Olympics, four years after she won the Olympic gold medal for skating. She and her future husband, Dean Paul Martin, were in the audience as the amateur, underdog hockey team from the United States defeated the professional and government-subsidized team from the U.S.S.R. Dorothy recounts, “As the crowd was hailing the American victory, Dean proudly turned to me (and said) ‘You know, you did that once.’ Not until this moment, and not until Dean said this, did I fully realize the magnitude of winning an Olympic gold medal and what….a great pinnacle of achievement it was in the eyes of the world, especially when an athlete was up against the extraordinary talent of the Eastern bloc countries.”

This book is full of many such incidents that often brought tears to my eyes. I have seldom read a book as moving as this one. When I came to the end I felt as though I know Dorothy Hamill very well, and, as she was dubbed after her Olympic win, that she still is “America’s Sweetheart.” And mine too.