Alumni Profile: Olympic Spirit
Olympic Spirit
Not many people can say they’ve competed in the Winter Olympic Games. Fewer still have competed and participated in three other ways at the world’s largest wintertime sports event. Janet Carpenter (B.A.’54) is one of them.
Janet Carpenter is pictured here skating at the Depot Rink in downtown
Minneapolis with her granddaughters Jia Griffiths, age 6, Sky Li
Griffiths, 9, and Sean Dala, 19.Photograph by Mark Luinenburg
A 2008 inductee into the United States Figure Skating Hall of Fame, she is the only American skater to have taken part in the Olympic Games as an athlete (Oslo, 1952), a team manager (Sarajevo, 1984), and a judge (Calgary, 1988 and Salt Lake City, 2002.) (A cheating scandal involving judges in the pairs figure skating event rocked the Salt Lake City Games. Carpenter was not a judge for that event.) “The first question people ask if they find out I was in the Olympics is, ‘What medal did you win?’ ” says Carpenter, who still skates recreationally. “When I reply ‘We were sixth place,’ they go ‘Oh’ and feel sorry for me. But we were thrilled to be sixth in the Olympics. Our goal was to skate as well as we could.”
Carpenter, then Gerhauser, was a 19-year-old University of Minnesota student when she earned a trip to the Oslo games. “When we competed, there were 13 women on the entire U.S. Winter Olympic team and only two sports for women—figure skating and skiing,” Carpenter notes. She competed in pairs competition with John Nightingale, also a University student, whom she met at age 13. The two practiced their lifts, spins, jumps, and intricate footwork at Williams Arena, which at that time housed a hockey rink as well as the basketball court. “The University gave us free, unlimited ice,” she says. “And we would arrange our classes so that we would have afternoons or mornings off to practice when the hockey team wasn’t using the ice.” In exchange, the pair entertained Gopher fans between periods of hockey games. “Without that ice time, we probably would not have made the Olympic team,” she adds.
Carpenter coached competitive figure skaters ages 5 to 20 in local clubs around the Midwest for four years after she graduated. By that time her oldest daughter, Kim Griffiths (B.S. ’79), was 2 years old, and she was pregnant with her second child, Dale, who died of spina bifida at 6 months. Two more children, Jill and Guy, followed, and a few years later she was pursuing a less time-consuming career—travel agent-cum-figure-skating judge. “That is what people did in those days,” she muses. “You just did not compete into your 20s or 30s like today. The women, for the most part, got married and started families.”
These days, Carpenter occasionally skates with her grandchildren and still judges local and national competitions. “Skating has been a constant for me. I traveled with it; I made friends with it. It’s been very much a part of my life, and yet, I don’t think it ever took over my life,” Carpenter says. She and her husband, Norm, planned to watch the Vancouver Games, held in February, from their home in Minnetonka, Minnesota. “I watch for fun,” she says, “but I'm probably more critical than most people.”
—Pauline OoPhotograph by Mark Luinenburg