Just two days after her mother passed away, Joannie Rochette delivered an amazing performance. She entered the ice composed and focused and skated from her heart. When she finished the crowd rose, cheering widly for Joannie as she fell into tears. Her near perfect performance left her in third place half way through the competition and in the running to become the first Canadian woman to win an Olympic figure skating medal since Elizabeth Manley claimed silver in 1988.
“Words cannot describe (how I feel),” she said in a statement read by Skate Canada’s high performance director Mike Slipchuk. “It’s hard to be precise but 10 years from now I’d want to come back and try this again — I have no regrets. (It was a) very nice warm welcome, hard to handle but I appreciate the support. I’ll remember this forever.”
The video of her performance is on the NBC Olympics website. This gallery shows her emotion as she finished an amazing routine and received a gracious and over whelming ovation from the crowd.