At 7:30 p.m. Wednesday it was easy to imagine all Guadalajara hunkering down to watch Donovan Carrillo’s much-awaited final routine in the men’s free skate program beaming here from Beijing.
After all, Mexico’s president and a raft of other leaders had been gushing praise since Monday, when the 22-year-old, "100% hecho en casa” as one sports writer put it, wowed the world by qualifying for this final. Not to mention that Carrillo came to the 2020 Winter Olympics in a tiny team of four athletes, the first Mexican skater to participate in 30 years, and the only one from a largely warm country where rinks are rare and ice is generally found in cubes, as his father quipped.
Carrillo made waves outside of Mexico too, dubbed “one of the breakout figure skating stars in Beijing.” And considering all that he had accomplished in preparation for Beijing—moving with only his trainer to skate in a shopping-center rink in Leon, Guanajuato, half of Donovan’s life ago, when the rink on Guadalajara’s Avenida Mexico closed; raising funds from friends of his middle-class family for training in an expensive sport—practically all he had to do in Beijing was exist, and let his trademark gracefulness, stage presence and charisma do the rest.
Please login or subscribe to view the complete article.