Good Losers -- Part II

Well, if you were watching the Ice Dancing last night (and who wasn't!), you may have thought you were tuned into the demolition derby. In a type of ice skating where hardly anyone ever falls, five of the best pairs in the world fell.

Good news, though. All the falls opened the door for an American pair to gain a silver medal -- the first for Americans in Ice Dancing in 30 years.

(What's the deal with those medals, though? "I Won Second Place in the Winter Olympics and All I Got Was a Lousy CD"?)

One of the things about the Olympics is that we Americans tend to look at everything in terms of winners and losers. And being a loser can even consist of not winning as much as you ought to -- for instance, the U.S. Women's hockey team which only won a bronze.

So here's an inspiring story about an ice dancer who didn't even win a stinkin' bronze. In fact, Jamie Silverstein and Ryan O'Meara finished 18th.

At one time, she and her partner, Justin Pekarek, were touted as the United States' best ice dancers in decades. They were Fred and Ginger on skates, seamlessly gliding across the ice as they waltzed, cha-cha-ed and rumba-ed their way to success, winning the gold medal at the 1999 world junior championships.

A year and a half later, Silverstein crumbled, unable to cope with her eating disorder, anorexia. She blamed her sport, in which women wear skintight outfits that show every flaw and the pressure to live up to expectations can be suffocating.

It's a pretty typical story.

Silverstein, from Pittsburgh, had paired with Pekarek when she was 11. Several years later, the weight began to peel off her 5-foot-3 frame. Her face became more angular. Her shoulder blades looked bony. Her weight loss was hard to hide in her costumes.

She pretended to be fine, but on the inside, Silverstein said, she was drowning. She said she felt the need to be the best, to make people happy, including her mother, Robin, who had gone through a divorce and had focused her energies on her daughter's career.

It was not unfolding as the romantic life Silverstein had imagined from watching made-for-TV movies. She said she felt invisible.

"I thought someone would say, 'She's more important than any of this skating stuff,' and would rescue me," Silverstein said. "I just wanted someone to pluck me away and, for a long time, that was so sad."

She handled that pain by restricting her food intake. Pekarek and their coach, Igor Shpilband, would try to feed her. Pekarek took her to a sports psychologist, but even that did not help.

"Everyone in the skating world knew she had a problem, but they didn't know the severity of it, or the ties to the depression or mental anguish," said Pekarek, now a skating coach and college student in Massachusetts. "She was lost because everyone had planned her future for her and she had no control over it."

She stopped skating, enrolled at Cornell University, and there finally confronted her problem head on.

At Cornell, Silverstein still battled anorexia and bulimia. After seeing a counselor and a nutritionist, she said, she soon realized that skating did not cause her problem. She learned ways to take care of herself.

But for Silverstein, who studies art therapy at Cornell, it still is difficult, particularly when she sees other ice dancers.

"It just takes having the courage to be as I am in this environment and not get caught up in comparisons," she said Friday, as a paper-thin skater walked by wearing an outfit that looked like two strategically placed dinner napkins.

Then Silverstein sighed.

"It was really hard for me for a long time, and it still is," she said. "On a day-to-day basis, I don't feel beautiful, but skating has always made me feel beautiful.

"It's just that now I've learned you can be beautiful without being perfect."

There are a lot of different ways to define hero. Jamie Silverstein can become a role model to lots of little girls, even if 18th in the world was the best she could muster. The Olympic Games can be a "bully pulpit", as we've seen in times past.