PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA—When Eric Radford was a kid he wanted to be a pilot, and then when he saw figure skating he thought that was as close as you could come to flying. He was the only boy who was a figure skater in Red Lake, Ont. — Balmertown, really, one part of the six-town amalgamation that totals just 4,107 people over an area about the same size as the city of Toronto. Viewed from a distance, it sounds like the start of a movie. “It’s a gold-mining town, in the north, hockey town, male figure skater,” said his older brother Richard. “And the only one. It was very hard for him.”Except most lives that start that way — kid gets bullied, discovers he’s gay, leaves home to follow a dream at 13 — they don’t end the way most movies do. Suicide rates are higher for LGBTQ kids than for straight kids; they get bullied more, and are more likely to experience homelessness.Read more:Canadian speedskater Boutin threatened online after controversial Olympic bronzeCanadian women happy to be hockey underdogs to archrival AmericansSnowboarding star White claims Olympic halfpipe goldEric Radford is the movie. The 33-year-old won silver in team figure skating in Sochi; this year Canada won gold, and with that Eric Radford made history: the first openly gay male athlete to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics. “That just brings a smile to my face,” he says. “I think it’s incredible; I feel very proud. And I think it’s an opportunity I want to use to try to make things better.”There have been gay gold medallists before, of course, but being out is newer. Radford wanted to do it before Sochi, but didn’t. He had already come out to his parents when he was 18; he waited until his dad was in the washroom before telling his mom. Everything else took longer.“He said, ‘Mom, it’s going to change everything between us,’” says his mother Valerie, ...
|
