David Remnick: Robert Samuels is one of our newest staff writers, and he just want to pull a surprise as the co-author of the book, His Name Is George Floyd, a biography of George Floyd. I'll let you in on a little secret. The first time I met Robert, and I was trying to get him to join The New Yorker, he insisted on a pretty peculiar term in our deal. He wanted me to promise that in addition to his covering politics, he could be our figure skating correspondent. He was kidding, but not really. Robert really is a figure skating fanatic, and he has been for a pretty long time.
Robert Samuels: When I was in second grade, my second grade teacher was a big figure skating fan, and she put up a copy of this Newsweek article that featured who I thought was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and it was Kristy Yamaguchi. I fell in love and I wanted to know everything about her, so I started watching the Olympics.
David Remnick: Now, a few years past the second grade, you told me that you watched skating as a form of procrastination. I'll sometimes watch people breaking down a guitar solo on a YouTube video, you're watching skating videos. How come?
Robert Samuels: Over time, it went from me just watching and enjoying the sport to seeing these metaphors for life and metaphors for writing. I know that sounds strange, but I feel like in the world of journalism, especially when I started, lots of people were getting laid off and lots of people were losing their jobs. It felt like you were doing something that was singular by yourself, but you're also a part of a really slippery ecosystem.
I started watching videos on YouTube whenever I felt distracted or needed a break or needed to be excited because I started envisioning my writing process as being a figure skating competition.
David Remnick: What are your go-to clips? What's the first one that comes to mind?
Robert Samuels: The first clip that comes to mind when I'm feeling particularly down and I feel my best days are behind me, it's this clip from the 2000 World Figure Skating Championships.
Speaker 1: The United States of America.
Speaker 2: Michelle Kwan.
Robert Samuels: What is outstanding about this video is for the early part of my childhood, Michelle Kwan was unbeatable. Everyone thought she was the best thing ever. Then she goes to the Olympics, and she loses the Olympics to Tara Lipinski, and it's a surprise. Tara Lipinski bursts on the scene, she's young, she's fast. After the Olympics, she doesn't compete again. Michelle Kwan continues, but it's not the same Michelle Kwan. She's slower, she's not jumping as well, and she starts losing. Coming in second and sometimes winning, but she's not skating with this authority.
When she gets to this long program, she's in third place, and she needs to do something magical to win because the other girls she's competing with, they are now doing jumps that are harder than she's doing, so she needs to find something within herself to win.
Speaker 1: She recently moved out of the dorm at UCLA to an apartment closer to a training site [unintelligible 00:03:40] class load to concentrate on skating.
Robert Samuels: There's a part of the video at the very beginning when Peggy Fleming whose commentator, she's quoting Michelle Kwan's coach, Frank Carroll.
Peggy Fleming: Coach Frank Carroll says, "That's the way of sport, you have to continue to make progress, or you're left in the dust."
Robert Samuels: The nature of sport is that you have to continue to make progress or you get left in the dust. I continue to think about that all the time, that it's not just important to be good at what you're good at, you have to continue pushing yourself or else you might be rendered irrelevant.
David Remnick: What is the climax of this? What is the apt moment of this Michelle Kwan video?
Robert Samuels: After this jumping past here, which is triple lutz double toe loop, you're going to see her build a great amount of speed because she's going to attempt to do a triple-triple combination. That's three revolutions in the air immediately followed by another three revolutions in the air.
Peggy Fleming: Now, this is her most important element, her triple-triple combination.
Robert Samuels: Every girl in the world is doing this, and she hasn't been hitting it consistently. Now, you're seeing her skate super-duper fast, and here's the first three on the toe loop right here, and there's another immediate three.
Speaker 1: Oh, she killed it. Kills it.
Robert Samuels: This is the side that Michelle Kwan has come to play. She's looking a lot better than she's looked over the past two years since she lost the Olympics.
David Remnick: Okay, this is way better than learning how to make a spaghetti bolognese. I think I'm going to start watching these YouTubes. Let's move on to the 2016 World Championships. What are we going to watch here?
Robert Samuels: Okay, this one is of Javier Fernández. He's a skater from Spain, the first breakout star from the country of Spain, which is very exciting.
David Remnick: Now there's some comic element to this?
Robert Samuels: Yes. This is a performance set to the music of Guys and Dolls. He is pretending, he's taking on a character as Nathan Detroit or one of the gamblers.
Speaker 1: Javier's obviously a multiple quad jumper as well, smooth and easy, that's his style.
Robert Samuels: He's setting up for a quadruple toe loop here.
Speaker 1: Bang, nails it.
Speaker 2: Oh. Glorious. Glorious.
Robert Samuels: Javier Fernández kind of came from nowhere. There was no culture of skating in Spain. Sometimes, as a Black journalist who does long form or enterprise reporting, you feel out of place. I always remember the day Javier Fernández came and no one thought he was going to win, and he wins. It's one of those really inspiring things for me.
[applause]
Speaker 1: There it is.
Speaker 2: Just like that.
Speaker 1: That's why he's a world champion.
David Remnick: Now, the pick three, we've got Gabriella Papadakis, did I say that right, and Guillaume Cizeron?
Robert Samuels: That's correct. It's 2018. We're in Beijing, China, the Olympics. Papadakis and Cizeron, the French team, their final performance is to Moonlight Sonata.
David Remnick: The Beethoven top 40 hit.
Robert Samuels: I know. Not the most thrilling piece of music, but what they do with it is expansive. Now, the trick about looking at ice dance is you have to train your ice to essentially look at the bottom up because the legs, how they sway, how they lean from one side, their connection to each other is how you can tell a good ice dancer from a poor ice dancer. What's so expressive about this is you see the fluidity in their legs. They're just kind of like breathing the Moonlight Sonata.
You can almost hear the sound without hearing it. What is amazing about this is here they are, they're getting so close together, their blades could collapse at any moment, but it actually looks like they're conducting the music. They've just imbued it in this really chest-clenching way. For me, this is about authority. This is about taking a piece that's well-known and completely owning it and making it your own through what you can do.
David Remnick: The message of all this and the outcome of all this, is that an exchange for having to deal with the politics of this world for the next couple of years. You're going to go for The New Yorker to the Winter Olympics. You're looking forward to that?
Robert Samuels: Oh, yes. Oh, man. I cannot wait.
David Remnick: You won't have to wait till 2026 to read Robert Samuels. You can find some of his reporting already at newyorker.com. Robert is the co-author of the book, His Name Is George Floyd, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
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