BEIJING — Wearing a grin the size of the rink, Donovan Carrillo wiped away tears and sweat and lamented the only disappointment of his Olympics so far: He had to get off the ice.
“I didn’t want it to end,” he said afterward, still beaming from his 79.69-point performance, a personal best. “I wanted to keep living the Olympic dream.”
Even figure skaters who train in world-class facilities gush about how different the ice feels at the Games; the 22-year-old Carrillo, only the fourth Olympic figure skater in Mexican history, does quadruple toe loops amid grade-schoolers learning to skate at the miniature rink at a shopping mall. So when he got here, his first task was to rewrite his choreography to account for the larger size of an Olympic rink.
