Thanks for posting that, Breidy - Trevor Marsicano has a compelling story, and I've heard nothing but good things about Paul Marchese. I've never met Paul, but he's been at most of the events we've attended.
Paul makes boots for many of the skaters, and if I'm correct, he's the coach at the Saratoga Springs club.
Here's another excellent article about Trevor:
www.poststar.com/sports/article_ca80176e-032d-11df-b6fd-001cc4c03286.htmlMarsicano's long road to the OlympicsBy ALEX MATTHEWS | January 17, 2010
Trevor Marsicano skates to a second place finish in the men's 1,500-meter event at the US Olympic speedskating trials at the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns, Utah, Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2009. (AP Photo/Steve C. Wilson)..When Trevor Marsicano jotted down his speedskating goals for a homework assignment six years ago, he had no idea his mention of making the Olympics would become a reality.
Yet those closest to him — his parents, sister and coach — took the 14-year-old’s ambitions seriously and resolved to help make his dreams come true.
At age 20, the Ballston Spa native will head to Vancouver on Feb. 2 to compete in four Olympic long-track speedskating events.
Marsicano’s road to success, although relatively short, continues to test his strength. His supporters gave him the resources to keep striving, yet his raw talent, intense focus and desire to escape a depression-entrenched life carried him to his sport’s pinnacle.
“When I skate, it’s really a place of peace,” Marsicano said in a phone interview from the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee, where he has trained for 1 ½ years. “I can just go and focus on the moment. It’s really the one thing I can control, and I can do whatever I want with it, so I guess that’s what drives me to do it.”
Achieving the dreamIn early March, Marsicano wrapped up his first World Cup season with a world-record performance in the 1,000 meters, becoming the first skater to beat the 1:07 mark. About 20 minutes after he clocked 1:06.88, returning Olympian Shani Davis, who also trains at the Pettit, lowered the mark to 1:06.42.
“It’s definitely a healthy rivalry,” he said of independently training alongside, and racing against, the Olympic gold and silver medalist. “If one of us gets on the podium, we congratulate the other at the end. ... On the ice, we like the stare-down start, but that’s normal.”
A week later at the World Single Distance Championships in Vancouver, Marsicano made memories on the Richmond Olympic Oval, where he will make his Olympic debut Feb. 13.
At age 19, he became the youngest skater to win gold, with a 1,000-meter victory, and the first quadruple medalist in the championships’ history.
“I kind of knew something like that was going to happen,” he said. The U.S. coaching staff was more surprised.
“They weren’t expecting me to literally shoot to the top,” Marsicano said. “The week before, I got the world record, and they were like, ‘Who did that?’”
At the U.S. Speedskating Trials at the Pettit in October, he guaranteed himself a trip to the 2010 Winter Games with top performances in the 1,000 and 1,500.
Aiming to qualify in the 5,000 meters as well, Marsicano finished first in the event at the National Speedskating Championships in Kearns, Utah, in late December.
His results put him on the American team pursuit with Brian Hansen, Jonathan Kuck and Olympic medalist Chad Hedrick, the order of which will be determined during the Games.
“Trevor Marsicano,” said Kip Carpenter, a two-time Olympic speedskater and elite coach at the Pettit Center, with a pause. “I don’t know anybody who can hurt as much as he can out there. He’s the kind of guy who will be racing and will die in the middle of the race ... then he’ll come back to win it.
“He’s one of the strongest guys on the planet,” he added. “... I believe U.S. Speedskating is banking on him to bring home some hardware.”
As one of the youngest skaters heading to the Olympics with some of the highest podium expectations, Marsicano said the pressure has not bothered him.
“I know it is kind of cliché, (but my goal) is to really enjoy the experience and not take it for granted,” he said, “and after that, to just perform the best that I can, and if that’s a medal, then that’s good, but not to get all hung up on that.”
Escaping a nightmareMarsicano’s humble roots stem from his troublesome teenage years, during which he said he was relentlessly bullied and suffered a life-threatening injury.
“All the way up until fifth grade I liked school. I had a good group of friends,” he said. “Then when I went into sixth grade, that was when the guys started getting a testosterone boost and kids got mean.”
Through middle school, he was teased for having long eyelashes and a facial rash. His parents, Linda and Randy, brought him to dermatologists to diagnose the problem and prevent its spread, but the condition worsened.
“The part that really started bothering me was that my teachers really started to get on me about it, like, ‘Are your parents taking care of you?’” he said. “That was just more ammunition for other kids.”
“I remember him coming home on the last day of eighth grade and saying, ‘If I can make enough money over the summer, can I go to another school?’” his mother recalled.
“I came out to the car just sobbing,” he said. “Like, ‘I don’t want to go back. I’ve had enough of this.’ I had just stopped living.”
The family could not afford private school so his mother took the advice of his sister, Samantha, now 18, who insisted she home school them both. She then researched local speedskating clubs and helped Marsicano transition from hockey, a sport in which he loved but lacked aggression.
Under the guidance of Saratoga Winter Club coach Paul Marchese, Marsicano started out on the short-track, using skating to escape his battle with depression.
By age 15, he trained competitively in Lake Placid as a “Weekend Warrior,” but an on-ice collision with another skaters’ blade left him with a down-to-the-bone leg wound. He was off the ice for three months and did not return to full strength for a year, but returned to the sport as a long-track skater.
“That was probably the real moment that I found God,” Marsicano said, “because that was the real traumatizing moment of my life.”
Mark Boudreau, Marsicano’s strength coach and owner of MYGYM Fitness Center in Ballston Spa, helped him recover and develop the mental strength necessary to advance in the sport.
“The injury where he almost bled to death showed right then and there his mental toughness,” Boudreau said. “The amount of atrophy he had ... and he worked through that.”
Marchese, who e-mails Marsicano workouts and speaks with him daily, said this was a pivotal turning point for the young skater. It also showed him, a U.S. national team skate technician at the time, what Marsicano could accomplish.
“It’s kind of like watching the news and seeing a projected cone of where a hurricane is going,” he said. “That was like him. You couldn’t pinpoint it, but you had a good idea of where he’d end up.”
Making sacrificesAt age 17, Marsicano finished his homeschooling and headed West. The national team took interest in him, the youngest athlete to make the Olympic trials, in 2006, and Marchese encouraged him to work with their coaching staff in Salt Lake City.
Soon after, Marsicano expressed his discomfort with the training and resumed working with Marchese over the phone and Internet video.
“That was his first year really traveling,” Marchese said. “It was a tough start in the first half of the year because there were a lot of opposing forces pulling him in a lot of different directions. ... Lots of ups and downs, but that was a huge learning experience.”
In June 2008, Marsicano moved to Milwaukee to train independently under the guidance of Marchese, who flies out to Wisconsin every few weeks and became a skate technician for China’s short-track program partially because of Marsicano. At the Olympics, only national team members can access the ice to coach athletes.
Marsicano’s parents provided the money to make his moves possible, and his mother became a medical transcriptionist, so that she had the flexibility to visit and support him.
“For a long time, I went to every competition,” she said. “He couldn’t rent a car or get a hotel room by himself.”
His sister put her plans of attending a four-year college on hold and is in her second year of studying production and public relations at Adirondack Community College.
“Our goal has always been to help him realize his dream, but financially it’s taken a huge toll on us,” his mother said. “... We have hit that point where we have to watch him from home and rely on technology to be able to follow him.”
Marsicano was home in Ballston Spa for four days after the holidays, but he will not see his family again until after the Olympics.
“When he moved, it went from (seeing him) two to three times a year to this year, we couldn’t even afford to go to the Olympic trials,” his mother said, fighting tears. “We knew as it became more of a realization that he was going that we had to deal with the disappointment. The goal was to give him the opportunity. That was the important part.”
Giving backLast year, Marsicano said he “downscaled” from his apartment in Milwaukee to live in the basement of a fellow skater, Erica Hawke. He has since gained endorsements from Nike, Oakley and Sega to help ease his financial struggles.
In the summer, he works for Marchese at his shop in West Coxsackie, Marchese Racing, which makes custom speedskating boots for a high percentage of athletes on national teams, including the U.S. and China.
He said his newfound confidence has made him happier, and laughed about nicknaming himself “The Hulk” and recently appearing in Seventeen Magazine’s “Cute Guys of the 2010 Olympic Games.”
“One day someone said, ‘You’re hot stuff,’ and I said, ‘Where is this coming from?’” Marsicano said, “and then I saw the article.”
His girlfriend, Jilleanne Rookard, a speedskater who also made the Olympic team, said she has noticed Marsicano’s transformation over the past few years.
“He used to be so worried about slipping back into depression, and he would talk about it,” she said. “ ... He doesn’t seem to be thinking about it anymore. He doesn’t seem to be worried. Even though there’s issues that still exist, he just seems happier.”
After Rookard lost her lone surviving parent, her mother, to multiple myeloma in mid-December, Marsicano was able to reach out in return.
“I’m just trying to be a stronger person,” he said. “After being aware of what Jill’s going through, it really just opens up your eyes about what other people are going through.”
With his story and that message, Marsicano has volunteered with Milwaukee children and hopes to become a youth pastor or social worker. After the Olympics, he may take a few classes at Marquette University or Wisconsin University in Milwaukee.
“I definitely want to go to shoot for another Olympics in four years, but we’ll see where I am at the time and how that goes,” he said.
Regardless of how he does in Vancouver, his mother knows he will be able to share his life lesson.
“He went from being this broken little boy to this young man who’s capable of doing anything he puts his mind to,” she said. “He could be a huge voice for a lot of people that suffer from depression. It doesn’t have to have that stigma attached to it.”