Target: Olympics
Bedford ice skater sets goal for 2010

By Ted Allen
Lynchburg News & Advance
February 26, 2006

Figure skaters trace a fine line between failure and success, happiness and heartbreak, fame and obscurity.

Such is the life 12-year-old Sammie Veloso of Bedford has chosen, as one of hundreds of young American female skaters who have their hopes and dreams set on qualifying for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada.

For the past six years, since taking her first lesson in Roanoke at the age of 6, Veloso has had an ongoing love affair with the sport. It is her passion and, to a large extent, her life.

“I love this sport,” Veloso said. “I just love to compete. It’s my thing. I like competing and winning.”

Sammie has done plenty of that throughout her young career.

“She’s got 50-some medals and 45 of them are gold,” said her mom, Holly Veloso.

Sammie, who grew up admiring Michelle Kwan - “She’s still my favorite skater and my idol,” she says - competes in at least six events per year up and down the East Coast. After placing second at the Southeast Regionals in Tampa, Fla., in early November, she finished eighth out of 40 skaters in the Junior Nationals in Denver in early December. The year before, she was 14th.

“I had a really strong performance,” Sammie said. “I was very happy with it. I did my best.”

She also was pleased with her ranking - eighth out of approximately 500 girls competing nationally in her 12-and-under division.

“That was a big deal for her, a big jump,” Holly Veloso said.

To qualify for the U.S. Olympic team, she has several more leaps and bounds to take. Skaters must qualify for regionals and sectionals before placing in the top three at the elite level of nationals.

“My short-term goal is to make it to junior nationals again,” Sammie said of the event scheduled for December in Cleveland.

To help her career to blossom, Sammie’s parents, Holly and Ashley Veloso, who works as an optomologist in Roanoke, have gone the extra mile and spared no expense.

Nearly every Tuesday morning for the past four years, Holly has driven Sammie to Northern Virginia to train with her coach, Serguei Kouznetsov, the 1992 Russian national singles champion.

They stop in Charlottesville along the way to pick up Sammie’s best friend, fellow figure skater Lindsay Black, another of Kouznetsov’s top students. They stay with friends in Fredericksburg and commute to an ice rink in Reston, where Veloso and Black train with Kouznetsov for two to three hours a day every Tuesday through Friday.

The Velosos return home on Friday nights, spending three-day weekends on their horse farm in Bedford, where they have raised sport horses for the past 10 years since relocating from Pennsylvania.

Sammie continues her training during Saturday morning and Monday afternoon freestyle sessions at Liberty University’s new LaHaye Ice Center.

“It gets hectic,” said Sammie, a home-schooled seventh-grader who does her studies in the car on the long road trips to and from practice. “Luckily, I’m not carsick. Education’s really important to me. I want to get into a good college, so I study hard.”

For the past three years, she also has been coached by Alexei Kiliakov and his former ice dancing partner Elena Novak, who teamed up to win Russia’s ice dancing national championship in 1992. Kiliakov instructs Veloso on her edge work and movements while Novak serves as her choreographer.

“I have two coaches that put together my whole program,” Veloso said. “It’s very complicated. I choose my music, but my coach has to permit if I’m going to use it. Right now, I’m skating to a Spanish Flamenco piece. It’s very fast (but) if you work on your stamina, you can keep up.”

She also has received ballet instruction for the past year and a half from Leeanne Ashley at her School of Dance in Bedford.

Veloso hasn’t let all of the personal attention turn her into a prissy snob, as the stereotypical figure skater may be. She’s still very much a happy little girl, with a winning smile that will be more charming once she gets her braces off in a couple of years.

“The nice thing about the kid is she’s not a diva,” said Sammie’s grandmother Judy Westenhoefer, who lives on the family’s farm in Bedford. “Even though she has to be sophisticated (on the ice), she’s a ton of fun (off of it).”

Her mom and grandmother taught Sammie how to ride horses as she grew up and her father, who played collegiate tennis at VCU, introduced her to the sport at an early age.

“I do a lot of other sports, but my main sport is skating,” Veloso said. “I have tennis to help with my hand-eye coordination. I ride horses to strengthen my muscles.

“And I take ballet to improve my artistry and my flexibility. You have to very balletic on the ice.”

“She’s a little dynamo,” added Nancy Bauer, a family friend who watched Sammie practice at LU last Monday. “She’s small for her age, but she has very long legs and she can spin while touching her head to her butt. She has that star quality - she smiles the whole time.”

Only in the past three weeks has Veloso added triple spin moves to her repertoire. Skaters are not permitted to use them in their routines until they move up from juvenile to intermediate, as she will do before she turns 13 in June.

She landed a few triple salchows in last Monday’s freestyle practice at LU after successfully performing a couple in practice the week before in Reston.

The salchow, like an axel, is an edge jump. The lutz, toe loop and flip spins are pick jumps, with the skater planting and leaping off the toe of the skate.

“The triple has gone pretty good so far,” Veloso said.

That’s not to say she’s perfected the jump quite yet. But as figure skaters in last week’s Winter Games in Torino, Italy, demonstrated, you don’t have to skate a perfect program to be an Olympic medalist.

“Whenever you’re learning a hard jump, it’s all about falling at first,” Sammie Veloso said. “My coach says that’s how you learn. You can’t not fall.”

He has shown her a better way to fall to avoid injury.

“She’s pretty much constantly falling on her hips and knees,” Holly Veloso said.

She wore a gel pack on her left hip for Monday’s session to protect her from additional bruising.

Sammie’s next competition, her first competition at the intermediate level, is March 25 at the Washington Figure Skating Championships in Alexandria.

“I’ve got a month to try to get my triple a little more consistent, and my double axel,” she said.

Sammie stays motivated to sharpen her skills on the ice, having mastered time management at a very young age.

“People always ask me, ‘Do you have to push her?’ And I tell them, ‘She’s dragging me out of the house on Tuesdays to get there,’” Holly said. “Her heart is so far into it. She’s driving us.”

That’s not to say Holly wouldn’t gladly let Sammie assume a normal lifestyle after six years of intensive training and shuttling her to and from ice rinks.

“There’s a lot invested in it (and) I definitely feel she’s benefited from it,” Holly said.

However, if she decided today she wanted to hang up her skates, Holly would be fully supportive of that decision.

She doesn’t see that happening, and neither does her mom.

“She’s very driven,” Westenhoefer said.

“She’s committed (and) she’s got the right mental toughness for it,” Holly said, noting that early in her career, Sammie neglected to tell her that she had a broken toe for about a week out of fear that she would pull her off the ice.

Her coaches keep her focused on and off the ice. Kouznetsov puts Veloso on a schedule so she will be at her peak performance level for nationals.

“They’re very methodical in their training,” Holly said. “He wants to keep them steady so they don’t flash out.”