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PATTON: Dornbush’s smooth rise includes close-to-home stop
BY GREGG PATTON STAFF WRITER [email protected]
We’re not sure if figure skaters can claim the same advantage that basketball, football and baseball players cite when they perform in familiar surroundings.
But Richard Dornbush is going for it.
“It’s great being so close to home,” said the Corona native, a featured competitor at Skate America , the International Skating Union’s first Grand Prix event of the season, in Ontario Friday through Sunday. “It’s nice to have home-field advantage. I hope as many people can come as possible.”
That would be various family members and friends, and maybe a whole, new, potential posse of Inland area fans who may not even be aware, yet, that they have a world-class skater training and going to school in their midst.
After all, it was only 10 months ago that Dornbush emerged as an international force, winning the sport’s biggest prize for under-20 skaters, the ISU Grand Prix Junior Championships, in Beijing.
He then used that victory as a springboard to the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in January, placing a stunning second in the senior men’s competition. Stunning to many except, perhaps, himself.
“I was skating in the juniors, but I was training like I was in the senior ranks,” said Dornbush, 20, referring, in part, to the difficulties in his short and long skating programs.
“I’m not sure I gained any more confidence (by winning juniors). The confidence I had was from the program I was skating. I knew it would be competitive at the U.S. championships.”
His silver-medal finish may have come a little earlier than she once figured, but it didn’t shock his coach of 14 years, Tammy Gambill, either.
“We’ve been aiming for the stars since he was little,” said Gambill, who guided Dornbush through his exciting, but long and tumultuous year.
His junior season began in September 2010, and included stops in Germany and Austria before the finale in China. His top-three finish at the U.S. nationals also qualified him for his first World Championships, in Japan. Unfortunately, the country’s devastating earthquake caused a one-month delay, into April, and the relocation of the event to Moscow.
There his eight-month “season” culminated in a ninth-place finish, first among the three Americans.
“It was a whirlwind last year — and super long,” said Gambill. “But he’s such an easy-going, laid-back kid. He just rolls with the punches.”
He will have to. The more accomplished he gets, the more his life will change. It already has — just in the past year — as he handles his emerging celebrity.
“It’s not even close,” said Dornbush of the changes and demands on his time.
He is still pursuing an education in engineering at Riverside Community College, as best he can, with eight hours of calculus and physics classes.
“Last semester, I was almost a full-time student,” he said, a little wistfully. “I’m still training at a high level. I’m taking night classes. I get up early and get home late. There’s definitely a lack of sleep.”
The ultimate goal, of course, is the Winter Olympics, the next one looming in 2014 in Sochi, Russia.
But first, there are some hometown fans to win over.
“He’s pretty excited about it,” said Gambill of her prize student’s place in Skate America, the first in a series of six international Grand Prix events. “There are people he grew up with, professors from school, people who have never seen him skate before. I just don’t want him too excited.”
So maybe the best place to stay cool will be on home ice.
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.PATTON: Dornbush’s smooth rise includes close-to-home stop
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