Reporting from Colorado Springs, Colo. — They pass the spot just outside the main entrance to the World Arena every day on the way to practice.
It is where it all nearly came apart in a routine training exercise, long before Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker could become the best pairs figure skating team in the United States.
McLaughlin and Brubaker were working on a lift off-ice as they trained for the second competition of their career, a summer event called Liberty Skate in Philadelphia. He picked her up and his hand got caught in her sweater and the whole thing became unbalanced and McLaughlin fell face-first six feet to the concrete below.
The right side of her head swelled enormously. When that drained, both eyes swelled shut. Her face and head were cut. She developed a jaw condition known as TMJ, which made moving the jaw painful.
This was barely three months after their partnership began in 2006 with a tryout that impressed everyone who saw it, including McLaughlin, then a 13-year-old wisp, who remembers a feeling of soaring above the ice the first time Brubaker lifted her.
She long had been comfortable being held by a man over his head. The guys who had skated in a Disney on Ice Show years before with her mother, Lei'Ina, always were lifting the kid, who was barely 4 years old.
"I have fun doing the crazy stuff," Keauna said. "This was just a fluke accident. I was pretty frightened but I didn't have time to think about it because we had a competition in a week and a half. As soon as I could see, we were back on the ice."
Her mother recalls the funny looks McLaughlin got as she trained with the bruises still prominent. And that was nothing compared with how she had appeared a couple of days earlier.
"The pictures were horrendous," Lei'Ina McLaughlin said. "I didn't know if she would ever look the same."
McLaughlin and Brubaker looked fine to Finnish pairs judge Hely Abbondati at Liberty Skate.
They won Liberty Skate, just as they had their first trial competition, the Broadmoor Open, when judges became as dazzled by their potential as their coach, Dalilah Sappenfield, had been at the tryout.
"There were big expectations right from the start," Brubaker said. "Judges told us we should be on the Junior Grand Prix circuit, then that we could win it, then that we could win junior nationals."
