Tara Lipinski

Born on June 10, 1982 to Jack and Patricia (Brozyniak) Lipinski in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Tara Kristen Lipinski grew up in Sewell, New Jersey in a close-knit, Polish-American family. She started taking roller skating lessons at the age of three and demonstrated enough talent and dedication that she started private lessons the following year. Lipinski enjoyed the sport so much that her twice-a-week lessons soon turned into daily practice sessions; she even joined a roller hockey team as the squad's only female member. Eventually, Lipinski won over fifty medals in various roller skating competitions, including a gold medal in the Roller Skating National Championship in the primary division when she was nine years old.

Despite her precocious talent on roller skates, Lipinski did not try figure skating until she was six years old. "I was a mess," Lipinski described her debut on the ice in her memoir Triumph on Ice: An Autobiography, "My ankles bent in. My elbows pointed out. And I kept ending up on my backside. My parents were a little surprised I was so awful. After all, I was a natural on roller skates." After forty-five minutes on the ice, however, the young skater was no longer falling down and even performed a few jumps. A week later Lipinski started figure skating lessons at the University of Delaware, which sponsored one of the country's best skating programs. Her persistence and hard work in transferring her roller skating skills to the ice soon paid off with a second-place finish in a local meet.