Tara Lipinski

Although she continued to pursue both roller and figure skating for the next couple of years, ice skating became the focus of Lipinski's life after her family moved to the Houston, Texas suburb of Sugarland in 1991. By now taking three skating lessons a day, Lipinski woke up at three o'clock each morning in order to get her time on the ice before school. After a year in Texas, Lipinski and her mother decided to move back to Delaware so that she could train full time. Her father, an oil company executive, remained in Texas and visited his family on weekends. The Lipinskis planned on a one- or two-year separation, but after coach Richard Callaghan of the Detroit Figure Skating Club had an opening for a new student in 1995, Lipinski and her mother moved again, this time to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Looking back on the sacrifices of living apart for so long, Patricia Lipinski recalled in an interview with Nancy Kruh of the Dallas Morning News in 1999, "It was a disaster for us. The stress on the family—you will never know stress like this."

Part of the tension over Lipinski's career came from the intense media scrutiny that the young skater encountered almost from the start. By the time she won a silver medal at the USFSA National Novice Championship in 1994, Lipinski had already been featured in several national publications and network television programs. The tone of the media coverage typically focused not only on her considerable talent, but also on the question of whether her parents should have allowed her to pursue an amateur figure-skating career at such a young age. Her parents insisted that their daughter's motivation was entirely self-derived and that they carefully watched over her well being to prevent her from becoming burned out.